‘What do you take me for, Rose?’ He lowered his lashes. ‘Even I’m not that swift.’

My phone bleeped. I read the message; my hand shook a little.

‘Who’s that?’ Xav narrowed his eyes. ‘Rose Langton. I recognise that look.’

‘No one,’ I said, but I was blushing. I found it oddly comforting that he knew me so well.

‘Rose,’ he sighed. ‘For Christ’s sake, be careful. You don’t need to get hurt now.’

It was late, it was dark, London throbbed around me. Full up with adrenalin and nerves, I left the club.

The moon was full, but the dim little street near Paddington Station was too narrow to absorb its light. A hanging-basket full of dead geraniums hung by the peeling front door of the B &B, half a bicycle with no seat chained to the railing. Somewhere inside, a couple argued in an African dialect, Yoruba perhaps, their voices floating out angrily from the ground floor, the smell of curry and rotten bins mixing in the chill spring night. I paused, unsure whether this was the right place. And then I heard a low tuneful whistle. ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean … ‘

The front door was open. I ran up the stairs.

He was lying fully clothed on the small double bed, on top of the candlewick bedspread, smoking, the ashtray on his chest, the only light in the room the streetlamp outside. I stood nervously at the door, my back pressed tightly against it.

The net curtain blew in the breeze from the half-open window, and I shivered in the chill. I was frightened. I didn’t remember ever feeling like this before. Happiness; excitement, perhaps. No, not so pure as happiness. Absolute anticipation.

‘Why are you over there and I’m over here?’ he asked, stubbing out his cigarette. I walked to the bed, and looked down at him. At his thick tousled hair, at the sharp freckled nose, the veiled eyes, the blue dulled by the dim room. The blue I kept falling into time and again.

I wavered there above him, unsure – and then he sat up, put out a hand.

I’d forgotten what it was to be wanted.

He pulled me down to him. ‘Rose,’ he murmured into my hair and I breathed him in. The grotty room, the noise from the street, the sirens in the distance faded until there was just us. Us – and time.

He pushed back my shirt and put his lips against my collarbone. Never enough time, I thought, dazed, and then I stopped thinking.

Afterwards.

I slept for a while. When I woke, he was watching me, and I smiled, suddenly shy, pulled the sheet up around me self-consciously. We gazed at each other, the street-light dimly orange behind the nets.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ I said. ‘It’s really odd.’