‘Is that a joke?’ I snapped. My face in the small mirror was flushed, with fear and fury. My eyes were wide, my make-up a little smudged. My birthmark, that rocky terrain, was covered but crusty-looking – always there, always there. But I was glowing, somehow. I looked alive.

‘Come here,’ he said, and I found myself leaning towards him and I knew when we kissed my anger would seep right out of me and fly from the open car window up to the dark, Saharan sky.

He kissed me and I forgot the fear and the danger. He kissed me again as we pulled up to his building and as we tumbled through his front door and up his stairs. He kissed me as my dress was flung to the floor, like a rag; he kissed me as he threw me back on his bed and I prayed he’d consume every part of me until there was nothing of me left and someone else, hopefully, was in her place. My choice. My choice.

I’m still here. He didn’t touch me. As I lay back on his bed, naked and ready – to be devoured, swallowed up; erased, not loved, but erased – he stopped. He just stopped and looked at me. Smiled at me. Pulled the satin sheet up over my body and tucked it around me, like a shroud. Then he smoothed his hand slowly and gently down the bad side of my face, while I lay breathless, and told me I was something else, that I was really something else.

‘Don’t you want to sleep with me?’ I asked; begging, pitiful. I needed him. I needed the validation. I needed him to need me.

‘No, I’m going to save you,’ he said, and I didn’t know what he meant, and I was so disappointed, as he was supposed to be my miracle, my promise of something – yes, I did crave to be loved, I did – I wanted love and romance and happiness, all the things that other, normal-looking people obtained so easily. But then he said, ‘Bad girl,’ so tenderly I was confused and humiliated and happy, all at the same time, and he sat down beside me and stroked my hair and the side of my face and gazed at me until I fell asleep – too early, way too early – and I eventually let the disappointment ebb from me like the tide from an abandoned beach at the end of a long summer’s day.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asks, from the doorway now, a white towel wrapped round his waist and a coffee mug in his hand. It’s early; it’s only about 6.15.

‘I’m thinking this is usually something a woman asks a man,’ I say. ‘And the man is usually thinking nothing at all, or about the football scores, or what time dinner is.’

Salvi laughs. ‘What else?’ he asks.