‘coming to your house for sex. you?’

As before, he pulled up outside. When he opened the car door, I held up my hand in sombre greeting, serious and formal.

I hadn’t hosted in a long time and I wished I could do that thing guys sometimes did, where they offer you a beer. What else did they like to do? Okay: when you got there, they moved you quickly past the doors of other private bedrooms. They played techno through their laptop speakers and they barely talked.

‘Should we sit down in the kitchen?’ he said. ‘Or should we go upstairs?’

‘How do you know I live upstairs?’ I said.

He looked at me dreamily. ‘Because we’re downstairs now,’ he said, ‘and I can’t see any bedrooms.’

It all checked out. I walked him upstairs.

He was looking at my bedroom. At least I’d brought my mattress back up here. If I’d been any older, this quiet room, with books and bed and blu-tacked Xiu Xiu posters and zero plants, would have looked like it belonged to the unwilling subject of a genuinely brutal divorce.

Late at night, when I was alone in this bedroom and Dan stopped in the doorway for a check-in and a chat, I could see him silently reassessing its ‘neutral vibe’, as if newly deciding that it was fine, fine, fine. He once left a bundle of decorative sticks on my pillow, and I had to retaliate by leaving a knife on his to show him how spooky it was to find a thing like that, ominous and witchy.

But it was fine, fine, fine, because I was young, young, young. I flopped back on the bedspread and patted the mattress. My Richmond friend sat down and I felt a sudden, happy helplessness: where to put my hands? Who to marry? How to sit?

‘What do you want to do?’ I said.

He rearranged his legs. ‘Anything,’ he said.

He put his hands on either side of my neck, flat-stiff like ping-pong paddles, and moved them slowly upwards onto my cheeks, then quickly into the air. It was the strangest and nicest thing I’d ever had done to my face, so I moved my face towards him and hovered near his lips, in that strange pre-kissing pose of silent intent: your arms hang there, his arms hang there, your chests and legs aren’t moving, as if you are giving space to the whole kissy event. I wanted to do something gross, like lick his cheek or something, but instead I breathed into his ear and pulled back when he gasped.

I took off his shirt and he unzipped my jeans, and soon our clothes were kicked together half-under the bed.

‘Let me slip into something a little more comfortable,’ I said, pulling a roll of condoms out from the top dresser drawer.

‘I have to tell you something,’ he said.

‘That’s okay,’ I said.