‘No,’ he said, and moved away. ‘I have to tell you something.’

How many moments do you spend your whole life waiting for, without necessarily realising how much you want them, or how carefully you’ve been preparing for this exact thing? In this case, it was the fantasies I’d conducted in my head about repeating Dan’s moment of disclosure, when he’d told me his HIV status and I had said, ‘Whoa.’ I knew that disclosure moments, like coming out moments, were to be resisted, because they reduced the lived reality of an idea and made it too much about the other person. They were predicated on the assumption of secrecy and vice, because only indecent things have to be declared in the first place. As if to illustrate exactly this – to make it about me – I was now prepared to be good at this un-meaningful thing, to receive the news with perfect grace. I nodded and said, ‘Okay.’

‘But I can’t just tell you. I’m shy,’ he said. ‘I just need to feel comfortable.’

I looked at him expectantly. ‘You’re on a mattress,’ I said.

‘No, but if you sort of lie facing the floor,’ he said.

I looked deep into his eyes.

‘That would make you comfortable?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Okay,’ I said.

I got off the bed, looked at him again, then lay down on the floorboards, with my hands pressed down beside me in the baby cobra pose and my nose squashed against the naked wood.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I sort of mean – hang on, come back up here.’

I got up, saw that he was lying face-up on the bed, lay down next to him, and allowed him to position my head on his stomach, facing not so much the floor as his thighs and underwear. ‘Ahh,’ I said. ‘You mean not looking at your face.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I said.’

Silence.

‘Facing the foot of the bed,’ I suggested.

‘I could go,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘What do you have to tell me?’

‘I want you to fuck me without a condom,’ he said. ‘Are you on PrEP?’

I sighed. Of course I was, of course I wasn’t; like everyone, I’d taken PrEP as a rite of passage, like the first time you buy cigarettes just because you can, but like cigarettes, it was costly, especially if you were never going out or having sex. I explained this to my Richmond friend, my head on his stomach.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I am on PrEP, so we can do whatever we want.’

I rolled over and faced him.

‘No, come on!’ he said.

‘You obviously know what I’m going to say,’ I said.