He couldn’t remember how to do this. How did you get from kissing in the living room to lying together in bed? And how and when did you undress? Ah, but in this perfect little haven there were no awkward pauses because the bed was only two steps away, and Ava was already half-naked.

He’d shrugged off his heavy coat without realising; his body remembered even if he’d forgotten. His hands lifted off the huge jumper that swamped her. His fingers nudged hers gently aside as she struggled with the buttons on his shirt, taking over the task with ease even though his brain was drowning in panic – panic, and the conviction that she would put a stop to this any minute now. His lips brushed over her skin. It was like watching himself from above. The absurd moment when you’re stood in your unbuttoned shirt and pants, unsure when or how to take your socks off. The shiver when she laid her palm flat against his chest to feel his heart, which leapt and galloped like a terrified rabbit. Did she like how he looked? How he felt? Her husband had been so lean and trim. What would this look like from the outside? A middle-aged man, at the end of a long dry spell, finally getting back in the saddle. Trying to find out what she liked. Watching her face for a response.

Now they were crammed awkwardly into the bottom bunk, a patchwork quilt thrown over them. He felt the warmth of the stove, and the faint draft of air from the open sea. Shades of his misspent teenage years, when sex indoors was a glorious novelty and sex in a double bed an unimaginable luxury. By the time he’d met Ellen it had been swanky hotel rooms with lush king-sized beds, then the long deep peace of the large airy room that looked out onto the back garden; a few years of wild abandon (no party wall!) and then the need for quiet (don’t wake the baby!). Now, a different kind of freedom – unless…

“Finn,” he muttered against her ear, in a sudden panic.

“He won’t be home ’till later.” Her eyes closed, her skin flushed, blotchy where his stubble had prickled her. No sign now of the angry goddess he’d inadvertently spied on, or the well-groomed waif who ran away from her husband and left her shoes in the car park. Instead, a pretty stranger, eyes closed, lips parted. Did he look as strange to her? Was that why she had her eyes shut? Her movements were jerky and tentative, as if she shared his incipient panic. And all the while his body knowing what it wanted, knowing what to do, how to be. He tried to roll her beneath him, but she shook her head and pushed him onto his back. That was okay, if he was honest, he probably preferred that anyway.

And then as her hair fell across her face and hid her features he suddenly saw Ellen, and for a heart-stopping second he thought, No, I can’t do this, I can’t… then she opened her eyes and looked at him questioningly and became Ava once more, and he was back in his body, sweaty and frantic, every part of him yearning for the closeness, and he drew her down onto him and heard himself sob with joy.