In the new semester I felt a constant pleasure of preoccupation. How should I please Charlotte? How could I make her smile? How could I help her in her work? And then too I had to be attentive to my own presentation: how could I please her without being servile? I didn’t want her yet to know the intensity of my feelings: it might put her off, and there were promising signs that she might think of me as more than a friend. Wrapping a twist of hair behind my ear; leaving notes in my lunchbox scrawled with doodles – sketches of naked women, messages with all the Ps written in red; a possible portrait of a man with kiss curls, which could have been no one else but me. Goodness, the smallest gesture made me happy for weeks.

Our actions around one another were gentle arcs of flirtation: our kisses closing in on the other’s lips, hands knocking each other’s in the park; it was always, really, a slow chase to the other’s skin. When together, it was all loveliness; when apart, the situation was an emergency. It felt as if I were about to flood.

It sounds small, but one morning before Christmas she put my shoes on for me, and it was probably the most erotic moment of my young life. Down on her knees, she lifted each of my feet and stowed them into my brogues. She looked up at me, her green eyes flashing – what was it? Knowledge of what we were? Of what we would become? – and then tied the laces in bows. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Much better.’ In class that day she kept on looking over; she too must have known of the morning’s grace. I’d smile; she’d half-smile back.

All day the shoes bit. I did nothing to adjust them.

Like this the days passed.

Over the winter I’d had every kind of fantasy about how we’d end up together. We’d go to the forest and roll in the mulch; at the Ilm she’d kiss me and we’d roll in the blond grass; we’d be reading in my room, then we’d roll by the open fire. Always, this rolling. This was all I could conjure, since I knew her boyish body would not be like other women’s, which made her nakedness more improbable and exciting. Also: I was a virgin. I wasn’t even sure what would happen next.