He didn’t fit in there with his military clipped hair and his tight, unsmiling mouth. He was also older, much older. In his late twenties. A man. I was ready for someone different after those clumsy, privately educated boys in medicine. Grandpa had recently died, it was around the time I dropped out of medicine and started studying for the ambulance service instead. My ID was stuffed down my bra and at some stage during the night it slipped out, through my dress to the floor. Cain had spotted it. He’d walked the bar until he found a face that matched the one on the card. The cover band had just started a version of ‘When You Were Young’ by The Killers, the snare sizzling, the rasp of a distorted guitar. Punters flooded to the dance floor. ‘I found you,’ he said, holding up my ID.

I patted my chest as if the ID might impossibly still be there. The lines about waiting for a beautiful boy and being saved from your old ways were playing.

‘Apt, this song,’ I yelled, taking the ID from his hand.

‘What?’

I leant close to his ear, could smell him, not his cologne, but him. This alone set him aside from the crowds of boys soaked in body spray and perfume. ‘I’m going to buy you a drink to say thanks.’

Then the singer sang about closing your eyes and seeing the place where you used to live and I felt suddenly effervescent. I can see now why they call it falling in love. It was as though I’d stumbled and found myself wanting to spend every waking moment with this man. That’s how sudden it was. Maybe I was already in love that night. If that’s possible. Just the idea of him. A soldier in the army. Training for the SAS. Elite, fit, someone who could protect me. So utterly different to my mother’s men. He grew up outside of the city, down near where I’d spent so much of my childhood.