‘That’s too easy,’ I retorted. ‘Because I’ve already told you I was. And that I still am.’

‘I’m not buying it,’ he declared. ‘There’s gotta be a wild one in there waiting to get out.’

He held my eye as he said it, provoking me. The sun hit him in a way that lit him up, making him golden and youthful. His wide frame occupied a pleasing width of the booth, and it had been hard not to notice how big his hands were. I could barely hold my pint glass with one hand when it was full, despite my limbs being like Stretch Armstrong, but his hands – he could have wrapped his palm around a whole barrel.

‘Changing the subject …’ I said, refusing to get drawn in. I didn’t even want to flirt for sport.

‘Humour me!’ he insisted, getting up for another round. I was going to protest before I realized I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep drinking, and to keep talking. It was exactly how I had hoped it would be. It was exactly what I’d been craving. Being with him was an escape.

The afternoon bled into early evening, and the conversation took a turn with it. Somehow we were trying to distinguish the difference between sex and intimacy.

‘I have a vested interest in intimacy,’ Patrick explained. I had no idea how we ended up there. We’d talked about everything and anything and nothing and the world. And we were tipsy by now, too. ‘Because it involves showing your true self to each other.’

I shook my head, but I was grinning. ‘A vested interest in intimacy? That sounds suspiciously like another way to say, “my hobby is getting people to sleep with me”, pal.’

Patrick feigned outrage. ‘Well, well, well – that’s incredibly presumptive.’ He took a swing from his pint glass. ‘It’s good to know where your thoughts lie, Annie Wiig.’

I raised my glass to him in a mock cheers. ‘I just call ’em as I see ’em.’ I’d grown sillier and sillier as we’d talked. He made it easy to be that way.

‘On a scale of one to ten, how good are you at admitting when you’re wrong?’

‘Couldn’t tell you.’ I smiled. ‘It’s never happened.’

He set his drink down and leaned back. ‘Real talk,’ he declared. ‘I honestly think sex and intimacy are two totally different things. You can have sex without being truly intimate, and you can feel closer to somebody than anyone else in the world without having touched one another.’

I narrowed my eyes, trying to get a hold on how serious he was.

‘Go on,’ I said, lending him enough rope to hang himself.