I remember so clearly the end of the drive home that day I ran into Terry. I remember turning from the highway just before the bridge of the neck, to the road that traces the hook of Pirates Bay. I remember my heart sinking when I saw the way the north-easterly sea breeze had blown in, and with it, a band of low cloud that hugged the coast and flattened everything into greyscale. The sea, lit ultramarine by the sun that morning, was now shifting dull and cheerless.

But I pulled into the car park anyway. I felt so rubbish I had to swim.

I remember the rush of cold water on my skin.

Jem and I had sex that night, only hours after the whole Terry thing. Or at least, we tried to. I was on top and he shadowed me with outstretched hands, his palms continually skimming my nipples, but only just, and he watched me, cat-like, through languidly narrowed eyelids. It distracted me, being watched like that. I felt on show; his gaze made a performer of me and a costume of my breasts.

‘Shoulda kicked the seedy old alco in the balls!’ he’d spat when I’d told him about Terry earlier.

‘I still feel all dirty, you know?’

‘It’s bullshit that people would act like that, after what you’ve been through,’ he’d said.

But his attention in bed wasn’t what I needed and I felt like this was something he should’ve anticipated.

‘Why do you do that?’ I asked, pausing and looking down at him. He dragged his eyes from my breasts, which sat boulder-like, a wall between us, to my face.

‘Do what?’

‘Pay them so much attention.’

‘Why?’ he panicked. ‘Do they hurt?’

I was almost flattered by his concern.

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just, I don’t know. It just feels like you like them too much. I don’t remember you paying my old ones this much attention.’

‘Well, they say variety is the spice of life,’ he quipped, then his face dropped when he saw the way I was looking at him. ‘C’mon, Luce, it was a joke.’

‘I know it was a joke,’ I said calmly, sliding off him. ‘The problem is, this sort of thing: it’s always a joke with you. I’m just not in the mood for it today.’

I grabbed my dressing-gown from the floor by the bed, wrapped it around my body and retreated to the window seat, then nudged at the crumpled heap of clothes on the ground with my toe.

‘I’m sorry, Luce. I was being flippant. But jeez.’ He propped himself up on his elbow and drew the sheet over his waist. ‘What do you want me to do? Ignore them? That’ll be kind of hard, they’re so … there.’

‘You mean it, though, don’t you? Variety is the spice of life? It’s like being with a whole other woman for you, isn’t it?’