Roy and I slept in his childhood bedroom, with his high school diploma and a framed picture of Jesus hanging on a cross on the wall. There was a low shelf of books beside the bed and on top of it were trophies from when he had played baseball and models of aeroplanes he must have spent hours gluing and painting. They still smelled faintly acrid. He wore blue-and-grey-striped pyjamas which his mother ironed, the creases falling down the bones of his legs. In the mornings after breakfast I saw his mother go into our room to make the bed, changing our sheets on Saturdays, and I wondered if Roy had ever done that on his own. I told her to let me do that small thing, and she tightened her lips but agreed with a curt nod. It was as though she would fight me for every inch of her son. Surely she could smell our bodies in that bed.

Our first night together he sat on the edge of the bed, looking tense and uncertain.

I shifted to sit beside him. For a few minutes there was nothing but the sound of each of us breathing. I could have told him then, about Jim, about the kiss, about the madness that came over me. He might have forgiven me. I listened for the house to creak, for the sound of his parents getting into their bed.

I put my hand on his knee. It was hard beneath the cotton fabric, a dent in the flat part of the kneecap and ringed by bone. My hand travelled slowly upwards. His muscle twitched, flinched.

‘Did the doctors say you could?’

He nodded. I was surprised by my own desire.

Very slowly I moved my hand up his thigh, keeping a steady pressure, making a sound between my teeth as though calming a distressed animal. The muscle in his thigh was soft now.

‘They said I probably can’t have children though. It’s okay if that changes things for you. It’s not too late for you to find someone else.’

I shook my head. I didn’t know how to take what he was offering then. I pushed down the sadness that reared its head. Instead I kneeled at his feet. ‘Let me take off your slippers.’

I took off his knitted slippers and rubbed his calloused feet. Feet which were unfamiliar to me. The ways I knew him were fewer than the ways I did. There were blond hairs sprouting beneath the knuckles of his toes, the toenails were thick and yellowish. I lifted his feet onto the bed and he obediently lay back, letting me shift his legs and hips. My hands shook.

I squeezed in beside him and tugged the quilt over us, nuzzling into his side.