‘Find another girl for your “fun”. I’m not interested.’

‘I don’t mean it like that. I mean—’

‘There’s girls you can pay for fun.’

‘I mean, I’m crazy for you, baby. I want to stay. I want to leave them and stay. I don’t want to go either.’

And his eyebrows knit in together as if a thread had caught and pulled them tight and I saw that he was scared too, terrified, and it wasn’t only what he was leaving but where he had to go. I felt selfish, then, for thinking only of my own sadness. What did I know of war? We leaned against the side of a building, out of the traffic and rush of passers-by, and I put my hand on his wrist, which hung at his side. I felt his pulse there, under the skin, like a moth banging against a paper lampshade, blind and panicked. He was fighting back tears, blinking fast, and his face was red from the shame of it. For the first time I remember thinking: how glad I am not to be a man. He was twenty years old.

I kissed him then, as much in apology as to hide his face from the street, his shame, his almost-tears. As much to save him as to bind him to me. And what did I have to offer except my body? It was clearer than words, which would have come out wrong. Muddled. Underdone. I pressed myself to him, felt the long flat belt buckle through the thin fabric of my dress, his scratchy face, his quick breath. I wrapped my arms around his neck, damp with sweat, prickling with tiny, vulnerable hairs. Would I have fallen for him if there had not been the rush, the desperation? I don’t know. Was it love? It was different then. He was leaving, he might die there, and what could I give him if not myself, that which I had been told was precious—that which I was meant to hold dear?

•

I thought of little else, and even at work I saw people differently now, imagining them naked, with a lover, how they would moan, shift, kiss. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to try. I wanted Roy and me to be as close as we could possibly be. Time stretched slow over hours of typing, filing and taking dictation. The tea cart and the lunch cart and the gossip in the ladies’ toilets. Devon sandwiches and buns with pink icing sat half eaten on my plate; I wanted only to see Roy again, nothing else could sate me.