Freddy Taylor had floored her. He had broken down every one of her protective barriers, piece by piece, until she was completely helpless. She couldn’t keep away from him even if she tried. She was completely in love with him. All of the teenage crushes and brief relationships she’d had in the past seemed silly and juvenile now, as though she’d been wearing learner plates, just practising for the real thing. This, here, was the real thing.

For the last six weeks they had been inseparable. When she was with him nothing else mattered. When she wasn’t with him, he was the only thing she could think of. Even when she was walking down the street, she was looking for him, searching the crowds for his face, hoping to bump into him even though it had only been a few hours since they had parted. Leaving him in the morning to go to lectures was torture. She had aced her first assignment but she knew that she had been distracted since, she was off her game when it came to her studies and it couldn’t go on for much longer. But she was infatuated with Freddy and it thrilled and terrified her.

She had only just started speaking to her dad again and the ceasefire was delicate. She couldn’t even imagine the fall out if he found out who she was sharing her bed with almost every night. She hadn’t even told her mum and it was probably the first time she had kept a secret from her – if you didn’t count the time when she stole a mascara from Boots and felt so wretched about it that she snuck it back into the shop. It didn’t feel right, keeping something this important from her, yet she tried to reconcile herself with it by reminding herself that her mum had kept an even bigger secret.

It was always there, the elephant in the room between them. They were in the shouting from the rooftops stage of their love yet neither of them had told their families about the other. Sometimes it was easy to forget about it, as they strolled hand in hand through the streets of Oxford together or wrapped themselves around each other in bed, listening to music and drinking cheap wine. But then one of their phones would ring and they’d look at it guiltily before tucking it away under a pillow and it was always obvious who had called. One of them would change the subject but by then it was too late, the mood in the room had changed.

Occasionally it was thrilling, this illicit affair between them. But the thrill was always replaced with dread in the end. The secret was fast becoming a burden that she was struggling to bear and what was even more frustrating was how annoyingly blasé Freddy was. They’d had a row the previous evening about it, their first ever, and it had left a bitter taste in her mouth even after they had cleared the air.