“Flashing the flesh,” Terry says, raising his eyebrows teasingly at Simone’s exposed legs, then nodding approvingly at the low cut of her vest top.

Simone grins responsively back at him, shaking her bare shoulders.

Terry flickers his eyebrows at her again and a knot of pleasure pulses through her, then he jogs a little way off with Dominic. “Nice one mate,” he calls as Dominic kicks the ball in a solid straight line. “Now try this.” He shows off some fancy footwork, then pats the ball back to Dominic who attempts to copy. Simone watches. Terry is handy at sports and his confidence stretches here – playing, displaying, inhabiting territory he knows well. As the ball travels back and forth between them, there is a broadening in Dominic’s frame too, an almost touchable expansion of self. Simone sips on her beer. If only the whole world could be a football pitch, or a boxing ring. If only Dominic could live fenced safely within the edges. If only Terry could always know how capable he is, and not feel the need to prove it.

He slept on her couch for almost three weeks before they got together. Terry was twenty-four, fresh out of a relationship that had ended with the kind of drama that saw his clothes cut to shreds and his flat burnt to nothing, but he must have done worse to his ex since he never did anything about it, besides calling her a crazy bitch. Although Simone didn’t know him properly, he was a friend of a friend, and somebody who, right from when she was first with Noah, she had noticed. They weren’t in the same crowd back then and Noah didn’t like him – Terry was part of a group where everybody was on drugs, hard ones, properly, and they were in and out of jail, and lacking in the aspirations that Noah and his cohort held up like the bible. But he was at parties sometimes. It wasn’t so much his looks that took her, it was the intensity of the eyes, the lean boxing bravado, the tightly coiled energy, the attitude that told her and everybody else, that he knew the score, he had things sorted. Often, she had heard him talking about politics: the appropriation of power by the capitalists; the criminality of tax dodgers; the way that immigration was alright for Them with their Polish builders and Romanian cleaners, but they weren’t the ones who ran out of school places and waited for months on the NHS. He’d been passionate and articulate, she’d noticed. Fiercely intelligent. Most of the time, she’d been too drunk or monged to follow the argument properly, but just hearing him talk lifted her eyes enough to see him. And the sheer fact of her noticing said a great deal, since with Noah’s arm around her, it was rare for her to notice anyone.

When, years later, she heard that Terry needed a room, she without hesitation offered her sofa.