‘I am,’ I say. ‘I don’t want it to stop.’ I’m not ready for it to stop.

For the last few days we’ve been staying in a four-star hotel in Kathmandu, full-flavoured days of the Raj stuff, with uniformed doormen, Musak in the lifts and a real, live, flushing loo in the bathroom. Dean looks horribly out of place. He doesn’t suit being in a wallpapered room, in a bed whose duvet matches the curtains. It’s just not right—he’s far too rugged. He looks much better in the mountains. It’s some ungodly hour in the morning and already he’s clean-shaven and his hair is freshly washed and he smells of vanilla bubble bath, rather than tents and sleeping bags and cheesy boots and sex. I can feel him slipping away from me already.

He puts his arms round me. ‘I’m not coming to the airport,’ he says.

I hear myself cry out.

‘I can’t,’ he insists. ‘I hate airports. It would be too awful. Too…too goddamn awful.’

‘Anywhere’s going to be awful. I want to stay with you to the very last minute.’

‘There’ll be people around…the rest of the group. It’s better this way.’

I don’t think any way is better. It all bloody hurts. There are so many things that I want to say and I don’t know how to start. We’ve been lovers for a month now and yet we still haven’t said we love each other. I can feel the words stretching between us like a spider’s web, fine and fragile. And this is probably the wrong time to say it, so we let it hang there, suspended and unspoken.

I don’t know if I can bear to be without him, watching him stomp up hills, pitch tents, light campfires and whitewater raft. Goddammit, he’s the nearest I’m ever going to get to a real-life Indiana Jones!

‘It’s time to go,’ Dean tells me and we hold each other for one last time.

I cry pathetically. ‘Thanks for everything.’ What a stupid thing to say. It feels as if I’m talking to a stranger, not someone who’s shared my sleeping bag every night.

‘Keep in touch,’ Dean says.

‘Yes.’ I sniff back my tears.

‘I’ll email you when I can.’

‘Me too.’ I’m aware that instead of schlepping into the spare bedroom at home as I would, this will involve Dean in a four-hour round trip to the nearest internet café in Pokhara. How soon will he grow tired of doing that?

My lover kisses my hair and then relaxes his hold on me. I want him to say something meaningful before the moment is gone. I want some wonderful, poetic sentence to remember him by.

‘The coach will be waiting,’ Dean says. He hoists my rucksack onto his back. ‘Let’s go.’