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For want of something to do, I scraped my hair back into the tiniest of ponytails, pulling a couple of strands loose around my temples.

‘Your hair looks nice like that,’ Theo observed.

I cleared my throat. ‘Really?’

I’d never been good at taking compliments.

‘Really,’ he said. His fingers were covering his mouth, but I could see traces of a smile through his fingers.

‘You’re just trying to stall for time,’ I said.

For some bizarre reason, my brain was going to places I didn’t want it to. Like how my skin was burning where he’d touched it just now; how part of me wanted him to put his hands on me again.

‘Hmmn,’ said Theo, looking pensive. ‘Where do I start?’

A waiter delivered our wine to the table, the condensation on my pink-hued glass shimmering in the afternoon sun. I watched Theo’s throat constrict and relax as he took a mouthful of his red and swallowed.

‘Wherever you like,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘OK, well my first thing involves a teacher at my senior school. Mrs Mackenzie. I was one of her favourite pupils, or so I thought. Because she taught English, which of course I loved. I was that guy who was always putting his hand up and volunteering to read the text and handing in relatively well-crafted essays on the themes ofMacbeth, or whatever.’

I ran my fingertip around the rim of my glass.

‘So you were a teacher’s pet, essentially?’ I teased.

‘Basically.’

‘Go on.’

He rubbed at his jaw with his hand. ‘This is hard.’

‘Oh, I know.’

Theo put his glass down very slowly.

‘I’ve done a pretty good job of burying all of this. Feels weird to talk about it.’

‘Well don’t stop now,’ I said.

‘So fast forward to sixth form,’ said Theo, looking increasingly uncomfortable.

‘Yes . . .’

‘And we’re chatting about careers. Most people in my class didn’t have a clue. Lots wanted to go to uni, but only because they wanted to get as far away from home as possible and had heard that there wasn’t actually that much work to do. Somebody wanted to go into the army, which none of us could believe because he was . . . well, not the sort of person you’d imagine would want to put himself on the front line.’

‘And what did you say you wanted to do?’

He looked up at the sky, as though he was going to find the answer up there. ‘This is where it gets tough. It’s like, as I’m telling you, I’m there all over again. And it still hurts, weirdly enough, all these years later.’

This was intriguing. How could a relatively innocuous group chat about careers have had such a profound effect on him? I wanted to tell him to hurry up and tell me but thought I ought to appear patient, even if I definitely wasn’t feeling it on the inside.

‘I told her – in front of the whole class, I might add – that I wanted to be a writer. An author, specifically, and that I wanted to write novels and for that to be my job.’

‘OK.’

‘And she laughed,’ he said, his voice breaking a little.