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He looked a little taken aback by that comment.

“Was that your son’s mother?” he asked, twirling his tie around his fingers.

I nodded.

“Tell me.” He had such a nice voice. Light. Calming.

“Not much to tell. She was kind and beautiful, and for someone like me, just what I needed. I was inexperienced and overexcited and very naive, but she looked after me and made me feel good, and I kept going back to see her. I wanted more, and then she told me to go away. Said she didn’t want to get close, that punters like me would start to demand things and she had bills to pay. She had a certain reputation to uphold with her other clients. She told me I wasn’t special. Not in any way.”

I shook my head. What a fool I’d been.

“Then years and years later, I saw her photo in the papers. Said she’d been done for gang-related criminal activity, drugs and violence. Had a son who had been handed over to the authorities. And you know when you read something, and it suddenly feels like someone has shotelectricity through your veins? I didn’t know why or how, but something was wrong, and I started looking into things and rang social services and offered myself up as a potential father. They just laughed at me.”

“That must have been hard.”

“But I refused to give up. Then I finally got hold of the right social worker, and she agreed to meet me. A year later, I picked up my son from the group home he’d been living at. That was the most terrifying day of my life.”

“Gosh.”

“Indeed.” I had to smile. “We’d met a few times, with appropriate people present, but he didn’t know me. I didn’t know him. Not at all. I knew nothing about who he was or what he liked or his hopes and dreams. He was just a scrawny kid with a massive, unkempt mop of hair, and he was flighty and terrified with this gigantic attitude, like he was going to get up and cut me if I didn’t do as he said.”

He laughed, Dylan Scotland. Funny how I laughed too.

“I bet you curbed that attitude pretty darn quick.”

“No. I was so scared of him that I locked my bedroom door.”

Iloved that I made him happy, the sound of his laughter matching mine.

“It took a long while for us to get to know each other, a day at a time. Good days and bad days. Very bad days. But we learnt to trust each other. I started to read him. He would come to me and sit down, tell me things he’d done, like he was testing me. And I’d sit there with my heart in my throat, anger raging. I wanted to shake him, shout in his face. But I didn’t. I told him I wasn’t about to give up on him. That I was his father and he was stuck with me.”

“That’s why you’re a good dad.”

“I wasn’t always. I was still drinking.”

“What made that change?”

“He told me it frightened him, when I drank, and I hated that it did. I was so terrified of losing him that I hadn’t noticed that he was equally scared of losing me. We came to an understanding. It took years. Years, Dylan. That was a lot of damage to undo.”

“But you did it. So you’re a good dad.” He nodded, to emphasise his words.

“So are you. We just need to love these kids and hope that one day they will realise how much they love us back. Because they do. That’s who we are.”

“And you never had a relationship?” He had an eyebrow raised, like he didn’t believe me.

“I had my son. I was so busy with him and working and…it wasn’t something I needed. I was happy. I still am, and now I am sat here like a big old potato wondering what the hell I’m doing with you.”

Another pause. Him just looking at me. He’d dropped the tie, his fingers now tapping against each other.

“Like, you and me?” he questioned.

I nodded, flames rising up my cheeks.

Perhaps I had this all wrong. Perhaps I was still as naive as the young me had been, ringing that doorbell with a twenty-pound note clasped in my hand, hoping to kiss a pretty mouth, longing for the feel of another body against mine. Only here I was, thirty-odd years later, and the person I wanted to feel was no woman. He was a scrawny, tieless mess of a man, who was biting his lip, a small, amused smile on his face.

“Sorry. I got this all wrong,” I stuttered out, trying to get up. I wanted to flee, run back home where everythingwas familiar and settled. Where my kettle and sofa and TV were my solid companions, and where I needed to feed those goddamn cats who had no doubt tipped over their automatic water dispenser and broken into the cupboards and stolen food again.

What had I been thinking?