Great stuff. Everyone getting on well. However, because Aidan had come out with my friends twice, I was obliged to meet Leon and Dana and I was not looking forward to being judged and found wanting. But—unlike the last time I’d met them—they didn’t treat me like a cardboard-cutout woman, and we had an unexpectedly (unexpected on my part, anyway) nice time.

Then, a few days later, the Real Men had a Halloween party, where they (the Real Men) dressed up as themselves. I was standing around wondering whether Aidan was going to show when someone appeared in front of me, wearing a sheet over his head and going, “Wooooooh!”

“Right back at you,” I said.

Then the person lifted the sheet and exclaimed, “Hey, Anna, it’s me!”

It was Aidan; we shrieked with surprise and delight. (Not that it was that surprising to see each other, but anyway.) I launched myself at him and he grabbed me, his arms around my back, our legs tangled together, and a jolt of want leaped from me. He felt it, too, because his eyes changed, instantly becoming serious. We held the gaze for a timeless moment, then Nell’s strange friend stuck a pitchfork in Aidan’s arse and broke the spell.

At this stage I’d seen Aidan about seven or eight times and not once had he tried to jump me. Every date we’d gone on, we’d had just one kiss. It had improved from quick and firm to slower and more tender, but one kiss was as good as it got.

Had I wanted more? Yes. Was I curious about his restraint? Yes. But I kept it all under control and something had held me back from getting Jacqui in a headlock every time I came home from an unjumped-on night out and tearfully agonizing: What’s his problem? Doesn’t he fancy me? Is he gay? Christian? One of those True Love Waits gobshites? Feathery Stroker in disguise?

Aidan rang the day after the Halloween party and said, “Last night was fun.”

“Glad you enjoyed it. Listen, on Saturday night, Shake’s in the local heat of the air-guitar championship. We’re all going along to laugh. Like to come?”

A pause. “Anna, can we…talk?”

Oh Christ.

“Don’t get me wrong. I really like Jacqui and Rachel and Luke and Shake and Leon and Dana and Nell and Nell’s strange friend. But I’d like to see you, just the two of us?”

“When?”

“Soon as possible? Tonight?”

A funny feeling started fluttering in the pit of my stomach.

It increased when Aidan said, “There’s a nice little Italian on West Eighty-fifth.”

There was more than a nice little Italian on West Eighty-fifth. Aidan lived on West Eighty-Fifth.

“Eight o’clock?” he suggested.

“Okay.”

We got through our food superspeedily; an hour and a half after we’d arrived, we were at the coffee and kicking-out stage. How had that happened?

Because our minds weren’t on our food, that’s how. I was very, very nervous—although I shouldn’t have been. Shortly after we’d come to New York, me and Jacqui had done a class in seduction techniques. “We’re out of our depth in this city,” Jacqui had said. “New York women are very experienced. If you and me can’t pole-dance we’ll never get blokes.”

I had only gone along for the laugh. My feeling was that if a man refused to sleep with me because I wouldn’t be his private dancer, he could so forget it. However, the class had been more interesting than I’d expected and I’d picked up a couple of handy hints on how to undress. (When you take your bra off, you should wave it above your head like you’re trying to lasso a runaway steer, and after you slide out of your knickers, you must touch your toes and waggle your bum right in meladdo’s face.)

So, in theory, I could pull one or two sexual tricks out of the box. And yet when Aidan twirled my hair around one of his fingers and said, “Come back to my place. See who won The Apprentice before you embark on your long journey downtown,” all the little hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention and I thought that I might varmint.

When he let us into his apartment, I stood in the hall, listening. “Where’s Marty tonight?”

“Out.”

“Out? How out?”

A hesitation. “Very out.”

“Hmm.” I pushed open a door and walked into a bedroom. I took in the neat crisp bed linen, the candles dotted about, the meadow-fresh smell. “This yours?”

“Um, yes.” He followed me in.

“And it always looks this good?”

Pause. “No.”

I flicked my eyes at him and we laughed nervously. Then his expression changed to something far more intense and my stomach plunged. I moved around his room, picking things up and putting them down.

The candles on his nightstand were Candy Grrrl ones. “Oh, Aidan, I could have got you these for free.”

“Anna?” he said softly. He was right beside me, I hadn’t heard him approach. I looked up.

“Fuck the candles,” he said.

He slid his hand along my neck, under my hairline, sending electric shivers down my back, brought his face to mine, and kissed me. Tentatively at first, then suddenly we really went for it and I was overwhelmed by his nearness, the roughness of his hair, the heat of his body through the thin cotton of his shirt. I moved my thumb along the leanness of his jawline, my fingers down the line of his spine, my palm against the jut of his hip bone.

His shirt buttons had opened and there was his stomach, flat, muscled, a line of dark hair, leading downward…I watched my hand pop the button on his jeans. It was a reflex action, anyone would have done it.

Then we froze; now what?

My hand was shaking slightly. I looked up at him. He was watching me, his expression beseeching, and slowly I found myself lowering the zip, the details of his erection visible against the straining denim.

Lean flank, tiny bottom, a line of muscles along the back of his thighs, he was even more delicious than I’d imagined. Leaning over me, his shoulders flexing, he unwrapped me like I was a present. “Anna, you’re so beautiful,” he said over and over. “You’re so beautiful.”

His erection felt like silk, soft and hard between my thighs, and he kissed me everywhere from my eyelids to the backs of my knees.

All my training went by the board. I’d really meant to twirl my bra above my head but in the heat of the moment I forgot. I’d other stuff on my mind: I rarely come with men the first time I’m with them, but the things he was doing to me, the slow manipulation of his penis against me, inside me, the heat and the need and the pleasure building, swelling me…