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is covered in plastic. The couch and chairs are what looks like a lovely and tasteful white and blue striped silk, but they’re still covered in giant condoms.
    There’s not a speck of dust to be seen. Everything is at perfect right angles to everything else. Instead of a TV, he has a giant graph, plotting the space used by each item in his living room.
    OK – perhaps not that last one. But it’s a close thing.
    ‘What a lovely apartment,’ I say, and I think he flinches – as though expecting sarcasm.
    ‘Oh, well, I …’ he begins, then gestures half-heartedly at nothing. ‘I know most men don’t keep things this neat.’
    I get the impression that other people have not approved of his lifestyle choices.
    ‘Who cares what most men do?’ I say. He looks startled. Clearly the idea of not giving a shit has failed to occur to him.
    I try to communicate my not-giving-a-shit-ness to him, with just my gaze. Unfortunately, I think I send him extreme horniness, instead. He flushes from collar to eyeballs and looks down quickly, but there’s no respite there. We’re reflected back up at him in his over-polished floors.
    I’m afraid to walk on it, this mirror floor. He’s now looking at my shoes and it’s reasonably obvious that he wants to ask me to take them off – but of course he can’t. It makes me wonder how many people he’s had in here, and been too terrified to ask them to remove their footwear.
    When he meets my eyes again the flush that had died down returns, and he looks away. It’s like a shove, to the small of my back.
    ‘Was there something you wanted to ask me?’ I say, but he goes in a completely unexpected direction. He blurts out, in a rush:
    ‘Did you bring that for me?
    Instead of anything about shoes. I don’t know – I give him an inch, and he takes a mile!
    Unfortunately, I love his mile. I want to run it, right now. I want to shout at him: of course I brought this for you!
    But I just give him the barest flicker of a smile, instead, and hold the dish out to him.
    ‘Why don’t you go put it in the oven?’
    His shoulders drop a little, but not in disappointment, I’m sure. It looks like relief, and the smile trying to curl the corners of his mouth suggests the same. When he reaches forward – from the waist, rather than actually taking a step closer to me – to take the lasagne, his tongue touches his upper teeth in that sweet and unintentionally lascivious way he has.
    Or at least, I’m assuming it’s unintentional. It certainly holds on to unintentional, when he stops halfway to the kitchen, and turns – all big chocolate eyes and open mouth and oh my word, does he have little pointed incisors on the bottom row of teeth, too? Like a vampire, in reverse? How lovely he is. How lovely, and unsure of everything.
    ‘Are you … were you going to stay and have some, too?’
    He sounds so hopeful that my heart suddenly expands and devours my entire body. I think part of me had intended to punish him in some way for not answering my messages, but oh, that’s not going to happen now. No no no.
    I think he’s going to get a treat, instead.
    ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Why not?’
    He smiles properly, then, and when he comes back from the kitchen he even gets real close, to take my coat from me – like a gentleman.
    His hands skim my shoulders, once I’ve turned for him. They do slightly more than skim, however, when his fingers curl under the collar – I can feel him getting a sneaky stroke of my skin, at the nape of my neck beneath the dark fall of my hair. And then he slides the coat down my arms as slow as humanly possible, knuckles brushing me through my crisp shirt, all the way to the wrists.
    Even sweeter and more sensuous than this strange repressed sort of touching: he leans forward, and breathes in the scent of my hair. I know he does. I can feel and hear him doing it – just this side of obvious. Just enough so I’ll know, without him having to say. That’s Gabriel.
    I