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heart sank.
    Johnny could guess what she was thinking about: it was all she ever thought about now. She’d be calculating her fertile period and assessing whether it was worth hauling him back home early or leaving him for another hour with Bill. Ironically neither option – passionate sex with the most gorgeous woman in the bar, or an extra round with his best mate – filled him with the joy it should.
    Bill might be a qualified doctor, but in Johnny’s private opinion, when it came to human fertility he was a rank amateur compared to Nat. She did her best to keep the gory details from him, but when your wife started to seduce you for half the month then ignored you miserably for the other half, even a bloke like Johnny had to know something was going on. And he wasn’t as daft as he made out. He’d seen the website she thought she’d hidden from him, the one that she plotted her morning temperature on. Nat thought she’d hidden that from him too, muffling the bleep bleep bleep of her thermometer before the alarm went.
    These days it was less like making love and more like being a sperm courier.
    Johnny tapped his foam-streaked glass against the table, more to distract himself than to get Nat’s attention. ‘How long does it take one man to buy a round?’ he asked in a cheerful tone. ‘What’s he doing up there? Brewing the bitter?’
    Natalie snapped out of her trance and looked towards the bar, where Bill was indeed pinned to a bar stool by an eager girl, in knee-high boots, who seemed to have something wrong with her neck going by the way she was encouraging Bill to peer at it. He didn’t need much encouragement, bending his dark head so his hair fell into his eyes, making ‘hmm’ faces.
    ‘No, I think he’s doing one of his out-of-hours surgeries,’ she said drily. ‘Funny how many strange rashes seem to crop up in here. Ray ought to get the place fumigated.’
    ‘I think she’s requesting a home visit,’ said Johnny.
    ‘She’ll be lucky,’ said Natalie. ‘There’s a waiting list, isn’t there?’
    Bill was a handsome bloke, even Johnny had to acknowledge that. Tall, athletic, twinkly brown eyes – Bill had the sort of college rower good looks that meant he could wear polo shirts with the collar turned up and not look a total prat. He was exactly the kind of guy Johnny’s mum had hoped his sister Becky would bring home – although Johnny was willing to lay money on Bill never actually reaching the ‘meeting mum’ stage, such was his endless turnover of adoring women. Three dates, or two weekends, was the average lifespan of a Bill girlfriend. And yet he always managed to break up so sensitively that they still cried on his shoulder and insisted to Johnny that he was ‘the nicest man I’ve ever met’.
    In Johnny’s opinion, it was time Bill took this whole mating game more seriously. Not just because he thought marriage had a lot to recommend it, but because there were only a finite number of women in a small town like Longhampton.
    ‘Do you think if he was less of a looker he’d stop playing the field so much?’ mused Natalie, out of the blue. ‘Do you think he’s got too much choice?’
    She often did that, slip inside his head, without him realising. Johnny slid his arm along the velvet booth, so he could pull her a bit closer.
    ‘I think he looks at us, and wants what we’ve got,’ he said, honestly. ‘But what we’ve got doesn’t come along that often, does it? I think how lucky I am every day, meeting the girl of my dreams in the comfort of my own school canteen. Twelve years down the line, you’ll always be the cute sixth-former to me. With your Jennifer Aniston haircut.’
    Johnny could have added, and every day you get more beautiful, and more amazing, and I can’t believe that an ambitious, intelligent, gorgeous woman like you would pick someone like me. But he didn’t, because Nat already knew how he felt about her.
    ‘Lucky me,’ he said instead.
    She gave