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that it makes you look like a tortoise when you do that…
    Melissa listened to the echo as she watched him serving the customer across the record shop floor.
    Good God. He really was quite striking these days. It was not so much that she had not noticed this, but rather that she had not registered that it had any significance for her.
    ‘So do you not fancy him then, Melissa?’
    She did not know how to answer this. Sam was Sam. Sam was the older boy who walked her to school. The boy who helped her with her roller skates in the local park sometimes. The boy who did great impressions of the teachers. How could she answer a question like that?
    Sam was Sam.
    And then everything changed when Melissa started university herself. She was reading English Literature, which her father had actively encouraged, despite others around being a good deal less supportive. And what precisely is she going to do with a degree in English Literature? Read for a living?
    Max, of course, had been a nightmare when it came to UCAS. He knew all the rankings and he knew all the insider gossip. And so on the grounds of teenage conflict alone, Melissa resisted every single piece of advice and plumped for Nottingham. The course looked good and the shops looked good. Also it was one of the few universities that Max had not actively promoted.
    ‘Why would you want to go to Nottingham? This is not about some bloody boy is it?’
    ‘Of course it’s not about some boy. I just like the sound of the course. Very traditional.’
    Max didn’t know any of the professors at Nottingham University.
    And so that settled it. Melissa would go to Nottingham.
    What she did not know until two weeks into the term was that Samuel the Satchel was finishing the first part of the slog that was Architecture at Nottingham.
    ‘You’re here. Good God. I didn’t know you were here.’
    She happened across him near the library, still thick with fresher’s flu, dark bags under her eyes and a messenger bag containing her laptop across her middle.
    ‘If you offer to carry my bloody bag, I will have to hit you.’
    She gave him a hug, shocked at the very physical pleasure at her face close in to his neck for the very first time. Then instantly embarrassed. Awkward and surprised also that he smelled so very good.
    ‘Goodness. Nice smell. Is that actually aftershave?’ She was now pulling back and fidgeting with her hair.
    ‘Present from my mum.’
    ‘Well it makes a change. All the guys in my house stink.’ Wishing now that she had done her face. Washed her hair that morning. At least put on some mascara.
    ‘And that’s not sexist at all?’
    ‘So how the hell are you? Oh God. It’s good to see you, Sam.’
    ‘And you. A very nice shock. So – you settling in OK?’
    ‘Loving it. Though dog-tired. Can’t hack the hours yet.’
    ‘Fancy coffee?’
    ‘Yeah, I do, actually.’
    And so it finally began.
    Melissa sat there over coffee, watching, as he told her all about his course, about the university and about all the best places to study and socialise and which agent to use for a house in the second year and which bars had the cheapest drink prices and where he was planning to do his year out before the slog of the second part of his Architecture studies. She was sort of listening and sort of in some kind of daze. Because in reality she was right back in that music shop, looking across at him, at the perfect line of his jaw and the unusual shade and the warm and very open expression in his eyes. Green. Yes. Looking at him again with a completely different lens on the camera.
    ‘I really had no idea that you were here. At this uni? Did you ever mention it to me, Sam? That you were coming here? Nottingham?’
    ‘Don’t think so. Why do you ask?’
    ‘I don’t know. It just feels really weird.’
    ‘Nice weird or horrid weird?’
    ‘Nice weird.’
    ‘Good. So does that mean that I can finally ask you out for a drink without you doing your tortoise