‘Bus.’ Silence hung between us. ‘Goodnight,’ he finally said.

‘Goodnight,’ I replied. He leant down and placed his mouth against my bare shoulder, then kissed along the back of my right arm to my wrist. He held me by my hips as he pulled himself round to the other side of my body and slowly kissed along the back of my left arm, as if taking its measurement with his mouth. My skin felt as thin and transparent as cling-film and I was sure he could see the insides of me. He turned to leave and I instinctively pulled him back by his hand. He pushed me up against my hallway wall and kissed me like I was the only thing that could satiate him.

Only now do I realize that the first night I spent with Max, I was looking for evidence of past lovers. I wanted him inside me so I could search for the ghosts inside him. In the absence of any context for who he was, I was gathering forensics from the inerasable fingerprints that had been left by those who had handled him. When he pressed his palm over my mouth, I could see the woman who fucked him to feel freedom in disappearance. When he held a handful of my flesh in his hands, I could tell he’d loved a body more yielding than mine. His lips running along the arches of my feet let me know he had worshipped a woman in her entirety – that he had loved the bones of her toes as much as the brackets of her hips; that he had known her blood on his skin as well as he’d known her perfume on his sheets. He held me like a hot-water bottle when he slept and I knew that night after night after night he had shared a bed with another body and together they’d constructed an oasis from just a mattress.

In the morning, he woke up early for work. He didn’t shower, because he said he wanted to wear me like aftershave. He kissed me goodbye, stood up and left. As I groggily stretched across my sheet – filthy and feline – I heard him walk along the corridor and close the heavy front door to the building. But I could still feel him there – invisibly surrounding me like water vapour. Max arrived at my flat that night and he didn’t leave for a long time.

5

We moved through the milestones of the following month with a new, easier pace. We stopped sending each other measured texts that needed to be analysed and annotated, Lola acting as my CliffsNotes, and we started calling each other instead. The communication between us became regular – an on-off week-by-week conversation in which we knew what the other one was doing and checked in on how we were. We saw each other three or four times a week. We kissed on the back-row seats of the cinema. We learnt how we both liked our tea. I met him at work for his lunch break and we ate ham and piccalilli sandwiches in the park by his office. We walked round an exhibition, and I took in nothing of the art but instead marvelled at the spectacle of what it was to hold hands in broad daylight. I saw his flat – mostly white, mostly tidy and completely lived-in, with faded, frayed rugs from travels, stacks of records on the floor and towers of paperbacks on every surface. There were comedy mugs in his cupboards from well-meaning but estranged aunts, given as Christmas presents. There were piles of shabby equipment for adventuring – walking boots, wetsuits and helmets. There was just one photo in his entire flat – a close-up black-and-white image of a smiling, closed-eyed man with his nose leaning in to smell the head of a little, white-haired boy. I asked about him only once, then never mentioned it again. Max and I edged around our respective locked rooms marked ‘dad’ and we both understood how important that was, without ever acknowledging it.

At night and first thing every morning, we journeyed through the new lands of each other’s bodies, marking our territory wherever we went. We colonized each other and I always left Max knowing exactly where he’d been for days afterwards – where he’d kissed and pinched and bitten. I couldn’t ever imagine getting to the end of him.

I sat in the reception of my publisher’s office and pressed the barely visible bruise he’d left a few nights before on my right wrist as he had held me down. It had turned light yellow, like a piece of gold jewellery. I gazed at the books on the shelves that lined the Soho townhouse that the company occupied as its office, the hundreds of books they’d published, and spotted Taste’s sage-green spine. I felt the same sense of belonging I’d felt since I came in for my first meeting with my editor, Vivien – a feeling of security that I knew was naive. I was the publisher’s product, not their child, and the fate of products was even more unpredictable than children.

‘Nina?’ a scratchy, lethargic male voice called. I turned round to see a slouchy man in his early twenties with an ironic mop-top haircut died copper orange, wearing a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt tucked into tracksuit bottoms and a pair of sliders. His lids hung heavy over his eyes like a pair of half-drawn venetian blinds.

‘Yes. Hello,’ I replied.

‘You here to see Vivien?’ he asked. I could see the chewing gum roll around his mouth like a ball in a lottery draw machine.

‘Yes.’

‘Come this way,’ he said, jerking his head to beckon me. He barely picked up his feet and shuffled towards the lift like his shoes were cardboard boxes.

Vivien was sitting in a glass-fronted meeting room, her shoulders rounded and her head lowered intently towards a piece of paper. She had a shoulder-length, messy-fringed shaggy blonde haircut that implied a former life of lots of parties. The sort of hair that suits a woman of her age, but also would look completely appropriate on an iconic ageing male rock star. She was in her mid-fifties, which you could see in the gentle sag and folds of her face and the milky blue of her irises, but she had the energy of the most powerful and popular girl at school. She was decisive, exacting, confident and mischievous. She liked scandal, gossip and salaciousness. She orbited in high glamour – well connected, well versed in style and taste – while being decidedly unglamorous herself, which made her all the more intriguing. She was bookish and bespectacled, always in black trousers and an androgynously cut simple shirt, no matter where she went. Her glasses were square and cartoonishly thick-rimmed, her earrings were always large and geometric – you could tell that all her accessories were chosen on account of being ‘funky’.

But the most compelling thing about Vivien was the spell of guruism she cast on whoever she met while being unaware of her own addictive didacticism. She would utter throwaway thoughts that would become fundamental truth to whoever heard them. She once told me to ‘always order turbot, if turbot is on the menu’ (I always order turbot) and that ‘all scents are tacky other than rose’ (I have since only worn rose perfume). I had never met a woman surer of her own thoughts and instincts, and it was an invigorating thing to behold.

Vivien stood up when I entered the meeting room and gave me a kiss on both cheeks.

‘Nina the Brilliant,’ she said in her deep voice of full vowels and sharp consonants, as she gripped me firmly by the shoulders. ‘So much to talk about. Now, Lewis,’ she said formally, turning to the man who accompanied me, ‘I’m going to have to ask you to listen very carefully. We would like two coffees, please, from the shop downstairs not from the ghastly machine here. Nina likes a flat white, not skinny, I like a double espresso, no milk. Can you remember that?’

‘So just, like, black coffee?’ he said, leaning against the door frame.

‘Well, yes, but don’t say a black coffee because otherwise they will give me something completely different to what I’d like. And get one for yourself.’

‘I’ve actually given up caffeine, I’ve read it’s the silent killer –’

‘All right, Lewis, thank you,’ she said briskly, before turning to face me with a weary smile. The door closed and he sloped off. ‘I’ve only ever hired earnest girls with bobs and lots of canvas book bags who love Sylvia Plath, so I thought I’d try something different for an assistant this time.’

‘Is he good?’

‘Disaster.’ An earnest-looking girl with a bob and leather brogues tapped on the glass door. Vivien turned to her. ‘Yes?’ The girl stepped in, nervously tucking her hair behind her ears.

‘Vivien, I’m so sorry, no one was actually allowed to book this meeting room for the next three hours.’

‘Why not?’ she asked.

‘Because every employee in the building has been asked to go to the “Take the Stairs Week” talk.’

‘What is a “Take the Stairs Week” talk?’