I’m not sure whether she likes me or not, I mean, she made love to me on the living room floor, but she might have just been being polite.

Jack suffocates

Hey, can I come in? So you know how your girlfriend just broke up with you? Well I figure you probably got some condoms left over, yeah? Do you think I could nick a couple? Thing is it’s going great with Hannah and me and I’m thinking… y’know, and she doesn’t want to wait for me to run down to the shop, I mean, talk about eager, and I don’t really want to go down anyway at this time just to buy some… you’ve got some, yeah? Ah, cheers mate, I owe you one.

Oh, by the way, you might want to turn your music up for the next hour or so, just saying, you know what I get like, could get a bit loud, y’know, through the wall, what you listening to anyway? Coldplay? Nice one. Well, anyway, cheers again, that’s my night sorted, see you in the morning.

A man driving a red sports-car overtakes a funeral procession. His wife, in the passenger seat, with the seat tipped back, is in labour.

“Sorry,” he mouths silently to the driver of the hearse as he narrowly avoids an oncoming lorry.

“When are we going to have sex?” the girl asked.

“When you say ‘I love you’ and I say ‘I love you’,” the boy replied.

“I love you,” the girl said.

The boy looked at her and he felt sad.

“I think maybe we should take a break, from each other, just for a while,” he said, “then maybe things’ll go back to how they were before.” But they could never go back. Not once he said that, not once that one small seed of doubt was planted. Because even if we did get back together afterwards, after our break, it wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t ever be the same, because he had had doubts once, and he might well have them again, always afterwards I would live in fear of that, of the doubts he may have. And we would never be comfortable again, there would always be that tension. Long gone were the days of expectation, of sweet denial and hope that one day we would be properly together after those spring nights of dreaming about each other.

And so I walked away.