Leo shrugged. "It's not practical," he said.

"I can jump on the bus," said Nick, who had studied the London A-Z in absorbed conjecture about Leo's street, neighbourhood, historic churches, and access to public transport.

"Nah-" Leo looked away with a reluctant smile and Nick saw that he was embarrassed. "My old lady's at home." This first hint of shyness and shame, and the irony that tried to cover it, cockneyfied and West Indian too, made Nick want to jump on him and kiss him. "She's dead religious," Leo said, with a short defeated chuckle.

"I know what you mean," said Nick. So there they were, two men on a summer night, with nowhere to call their own. There was a kind of romance to that. "I've got an idea," he said tentatively. "If you don't mind, um, being outside."

"I don't care," said Leo, and looked lazily over his shoulder. "I'm not dropping my pants in the street."

"No, no…"

"I'm not that sort of slut."

Nick laughed anxiously. He wasn't sure what people meant when they said they'd had sex "in the street"-even "on Oxford Street," he'd once heard. In six months' time perhaps he would know, he'd have sorted out the facts from the figures of speech. He watched Leo twist and lift a knee to clamber free of the bench-he looked keen to get on with it, and he acted of course as if Nick knew the procedure. Nick followed him with a baked smile and a teeming inward sense of occasion. He was consenting and powerless in the thrust of the event, the rich foregone conclusion of the half-hour that opened ahead of them: it made his heart race with its daring and originality, though it also seemed, as Leo squatted to unlock his bike, something everyday and inevitable. He ought to tell Leo it was his first time; then he thought it might bore him or put him off.