Freya’s in the kitchen when we get home. She’s got exercise books spread out all over the dining table, she’s halfway through a bottle of wine and she’s blasting Carly Rae Jepson from her laptop.

Henry goes straight upstairs, but I join Freya and put the kettle on.

‘Have you got much more to do?’ I ask her, gesturing at the piles of books.

‘Oh,’ she says, shrugging. ‘Shitloads, yeah.’

She turns the volume down on ‘Cut to the Feeling’ while I fill the kettle.

‘So,’ she says, when I turn around. ‘How was it?’

I catch her up on all the panic attack stuff and then say, ‘And he kissed me. On Westminster Bridge.’

‘Ooh!’ she says, pouring herself another glass of wine. ‘I wonder if anyone took a photo. Want one?’

‘That’s what I thought!’ This is why we’re friends. ‘And no, ta, I’m fine with tea.’

‘So how was it? The kiss?’

‘It was nice.’

‘Nice?’ she says, disdainfully. ‘Oh god. I’m sorry.’

‘No!’ I blow on my tea. ‘Not bad nice. It was good! It was a good kiss.’

‘You said it was “nice”. A nice kiss is not a good kiss.’

I shake my head. ‘I mean… I don’t really have much to compare it to. But it was nice. Soft lips. He didn’t slobber or bite me. It was—’

‘Nice. I get it. Was Anthony a good kisser?’

I wince. I’ve spent a long time trying really hard not to think about Anthony. I don’t want to think about Anthony. I reach for her wine and take a sip.

‘He wasn’t really into kissing,’ I say. He thought it was a waste of time, I don’t say.

She pulls a face. ‘Of course he wasn’t. OK, so did your knees go weak? With Dan?’

I frown. ‘They were already a bit dodgy from the whole panic attack thing, but I don’t think so, no.’

She shakes her head. ‘I think a first kiss should make you melt.’

‘Maybe in films. Or novels.’ I’m always struck by how perfect fictional first kisses are. No one ever bumps heads or even noses. Teeth don’t bash together. They’re never too slobbery. It’s all slow and gentle effortlessly becoming hot and desperate. It’s not realistic.

My first kiss with Anthony didn’t make me melt either. Oh, and now I’m thinking about him when I didn’t want to be thinking about him. But we had our first kiss in Waterloo station. He was running late for his train. We’d been walking along the Embankment, and every time we stopped I wondered if he was going to kiss me. At one point we sat on a bench and looked out at the river and I considered making the first move and just kissing him, but I was worried that he didn’t actually want to kiss me and that if I kissed him, he’d push me away and say, ‘God no!’ or something hideous. So I waited. And we got to Waterloo, looked up at the board, saw his train was leaving from somewhere down the escalators in just a couple of minutes and he sort of grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me. It was a bit too hard – my top lip bashed against my teeth – and he stuck his tongue in pretty much immediately with no finesse, and then he said, ‘I’ll ring you’ and practically threw himself down the escalator.

‘No,’ Freya says. ‘In real life.’

‘What?’

‘First kisses. Should be good. In real life.’

I shake my head. ‘You’re the one always saying that I’m a romantic. That I have unrealistic expectations.’

‘Right. And you are. And you do. Meeting a man that you’ve been having a recurring dream about is an unrealistic expectation. That a first kiss should give you butterflies – IN YOUR PANTS – is not.’

‘I don’t agree,’ I tell her. ‘I think the kissing will get better with time.’ Anthony’s didn’t. But Dan is not Anthony.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘So I told you about Georgie, right. The girl I met through work?’

‘Not really. But Henry told me he surprised her in the bathroom.’

Freya laughs. ‘Oh god, yeah. She was mortified.’

‘So was he.’

She grins. ‘OK, well, she came into work for an interview. I interviewed her. And she wasn’t right for the job, but we got on really well in the interview and I just… felt something, you know?’ She purses her lips at me. ‘No. You don’t know. Well, I’m telling you. We had chemistry. So when I rang to tell her she didn’t get the job, I asked her out for a drink.’

‘You did not.’

She waggles her eyebrows. ‘I so did. And she said yes. And we went for a coffee – I told you that, right? – and then we went for a walk. And then she pulled me into a bus shelter and kissed me and I nearly fucking came there and then.’

I stare at her. ‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously. Like if we hadn’t been near her house I wouldn’t have been able to wait. When you kissed, did you feel it in your, you know…’ She gestures at me, grinning. ‘Lady place?’

‘I can say “vagina”,’ I tell her. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘I mean, I think you’d know if you had, so you didn’t.’

‘But that’s OK!’ I say. ‘It was just a first kiss. The next one might be the… bus shelter kiss.’

‘But shouldn’t the first one be like that? He’s the man of your dreams. You fancy him, right?’

‘He’s really hot.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question. But let’s just assume you do. And he clearly fancies you. So why was the kiss such a big dull dud?’

‘I didn’t say it was a big dull dud!’

‘You didn’t have to.’ She picks up her wine with both hands and drinks while staring at me over the rim of the glass.

‘It’s not all about that anyway,’ I say, once I’ve drunk some of my tea. ‘I think it was nice because it was easy, you know? Like it was easy to talk to him – after the whole panic attack embarrassment – there were no awkward pauses. I was worried he would be freaked out and run away, but he didn’t. He was totally chill. It was just… like it was meant to be.’

‘Seriously?’ Freya gets up, opens the fridge door and then slams it shut, a Dairylea cheese triangle in her hand. ‘I mean… that sounds promising. But did you want to rip his clothes off? Did it feel like coming home? Was it the kiss of your dreams?’

‘I don’t think so, no. But I don’t have much to compare it to.’

‘No, I know,’ Freya says. ‘It makes me want to hunt Anthony down and punch him in the face.’

I push my chair back. I think I’ll take my tea upstairs. I used to fantasise about doing the same thing, but now I just don’t want to think about him at all. I wish she wouldn’t keep bringing him up.

‘Don’t go,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I know you don’t like talking about him.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say, picking up my tea.

‘It’s not. I upset you. And I’m sorry. I just think… it’s something you should think about.’

‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘I will. I promise.’

But I really don’t want to.