‘Lie back,’ he breathed, sliding his warm hand along my thigh. I did what I was told, and lay back on the sunlounger, the sun beating down under a foreign sky. His fingers were now expertly smoothing fragrant oil onto my warm skin, creating an electric sizzle on contact. I pulled down my shoulder straps provocatively and adjusted myself on the lounger so he could enjoy me in my best possible light. I looked at him from under luxurious eyelashes, my bronzed skin glowing in the sun, now high in the sky, the air laced with Hawaiian Tropic. I closed my eyes and relaxed as the gorgeous man applied factor 20 with the enthusiasm of a sex-starved Swedish masseur.

This is how I like to see it anyway, and the above description is pretty close, except for the bit about my skin being bronzed and my eyelashes being luxurious. My skin was more of a faded orange over mottled pink and my eyelashes were spiky and itchy and didn’t belong to me. They’d been glued on by Mandy the beauty therapist, who used me like a bloody guinea pig at the salon where I worked. As soon as a new treatment appeared on the horizon, she’d whisk me into her Heavenly Spa above the salon and ‘inflict’ it on me. She’d once vajazzled a cougar onto my private parts (not, I must add, at my request) and I was shocked to discover two very lifelike cougar eyes staring back at me when I’d looked down. Not, it has to be said, as shocked as Dan, my boyfriend who’d come face-to-face with the spectacle in the dark during a passionate encounter. He took it like a man but joked about being traumatised by it for some time after. Mandy had assured me these innovative new lashes I was now batting were all the rage in Hollywood and I’d look like a ‘hot film star’, but by the time I’d left the salon I looked more like a surprised drag queen.

So there I was in a small hotel in the Spanish hills, lying by a pool, with Dan, the love of my life. We’d been together for three years (with only a small gap in the first year when we’d hit a problem) and I’d never met anyone quite like this rather wonderful Australian Adonis who’d turned up in my local deli when I’d thought my life story was over. Free-spirited, with the spontaneity of a teenager, Dan climbed the highest mountains, dived into the deepest oceans and jumped on planes like other people jumped on buses. He’d seduced me with his tales of new worlds, hot sunshine, different flavours, and amazing people, and now we were sharing that journey together.

When I’d first met Dan, I’d been unhappily married to Craig, a career plumber who loved toilet pipes and flange fittings more than he loved me. Plumbing was his passion and nothing and no one could compete with a dripping valve or a faulty ballcock where Craig was concerned.

‘Shall we sit in the shade?’ Dan was asking me now, his eyes twinkling, not a murmur of faulty ballcocks, just sunshine and white wine.

I nodded, wordlessly, as he took my hand, his own still warm and slippery from the sun oil, and we lay under a huge palm and gazed into each other’s eyes. I still couldn’t believe this was my life, that Dan and I were together. I was a grandma now, as well as a university student – how crazy is that? Dan and I lived apart but close by, which is why these lovely snatched weekends were so special. After selling the marital home following my divorce, I was lodging with Emma, my daughter, a single mum. I say, ‘lodging’, but really I had moved in to help Emma look after Rosie, my gorgeous granddaughter. I was happy, and felt like I was almost having it all, but only too aware of how easy it might be to slip back into a life of domesticity, with no goals, and no dreams, just an endless loop of waking, sleeping and working. I’d been there and done that before, having to abandon my own degree as a teenager when I fell pregnant with Emma. So, the first thing I did after Rosie was born was to enrol on a degree course in English Literature again, some twenty-odd years after the first time.

I loved this new life and now, at the age of forty-five, was enjoying all the challenges thrown at me, and was excited about my future. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with my degree, but I had more options than with my previous job as a hairdresser, which I still did part-time to supplement the student loan.

So here I was, a grandmother with a student loan, a lover and a full and busy life. I had my family, my dream course and my dream man. Freshly divorced, I had no plans to jump into marriage again any time soon, but if and when I did, it would only be with Dan. Neither of us had talked of marriage – I think perhaps for both of us it was way into the future, if at all – but I had that comfortable feeling that even if a ring wasn’t involved, we’d always be together. We were just meant to be. Despite being crazy in love (as Beyoncé would say), I didn’t want another relationship made up of arguments over the washing-up and heated debates involving which colour bin to put out that week. I wanted to preserve me and Dan, keep us special and our time together precious, so we lived apart, but minutes away – which was lovely. We also went away together whenever we could. From a night in Devon to a weekend in Rome, we were doing it all and enjoying our mutual passions: travel, food – and each other.

This weekend we were sampling the delights of Spain, from the weather to the food to the flamenco, and as I gazed at Dan over a glass of red, I felt like my heart was going to burst. His blue eyes were sparkly in the early evening sun, the dimples in his cheeks appeared as his eyes landed on mine and caught like fire. We didn’t speak, we didn’t need to; we just sat in silence, happy in each other’s company, we had the rest of our lives to talk. For now, we just enjoyed being together.

‘Is drinking red wine as the sun sets with a brilliant and handsome Australian on your living list?’ Dan asked now, the twinkle never leaving his eyes.

When I’d been unhappily married to Craig, I’d kept a list of things I wanted to do, but I couldn’t bear to think of it as my bucket list because it reminded me of dying, and this was a list about living. So that’s what I’d called it – my living list.

I giggled. ‘Not exactly. The specific wording on my list is drinking spicy Rioja while the sun sets behind a mountain in Spain… followed by amazing sex with a brilliant and handsome Australian.’

‘Oh… but we’ve ordered tapas. Where does that figure in your list?’

‘Between the Rioja and the sex, I’m just waiting for the brilliant and handsome Aussie to turn up,’ I joked.

He laughed, and before he could retaliate the waitress appeared with our tapas – spicy sausage, salty squid, warm pastries with melt-in-the-mouth cheese filling and sun-dried tomatoes, sweet as caramel, with a savoury tang.

Our first trip together had been early on in our relationship, three years before when we’d spent a summer in Santorini together. While there, Dan had introduced me to all kinds of new dishes – white aubergines in olive oil, with garlic and lemon juice; lamb with herbs; a fresh Greek salad, crunchy and light with the saltiness of feta. He made my mouth water in so many ways. But it hadn’t all been plain sailing, and when Emma discovered she was pregnant and abandoned I had to leave Dan on our paradise island and head home to be with her.

We split up, then reunited a year later on a rooftop in New York City, where we ate pastrami on rye and salty pretzels, washed down with bright cocktails. Later, as we lay in my hotel suite, we’d watched the flames of the sun reflecting on glass skyscrapers and Dan had told me he still wanted to see the world, but not without me.

‘Let’s add to your living list and tick places off, one by one,’ he’d said, handing me a plane ticket to Rome. Before Dan I’d only dreamed of foreign cities, faraway beaches and foreign suns – my ex Craig was happy with a fortnight in a caravan in Bognor. And so it began. Dan and I started on our quest to tick off my living list and conquer the world. Our trips were short, but always packed with lovely places, magnificent meals and cake. There was always cake.

We’d eaten gateau in a chateau, chocolate torte in a moonlit port, and stöllen kisses in a sparkling Christmas market… and don’t get me started on gelato in Milano. And now, here we were enjoying tapas sitting at a table under a palm tree, the sun slicing through the long, structured leaves, the nearby pool as blue as the sky.

‘I love this,’ I said, lifting my sunglasses onto my head so I could look into his eyes.

‘The tapas?’

‘No… us.’

He reached his hand across the table and, squeezing mine, he smiled that wicked smile. ‘Me too.’

Then he looked intently at my face like he was scrutinising it. ‘You okay, babe?’

‘Yes… Why?’

‘You look… I don’t know, surprised?’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes… You look permanently surprised.’

‘That’ll be the Botox.’

‘Oh yeah, performed by Dr Mandy Frankenstein,’ he laughed.

I nodded, and rolled my eyes… which to my relief I was able to do again, despite the two huge spider-like weights attached to my upper eyelids.

‘Do you know what one of my fellow students said the other day?’ I asked, trying to move my face while biting into a juicy shrimp covered in spicy tomato. Mandy’s ‘salon doctor’ had given me quite a dose of Botox, I wondered if I’d ever be able to express myself facially again.

Dan was concentrating on spiking a huge queen green olive from the earthenware bowl, and missing so that it slid away in its oily garlic bath.

‘No, what did she say?’

‘She said, “Faye’s having a series of one-night stands throughout Europe with a toyboy.” When you’re nineteen, that’s quite the compliment, not a judgement, and the response was a clutch of high fives and murmurings of “You go, girl!”’

Dan laughed. ‘When you put it like that, I feel like quite the stud.’

‘Yeah, and I feel like quite the cougar.’

‘Girl, you got it goin’ on,’ he laughed, offering me a high five.

‘Hell, yeah,’ I said, slapping his palm and sipping my wine.

Despite me being ‘the older woman’ in this relationship, I was like a teenager with Dan. He was the worldly one who’d seen more of life and had a wisdom beyond his years. I would drink him in, listening to his stories of a wasted youth on the beaches of Sydney – a life of girls, surfboards and beer as the sun went down. I longed to chase the waves with him, drink cold beers in his backyard and watch fireworks over Sydney Harbour. When you love someone, you just want to know everything about them, live their lives, and one day I would go with him to Sydney. Until then we’d talk about it and I’d imagine a Christmas filled with sunshine, a place where everything was upside down and inside out and an adventure I was yet to experience. The more he told me about his country, the more I wanted to go. It was now number one on my living list, but the time wasn’t right to visit yet. A holiday on the other side of the world would involve longer than a couple of weeks, and I couldn’t leave little Rosie.

---

Too soon our Spanish weekend was over and we were heading for the airport in a beat-up taxi, stealing last-minute kisses on the back seat as the car trundled over the bumpy road.

‘Where to next time?’ I said, snuggling into his arms as he kissed the top of my head. We always climbed into our little bubble on these weekends away and as much as I wanted to get back to Rosie and Emma and ‘real’ life, it wasn’t easy to leave these wonderful locations. Dan would go back to working his job at the deli and my life would overwhelm me and despite living close to each other, the passion and intensity faded once back. One of the ways we coped with this was by looking forward and planning our next getaway.

‘I was thinking…’ he started. ‘I reckon sometime in April is the anniversary of our first kiss, and I was thinking… it’s only fitting to celebrate in the City of Love.’

‘Paris?’ I asked, excitedly.

‘No… Ormskirk,’ he teased.

‘Oh my God, Paris!’ I squealed, sounding like an excited child. We’d been to many capital cities in Europe, but Paris was special, somewhere neither of us had been. We’d always said we’d go there when the time was right, so I was beyond excited. Finally, everything was coming together and life was almost too good to be true. I should have known then that’s exactly what it was – too good to be true.