I stand, motionless, in front of you as you sit on the straw chair in the kitchen, legs slightly apart. Your half-drunk cup of tea is on the kitchen table nearby. I cannot remember what we have been talking about, but the kitchen is now silent with all the words that one needs not speak: I know that we must have just looked at each other in that peculiar way only people who share a deep desire for the other can muster. With longing, and beyond the eyes.

I stand between your legs, and hoist my skirt up to my hips, holding the folds with both hands. When I flex one of my legs over yours, and then the other, you lift your arms to hold my waist. I sit in that perfect place that is your lap, the thin fabric of my panties rubbing against your desire covered in jeans.

If one should seek proportions as the measure of an ideal fit, I’d say that we are perfectly matched: when I bend over slightly, your hands will cup my bottom and my mouth will kiss where your throat joins your neck. I whisper in your ear the eternally powerful words lovers have been whispering since mankind began. Your fingers linger a second or so between my skirt and my knickers, then begin their journey, sliding up my back and round my shoulders, where they meet mine and hold them.

‘Emma’, you sigh.

I shake my head slowly.

‘Lucrezia.’

I have allowed Emma to reach out and teach my real self how to live out fantasies; the man underneath my thighs and holding my hands is very much alive and tangible. And so are my feelings.

Is it possible to have dreamt of kissing somebody for so long that, when it does happen, it feels as if you’d just come back from a long trip in the cold to find home?

There is neither the thrill of novelty nor the shiny newness that ties your heart in knots the way you would, as a teenager, explore another young and unknown body. Quite the contrary: the pleasure comes from finally pulling closer to a man I have kissed and made love to a thousand times in my imagination. That I should feel excited by tasting a familiarity I have built solely through my reveries of several weeks is odd, but exhilarating.

Let me move my hips in harmony with your heartbeat. We have walked alone inside London’s crowds and dreamt of breakfast together. The intimacy of our bodies only reflects that of our souls.

Will I worry, when my knickers have joined the rest of my clothes on the floor and I am kneeling in front of you, that there will come a time I shall wave good-bye to you and never know whether I am going to see you again? Yes, but not now. Not now that your hands are in my hair and you are inside my mouth, my body and my mind. Not now that I understand the meaning of me and find it so easy to explain it to you.

Lost and found. Lonely and cherished.

I have never found the taste of a man so sweet.