In this fictitious piece, PJA Woode imagines the lead up to the moment when Zac met Stella.

It was like walking past a fenced off area at a festival.  Or like going through a door marked private.  There was clearly a sense of exclusivity about it – like entering an executive club lounge or turning left at the top of the steps at the top of the entrance to an aeroplane.

He was buzzing even before he reached the hotel door.  Now inside, even though he had yet to utter a word, he could feel his head getting hotter and he was sure his cheeks were reddening.  He was conscious of his heart beating and he knew that as soon as he spoke, something rushed, garbled and unclear would emerge from his lips.  The excitement was almost too much to bear.  And yet it was also intoxicating.  Moments like this, he sensed, would be very, very rare.  It was probably a once or twice in a lifetime moment.

To complicate matters – and perhaps a reason for the intensity of the moment – there was a nagging doubt about what he was doing.  The moment he had stepped through the door – the very instant he had crossed the threshold – he knew he was doing something that his parents wouldn’t have liked.  Well, rather more than that.  They would have been livid.

He was a good boy.  He always had been.  He had never been sent to the headmaster at his prep school, nor his senior school.  He had never even had a de-merit.  He got straight As in his GCSE exams (well, apart from Art, but he was never really able to draw) and straight As at A Level. He had been a prefect and head of his boarding house.  And he was studying at a very respectable university.  His chosen subject could not have been more appropriate for someone like him: Law.  Actually, it was Law with Italian (he had done two languages at A Level – French and German – and he liked the idea of studying a new language at university). In short, Zac had always done the right thing.

That was until right now when he had entered the room and the door had closed behind him.

His path to this moment of heady expectation had been a long one.  Zac had always enjoyed sampling the pleasures of nubile women when surfing the net.  And the more he surveyed the online beauties, the more…