‘I’ve been wanting to do that all night,’ he said, against her mouth. He started to pull away but she grabbed his shirt and pulled him back, kissing him again.

God, his kisses were so addictive and very quickly the kiss turned into the prelude to something else, her hands were in his hair, his were wandering over her body. She reluctantly pulled away before she got too carried away right there on her friend’s driveway. Henry groaned with disappointment. Frustratingly they probably couldn’t even finish off the kiss when they got home.

Henry sat back in his seat, gripping the steering wheel tightly, clearly equally frustrated by their inability to finish the kiss.

He started the car and pulled out their drive.

‘We, erm… don’t have to go straight home,’ Henry said.

She looked at him and laughed. ‘What were you thinking, we find a secluded layby somewhere in the middle of the woods and have sex in the back of the car?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking.’

She stared at him in shock, there were no words in her head. It wasn’t exactly the sweet, gorgeously romantic experience they’d had the first time they made love but she couldn’t deny that the possibility really excited her.

‘I’ve never had sex in a car before,’ Penny said.

‘Me neither.’

‘Really? Isn’t that a rite of passage for most teenage boys?’

‘Remember my later teenage years were spent raising a baby, there wasn’t a lot of time for shagging in cars. Tina was the first girl I slept with, a drunken fumble at a party. There wasn’t anybody else then for years.’

Henry drove through the town.

‘That must have been so hard for you.’

He shrugged. ‘Daisy was my priority. Women just didn’t register on my radar for a long time. I was too exhausted to think about anything else. Night feeds almost killed me.’

‘So no wild sex in weird and wonderful places?’

Henry clearly thought about this for a moment. If there was any weird sex or sex in unusual places, none obviously came to mind. It made Penny feel a lot better about her complete lack of sexual experience. ‘I guess I’ve been quite sensible. I’ve done the usual places, like in the shower, on the table, on the couch, on a pool table, in a garden, on a sun lounger…’

‘Those are usual places?’ Penny blushed.

‘Well, yes. They’re not weird places. One of my friends had sex in a graveyard, now that’s a bit creepy if you ask me. I think mine have been quite normal. Maybe against a tree was probably the strangest place. What about you?’

Penny fiddled with a tiny hole in the knee of her jeans. ‘Erm… the bed and, erm, sitting up in bed once.’ Jesus, no wonder Chris went elsewhere for sex, he must have been bored out of his mind with the plain, boring sex that she had offered him. ‘I never really knew what I was doing and he certainly never instigated it anywhere other than in bed.’

Henry drove up the hill quietly. ‘So… we could rectify that if you want.’

‘I think we better, I’m bloody miles behind everyone else in terms of wild sexual experiences.’

Henry smiled at her as he drove past the turning for her house and she bit her lip. They were really going to do this, they were going to have sex in the car. She suddenly wanted to experience all those passionate sex moments with Henry, in all the places that he had spoken about.

They drove over the hills and Henry took her hand, running his thumb over her palm in tiny little circles which just sent desire and need spiralling through her. They came to some woods and Henry pulled off the road into a short service road that led to an old beacon. In the day, cars would be double-parked either side of the service road as people would walk round the woods with their dogs but now, in the middle of the night, the road was empty.

Once Henry was satisfied they were far enough away from the main road not to be spotted, he pulled onto the side of the road and parked under a tree.

He turned the engine off and the lights and they were plunged into darkness.

They sat in silence for a moment while their eyes became accustomed to the light, or the complete lack of it.

Penny was so excited and so nervous, this felt silly and wrong and wonderful all at once.

‘How should we do this?’ Penny asked, wondering if her innocence and naivety was a total turn-off. Maybe she should be more assertive.

She reached across the handbrake and kissed him and as he ran his hands through her hair, she moved over to his side of the car and straddled him, accidentally pressing the horn with her bum as she positioned herself against the steering wheel. The noise was loud and alien in the middle of the woods and it scared her enough to break the kiss.

Henry laughed and with his hands at her hips he pulled her tighter against him away from the wheel, before kissing her again.

He unzipped her coat and slid it off her shoulders and she shivered as the cold of the night soaked through her thin shirt to her skin.

‘Sorry, I’ll put the heating on,’ Henry mumbled, leaning forward to turn the ignition on, pushing her against the horn as he did. He carried on kissing her as he fumbled around, trying to find the heating controls, the horn went off again, hazard lights flashed and the windscreen wipers came on, making a horrible squeaking sound as they dragged across the dry windscreen.

Penny giggled. ‘I’ll leave my clothes on, let’s just take the necessary bits off.’

Henry nodded as he moved his hands to her jeans. He undid the button and slowly unzipped her fly. But when he went to push them off her hips, it was quite clear her straddling position was not conducive to the removal of clothes.

She shuffled around so she was leaning her back against the car door and her legs were sideways across his lap, her feet in the passenger seat, as she wriggled to get her jeans off. Henry tried to help her, dragging them down her thighs, and taking her pants with them. There was just no room to manoeuvre at all.

‘Let’s go in the back,’ Henry said, clearly getting very frustrated.

She quickly clambered off him, with her jeans still round her knees, fell through the gap between the seats and landed face down with her front on the back seat and her legs still in the front. This wasn’t sexy at all. Or romantic. Henry was still trying to wrestle her skinny jeans off her legs. He gave one big yank and they came off as he fell against the wheel, sounding the horn yet again. She quickly tried to arrange herself in a better position on the back seat as Henry was fiddling with the heating controls and then he moved into the back with her. But though there was enough room for her to lie across the back seat there wasn’t room for him. He knelt between her legs, his back, neck and head folded under the roof of the car; it didn’t look comfortable at all. She shifted back so her head was resting against the window to try to give him more space, but that hurt her neck. Henry didn’t exactly look like he was enjoying himself either.

He leaned up and spent a good minute trying to prise a condom out of his jeans pocket.

‘Why did you take a condom to dinner with Daniel and Maggie?’ Penny said, leaning up to try to help him. ‘Did you think it was that kind of dinner party?’

‘I thought I might try and sneak into your house when I got back, if Daisy was asleep.’

‘Planning ahead, I like it.’

He managed to get the condom out, ripped it open with his teeth and slid it on.

‘This isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it,’ Penny said, trying to shuffle back even more, to give him more room. He slid his hands under her bum, lifting her and folding her into a very odd angle, and she hooked one leg round his back and one over the back seat. He thrust into her just as a pair of headlights turned into the little service road, heading straight towards them. Frozen in the moment, she looked out the window over Henry’s shoulder and spotted the silhouette of the blue lights on top of the car as it came closer.