We'd been talking about it for eleven months. Eleven months of raised-then-dropped conversations, of late-night googling, of profile pages started and abandoned, of "maybe one day" becoming "maybe soon" becoming "okay, let's actually do this."

This is the story of the night we did.

The week before

Kirsty found the club. She'd been researching for weeks without telling me, which I only found out afterwards. She presented it one Tuesday evening the way you might present a holiday you'd already half-booked: tentatively, watching my face.

It was in a town forty minutes from ours. Far enough. We booked tickets for the following Saturday's newbie night and then didn't really talk about it for five days. We talked around it constantly. But not about it.

On the Friday night she asked me directly how I was feeling. I said nervous but excited. She said the same thing back. Neither of us was quite sure if we were telling the truth or telling each other what we thought the other needed to hear. That ambiguity felt like its own kind of intimacy.

Getting ready

Kirsty spent forty minutes on what to wear. I ironed a shirt I'd bought three years ago and never worn. We looked, I think, like two people about to go to a slightly formal dinner party, which is more or less what we were.

In the car she was quiet. Not distant, just inward. After about ten minutes she laughed at nothing in particular and said "we're actually doing this" and I said "we're actually doing this" back and something between us settled slightly.

The arrival

The building looked completely unremarkable from outside. A door with a keypad. Inside, a woman on a desk who took our names with the same efficient warmth of someone checking you into a hotel. She told us we'd find the bar straight ahead and that they ran a tour of the venue for first-timers if we wanted one. We said yes to the tour.

The tour guide was a man in his fifties who had the relaxed demeanour of someone who'd done this a hundred times and remembered what it felt like the first time. He showed us the bar, the lounge, the upstairs. He explained the rules plainly: no means no, always; phones in lockers; play areas optional; no pressure at any point. Then he brought us back to the bar and got us a drink and introduced us to another couple who'd arrived about thirty minutes before us and were also on their first visit.

Their names were David and Rachel. David worked in logistics. Rachel was a primary school teaching assistant. They were from thirty miles away in the opposite direction. We talked to them for probably two hours.

What happened

Not as much as we had half-imagined and more than we'd really prepared for emotionally.

Around ten o'clock Kirsty and Rachel ended up in a conversation that had moved somewhere more interesting and the four of us were on the same sofa. Things shifted gradually and naturally, the way these things apparently do when everyone is comfortable and nobody is forcing anything. There was a point where I looked at Kirsty and she looked at me and something passed between us that wasn't quite a question but had the character of one. I nodded slightly. She nodded back.

I won't describe what happened next in any detail. What I'll say is that the actual experience was less like the fantasy version and more like something genuinely real, which sounds like a reduction but isn't. Real turned out to be better.

Leaving

We left around midnight. Said goodbye to David and Rachel, exchanged details, said we should do this again sometime and meant it. The woman at the desk said goodnight.

In the car park Kirsty took my hand. She didn't say anything for a moment and neither did I. Then she said: "That was completely different from what I expected."

"Different how?" I said.

"Nicer," she said. "Just nicer."

The drive home

This is the part that surprised me most. Not the evening itself but the forty minutes home. The conversation we had in the car was the most honest thing we'd said to each other in years. Not about sex. About what we each wanted, what we'd felt during the evening, what had surprised us about our own reactions, what we were curious about and what we were less sure about.

We talked about things that had apparently been sitting unstated between us for years, coming out now because something real had happened and the usual social scripts had stopped applying. It was the kind of conversation you don't expect to be having at midnight on a motorway after a Saturday you couldn't have predicted a year ago.

We went back three weeks later. That was different too, in all the ways the first time had prepared us for.

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