Zoe loves Christmas, and being a mum has only given her reason to love it even more. It’s difficult to say who is more excited, her or daughter, but Zoe would argue it has to be her, because while her daughter is mainly looking forward to what she’ll get from Santa, Zoe has the excitement of both getting stuff from Santa but also being Santa and knowing that she is actually the one responsible for her daughter’s delight.

That said, Christmas is not the only reason for her excitement, because Zoe also has a new(ish) boyfriend. If it feels like he’s newer than he is, it’s because she’s only just introduced him to her daughter and, as a result, he’s started staying over, which is life-changing – if you’d told Zoe when she was a teenager that sex at thirty-two could involve just as much sneaking around as sex at fifteen, she’d never have believed you.

The boyfriend, Nick, is also the reason why she’ll be getting stuff from Santa for the first time in years – it was Nick himself who suggested they do stockings for one another, and Zoe found herself falling for him even harder.

And so, at 3pm on Christmas eve, she sits in the kitchen wrapping presents for the two most important people in her life – her daughter, who’s at her dad’s, and her boyfriend, who’ll be over when he finishes work. Her wrapping is exquisite – there’s a whole colour scheme and she’s spent the best part of a week’s salary on ribbon.

When her daughter is dropped off later that evening, she and Zoe put out a Sherry for Santa and a carrot for his reindeer. ‘Where will Santa leave my presents, mummy?’

‘He puts them at the end of your bed, darling – that way when you wake up, you’ll know straight away that he’s been.’

Nick, meanwhile, gets two stockings (three if you want to be precise) – the one she’s stuffed for him, and the ones she’s wearing. It’s the early hours of Christmas day before they’re sated and she drifts off in his arms.

She wakes to the sound of her daughter’s tears. ‘Mummy, Santa hasn’t been!’

Fuck.

The temptation of cock has stolen Christmas.

Ursula owns a beauty salon. It’s a successful business, and she’s proud to have built it up from nothing into something that not only pays her a good wage, but pays for two other full-time employees as well. She’s not only good at massage and painting nails – although she is good at those things – she’s also a gifted saleswoman.

She remembers everything about her clients’ relationships. She knows who’s on Tinder, who’s been with their partner for years but isn’t yet married, who’s recently had a baby, who has a crush on the lifeguard at the local pool.

Does she exploit that knowledge?

She prefers to think of it as doing her customers a favour.

She usually brings it up when they’re in a vulnerable position – just waking up from having drifted off during a back and shoulder massage, or as she has their hand in hers, gently rubbing in hand cream before she paints their nails a delicate pink.

‘How’s your boyfriend?’ she asks, slyly, or ‘Is your husband well?’ The response is almost always the same – muted mutterings about how things could be worse, could be better.

And then she prefers to be direct. ‘When did you last get waxed?’ she asks. ‘He’d like that, wouldn’t he, if you went home all clean and smooth? What a nice treat for him!’

Her clients wonder how she knows that it’s been ages, or even never. That the best they ever do is a quick swipe of an old Gillette razor on a Sunday evening.

‘I have a spare half an hour now, if you have time,’ she says, and it works, well, probably 80% of the time.

It works because they look at her, with her neat chignon and her false lashes, and her white starched dress, and they imagine her immaculate underneath, too.

Which is untrue. Ursula has never waxed in her life.

Tatiana has told all her friends that her new boyfriend is an actor. She keeps meaning to ask him what he’s been in – it has been nearly three months, after all – but somehow she just hasn’t got round to it yet. Anyway, he has another job for the moment – he sells cars, which is a bit cringey – she doesn’t like to think of him being all smarm and fake charm, but, as long as he doesn’t turn the charm on too thick when they’re together, she can cope with it.

Her friends, though, want to know. ‘Ask him what he’s been in,’ they protest. ‘Does he know Jude Law? Gillian Anderson? Can he get us cheap tickets for the National?’ They’re obnoxious like that, judgey. It doesn’t even occur to them that maybe he’s just been in more low-key stuff, stuff they might not even have heard of.

One night, they meet in the pub and, by the time she gets there, there’s already a glass of Prosecco on the table waiting for her. And he has one, too, that he’s nervously sipping from. None of these things are like him, and it occurs to Tatiana that he might be about to propose.

‘What are we celebrating?’ she asks, as she sits down. ‘I hope it’s something momentous!’ She’s trying to lighten the mood.

‘I got a part,’ he says, ‘A big one.’

‘Congratulations!’ she replies. ‘You didn’t tell Nr you were auditioning! Let me guess, you’re going to be … Macbeth!’

He laughs, deep and heartily, and she’s pleased she’s succeeded in cutting through the tension.

‘Not quite,’ he says, ‘but it is a lead role. I’m going to be one of the seven dwarfs in the village pantomime. I’ve got fifty-six lines to learn!’

Tatiana almost chokes on her drink. The village pantomime? What the fuck will she tell her friends? And would it be wrong to book a skiing holiday for that week and pretend it was in the diary before he found out?

Because she can forgive anything, anything but am dram.

Susie has been asked to make the wedding cake. She doesn’t want to make the wedding cake, but she’s never been good at saying no, and it was especially hard to say when faced with Annabel’s literal trilling.

‘But Maxie wants you to have a role, darling! He wants you to feel included!’

Susie disagrees. If Max had really wanted her to feel included, he’d have married her, rather than dumping her for Annabel in their second year of university. Still, she doesn’t say as much to Annabel. She just says ‘I guess I could do that.’

She’s not a professional baker, but she does bake, y’know, regularly. Her colleagues love her cakes. Max used to love her cakes. She’s got this, much as she’d rather not have.

Annabel is the type to want white and traditional, Susie knows that, but also, if Annabel wanted something specific, she should have bloody said, shouldn’t she? Susie is not really the traditional, three tier, fondant-iced type. She prefers things that are more modern, cooler.

And so she bakes Annabel and Max the cake that she would have wanted, if she’d been the one marrying him. It has the three tiers, sure, but not the white sugarpaste – in fact there is no sugarpaste at all. She bakes her signature ‘naked’ cake – three layers of vanilla sponge sandwiched together with lemon buttercream, the whole thing decorated with fresh fruit.

‘I hope you like it,’ she says to Annabel on morning of the wedding, all smiles.

Annabel is too polite to say otherwise. ‘I … yes, it’s lovely.’

‘I’m so glad,’ Susie replies. ‘After all, I know Max prefers things plain.’

Quinta is laying, half asleep still, in a narrow single bed in a room on someone else’s corridor. The bathroom door is closed, but she can hear the sound of the shower running and, faintly, of someone whistling.

She doesn’t know what he has to whistle about – he might have come all over her tits, but she didn’t come at all – he didn’t even try to make sure she got off, too.

In the future, she’ll grow tired of this – going out to clubs, getting drunk and dancing, letting men she recognises from lectures buy her a vodka and coke and then, at the end of the evening, take her back to their room for a fuck that, nine times out of ten, is deeply underwhelming.

It’s the chase part she prefers, or not really even the chase – the anticipation of the chase, the fuck twice removed, as she likes to think of it. The possibility, when she’s drawing her liner on so it flicks out perfectly catlike, or stashing a handful of Durex in her clutch, that whoever she attracts tonight might actually know to put his thumb on her clit.

The man in the shower now wouldn’t have known what to do with her clit even if she’d taken his hand and put it there directly, she’s pretty sure of it. That too though, is something that she won’t really start doing with guys she’s fucking for another five years or so. At this point, she’s lucky if they remember to use their fingers first.

Still, she has her way of punishing them. She waits until the shower has stopped and the sound has changed to tooth brushing – it makes her feel like the risk of getting caught is greater – then she takes the book on top of the pile on his bedside table – the same one she’s studying for an essay that’s due in two days, and rips the final chapter clean out.

He’s not the first guy she’s done this to. She’s hoping to get a reputation on campus. But she never does. It’s almost as if the boys don’t bother reading the books they’re assigned – they just base their opinions on nothing.

Primrose is a dream to date. She knows exactly how to make a guy feel special – knows to let him pay for her drinks, but not her dinner, will let him hold her hand across the table,  will ask him question after question about his job, and not even expect him to ask half as many in return.

She is excited to meet Peter. She is hoping for someone geeky but cute, kind but funny. She prides herself on not being one of those girls who cares about things like height, or the car a guy drives. She prides herself on not being that shallow.

However, if she did care about those things, she’d be in luck. Peter is 6″3 and he drives a BMW.

Fancy.

Plus, she fancies him. She likes the way he looks, the sound of his voice (that’s surprisingly important), the fact that he’s wearing button-fly jeans, which have never yet failed to turn her on.

He slides the wine list across the bar towards her, and she asks for a glass of chardonnay, just like she always does. She might usually have suggested that they share a bottle, but as he’s driving, she decides not to.

That’s where it all goes wrong.

He’ll never understand why there was no kiss at the end of the night. Nor why she ghosted him.

He’d never guess it was the pint of orange juice and lemonade.