She submits the essay at 6, and by half past she’s prowling the corridors. These are the dead hours: the clubs chucked out hours ago and even the scientists aren’t up yet. She’s strung out on a combination of coffee and ProPlus and the weird euphoria that comes from not having slept at all. She takes a kind of pride in her ability to stay up all night – when other people talk about all-nighters, they mean the nights they turn in at 3am, but, like everything, she likes to do it properly.

There’s a peace, a focus, that comes from working last minute, when everyone else is sleeping, and it appeals to her introverted side, too. Just music, a pile of books and the words accumulating: two weeks of study coming together on three sides of A4. But by morning she craves company. Company, and, well, cock.

He wakes early, usually, but not quite *this* early. She should let him sleep. But by 7 she’s practically scratching at his door and mewling like a lost kitten. And sure enough, as she checks her watch for the thousandth time, the door swings open and he’s standing there in his boxers, sleep-mussed and tired-eyed. He crawls back into his narrow single bed, holding the duvet so she can climb in next to him. For a moment, sleep is more of a temptation than sex, but as they spoon and his cock begins to swell in the small of her back she finds an untapped reserve of energy.

In the tangle of bedlinen, she kicks off her clothes. He reaches into her bra to grope her tits, sniggering into the warmth of her neck when he finds toast crumbs in her cleavage. He loves her like this, mascara smeared from all the yawning, clothes creased and her mind still whirring at a hundred miles an hour.

‘Fuck me,’

He does, though she’s on top, bouncing like a Duracell bunny. He slaps her arse whenever her rhythm slows and it makes her giggle, the joyful sound of it setting his mood for the whole day ahead. He rests his knuckles against her clit and she comes hard, words pouring out of her that couldn’t be more different from the ones she wrote overnight.

‘Slut.’

‘You love it.’

‘I do.’  And his orgasm merges with the wake of hers.

*

She needs to stay awake. She has a tutorial at 9. A shower will help, she knows, but she wants nothing more than to stay here with him, his come sliding down her thighs and his leg entwined with hers.

‘Don’t you have an essay to finish?’ she asks, as he flings an arm around her waist and snuggles in for the long haul.

‘Nah,’ he mutters. ‘I finished it days ago.’

She envies him this discipline as much as she teases him for it. ‘Swot,’ she replies, and takes his hand, guiding it back to her wet folds. ‘Luckily, some things can be finished more than once.’