She has a boyfriend.

   She has a boyfriend, and I'm not him.

   We both knew it, but we did it anyway.

   We met through a friend. Like in the plot line of my favourite Divine Comedy song, we hit it off as soon as we were first introduced to each other and we were nattering away like lifelong pals within minutes. Around us, our friends and acquaintances danced to the beat that the mediocre DJ was blasting from the gigantic speakers; but we were stuck in our own little world, a bubble we'd created, in which only the two of us existed. Is there a word for the belief that only you and the love of your life truly exist? Solipsism just doesn't cover it.

   I don't like night clubs. I don't like the music they play and I don't like the culture or the clientèle or the staff. But she made it all tolerable. Better than that, she made it enjoyable. Sitting there on benches that did nothing helpful for my piles and watching adolescents rub their STDs all over each other wasn't so bad when I had her eyes to look into, her smile to admire, her voice to soothe me. Forgive me for being over romantic here, like some dreamy paedophile, a Humbert Humbert of 2011, but this is how it really felt.

   When I made fun of her, she would tap my arm playfully and blush and twiddle her hair between two elegant fingers. When people would ask her to dance with them, she would say 'No, thanks' and then look to me to check that I wasn't going to the dance floor without her. And when I asked her where her boyfriend was and why he wasn't present, that's when she grabbed me and kissed me so suddenly that my breath was literally stolen from my lungs.

   I wasn't drinking last night, so we ran straight to my car together, leaving our group in the club none the wiser. We drove out into the night, to the coast, to spend the night together and forget the world we had left behind.

   And what a night it was. We sat up until five or six in the morning, just talking. She loves Lady Gaga and Panic! at the Disco and English muffins and blueberry Pop Tarts and the feeling of having her hair played with and wearing tracksuit bottoms to laze around the house on a Sunday and she dislikes Kerry Katona and our blame culture and organised religion and dramatic teenagers who 'haven't discovered who they are yet' and I listened to every word she said with a childlike amazement. Then, we made love.

   And what a night it was.

   We're in the car now, coming back from the coast, in complete silence. Not because we've fallen out, not because something went wrong, but because we both know what awaits us back home. Neither of us wants to discuss it, but we both know we're in for it. Her boyfriend plays rugby; he's big and he's mean and frankly, he scares the shit out of me. If he isn't furious, which he will be, then we'll still have to deal with the combined outrage of all our mutual friends. The fallout will only last a few weeks tops, but for those few weeks it'll be hell on Earth.

   You know what I mean. You've felt this feeling before. In the heat of the moment, we did something incredibly pleasurable but utterly stupid, and now we're on our way to face the consequences. It's a gut-wrenching, dreadful feeling. Even though we both know we will survive it, our minds are telling us that there's no chance we ever could. If her boyfriend gets his hands on me, I'll be eating through a tube for the rest of my days.

   I have to escape with her. I need to be with her forever and ever, so we never have to face up to the consequences of what we did and we can spend an eternity just in each other's perfect company. So I do the only sensible thing I can think of. I do something beautiful and final and merciful, something that will keep us together forever. I wait for a gap in the barriers of the central reservation, and I swerve into oncoming traffic, and I plough us both into the grill of an Eddie Stobart lorry.