I winced.

“Cesc Fabregas’s been playing for us in this game, you idiot,” said Polly, and as Matt disappeared, she added, “He knows perfectly well, you know, but he can’t resist teasing.”

“More a case of ‘a hundred and one things you didn’t want to know about Arsenal’?”

“Well, he did offer to bring me,” Polly said. “Not that I need ‘bringing,’ obviously, though a bit of company is appreciated, even when it is my brother. But I think it’s more that he’s got a crush on Kate behind the bar, to be honest. Mind you, so have I.”

So had I, too. Kate was considerably more my style than Pollyanna -- big combat boots, dreadlocks, and a leaping dolphin tattoo had it every time over pretty, fluffy femmes. At least, they always had done in the past. Not that I was particularly butch myself. Sure, shortish hair and jeans, but that’s standard in most women these days. You start categorizing people as butch lesbos on the strength of that, the straight world would disintegrate.

“Yeah,” I said absently, wondering why I was more interested in looking at Polly than at Kate despite everything.

“Have I shocked you?” Polly asked, her gaze suddenly very direct on my face. “I’m in a wheelchair, so I shouldn’t have sexual fantasies?”

While I quite wanted to hear about the nature of her sexual fantasies about Kate (hey, we could compare notes, right?), there was one thing I needed to put straight first. “Hey, Pollyanna, I’m the girl who reckoned Matt was your boyfriend, remember? And, no, I didn’t anticipate it was limited to hand holding under the table.”

She laughed. “What did you just call me?”

Oh, shit. Fell into that one, then. “Um... Oops?”

She gave me a little poke. “Did Pollyanna drink pints?” she asked. “Now that’s something I didn’t see in the Disney version. You’ll be telling me she smoked pot and had it off with guys in the bushes next!”

She was outrageous. I liked it. “I wouldn’t shatter your illusions that much, Pollyanna. Though,” I added, unable to resist, “apparently she had fantasies about barmaids...”

Her smile was wicked. “Why, want to hear about them?”

“Wouldn’t mind.”

“Of course,” she said provocatively, “I could also tell you the ones I’m having about a dark-haired lass wearing an extremely nicely-fitting pair of black jeans.”

Our eyes met. I knew precisely what Polly was suggesting, and she knew I did. I felt the smile curve the corners of my lips.

“Be my guest.”

“Well,” she drawled, lowering her voice a little so that she didn’t broadcast to the entire pub, “let’s see.” She looked me up and down. “That hair cut -- you know, it just leaves bits of your neck visible. I think I might have a vampire complex, because I think I’d rather like to have my mouth by your neck -- kissing, certainly, but I’m thinking a bit of nibbling, and maybe even biting might go on.” She smiled sidelong at me. “Do you like being bitten, Leigh?”

“Depends who’s doing it,” I said, but the throbbing between my legs told me that I wouldn’t mind at all if Pollyanna went through with her suggestions. In fact, I suspected I’d do all I could to encourage her.

“You know,” Polly added, “it’s seeing the tail of Kate’s dolphin disappear behind the sleeve of her top that does it for me.” (Kate was wearing a short sleeved corset-like top, and looked hotter than hell, which made me wonder why it was Pollyanna whom I was longing to snog.) Polly looked at me thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you have any tatts, Leigh?”

As it happened, I did. But the star on my right shoulder was something I kept very private. It had a special meaning for me, my only memory of my family. My mother, telling me I was her star-in-the-night. My dad, one dark winter night, pointing out Orion to a fat-legged toddler who had grown into football-loving Leigh. Orion would’ve been tops at football. I know it.

“Just one,” I said, and had a weird vision of Polly slipping my top off my shoulder and pressing her mouth against the five pointed star. I’d never liked it when girlfriends of the past had done it, yet now -- suddenly -- I found I wanted to share it with Pollyanna. “Here,” I said, shrugging my top aside so that the star was visible.

Polly was silent. Absolutely silent. Then, very gently, she ran one finger along the points of the star.

“That’s different,” she murmured, and there was this strange note in her voice which shivered through me, somehow.

“Different?”

“Special,” she said. Then she gave me a flirty glance, deliberately changing the mood. “The football’s about to start again, and I think you’ve lost your original seat. Matt’ll want his back, but you know the thing about this wheelchair?” She looked expectantly at me, but I shook my head. “It’s quite amazing, you know,” she said softly, “but when it’s the right person, it’s just big enough for two.”

She looked delicate, Pollyanna, and I reckoned if I lumped my whole weight on her she’d break. But she read my mind. Putting one arm around my neck and pulling me towards her, she snogged me fair, full and firm. By the time she’d finished, I’d probably’ve done anything she asked. But what she asked wasn’t much.

“Try me,” she said, patting her lap invitingly.

I tried her. It worked. I might not have got my head buried in her breasts, but I sure as hell made sure my hands had a good old feel. And Polly didn’t complain -- anything but. Her head fell back and she practically purred with encouragement. If her brother hadn’t been somewhere around, I might’ve taken her there and then, but there’s something about an audience that isn’t my thing. Turned out we were copping more glances than the football, so we turned our attention back to that and waited for a more private moment.

Oh, and by the way? Arsenal won, 3:1. A hat-trick from Fabregas.

I’d never really anticipated dating someone in a wheelchair. It’s not that I’d written it off on a list of “NOs” -- no guys, no smokers, no wheelchairs -- just that, well, most of the people you meet in the world don’t come complete with their own set of personal wheels. And it takes some getting used to. I mean, when I leaned over to kiss someone, I wasn’t used to having the arm of a wheelchair poke me in the stomach. When Pollyanna and I walked down the street... well, ‘we’ didn’t walk, I did, and Polly wheeled herself beside me, about a yard beneath my eye level. We couldn’t hold hands, because Polly needed both hands to maneuver her wheelchair. Occasionally, I’d push her chair, and I immediately became Nice Person Number One -- the sort who got asked the time, or to exchange two fifties for a pound coin. I was out with a girl in a wheelchair: I must be trustable. Or at the very least, easy to impose upon.

“Haven’t you ever had the urge to rob a bank or something?” I asked her. “Doesn’t it drive you absolutely nuts being The Disabled Person?”

Polly tilted to her head to one side for a few seconds as if considering the matter. “Well...” she said. “Yes, of course it does, you idiot. I’m used to it, because I can’t remember anything else, whereas for you it’s new and weird, but I think I could fairly say that it drives me absolutely nuts.”

Polly had a habit of using my exact words in her own, very posh, tones. I knew perfectly well that she meant it as a piss take -- or, as Pollyanna would have it, “to sound completely ridiculous.” In saying that she “couldn’t remember” anything else, she was also telling the exact truth. Her left leg had been paralyzed after she got polio -- which, frankly, I didn’t hadn’t even known still existed these days -- as a baby. Apparently she’d managed an amazing run of bad luck involving being too ill to have the vaccine at the appropriate time, followed by catching polio (or whatever you did with it) before they’d had time to re-schedule the jab. Even then, Polly said, most cases didn’t end up with paralysis. “I was just particularly lucky,” she said ironically.

The first time she showed me her leg, it was a bit of a shock. I don’t know, somehow I’d expected it to look okay, even if she couldn’t use it. Especially with Polly being so damn gorgeous everywhere else. But it wasn’t. It was kind of... withered, I guess. Shrunken. It didn’t seem to go with the rest of her. She saw my expression and smiled.

“You see? There’s good reason for my long skirts!”

That was as near as she got to regret for all she’d been through. In a way, I felt she did deserve the Pollyanna tag: I regularly got angry that she was treated as if she had a mental as well as a physical disability, and when she told me about the circs surrounding her getting ill, I felt furious with the unfairness. Polly, however, just shrugged.

“It’s one of those things, isn’t it?” she said. “I could sit here and grump about it, or I could get on with life. I mean, I could be dead and I’m not. Lucky me.”

“Pollyanna!” I retorted, and she laughed.

I wondered, at first, what it would be like going to bed with her, whether the paralyzed leg would make a big difference. I know, I know, you’re not supposed to think that, but I bet everyone does, just a little. I wasn’t bothered, but I was a bit hesitant. I knew that Polly was, too; when I taxed her with it, she blushed.

“It’s not precisely beautiful,” she said. I guess for someone as beautiful Polly, it made a big difference. “And...” She took a long swig of her drink (we were at her place, sharing a bottle of wine). “Well, I never have.”

“Never have what?” I asked, being uncommonly thick.

She gave me A Look. “Not a whole lot of people fancy dating girls in chairs,” she said patiently. “In fact, to put it bluntly, two people before you -- one guy, and one girl. I got as far as kissing in both relationships, but no further. Of course,” she said, her teasing smile coming out, “I still need plenty of practice at the kissing thing...”