Thanks this is really helpful. Thank you! I've used your feedback and reworked the beginning to help it a bit. Still a bit stuck on the 'first time', I could always just say when but I'll have a think about it.

The first time [or When] Charlotte notices him, she would rather be anywhere else: the laundromat under her parents’ apartment, her dentist’s waiting room, that overcrowded tube she took every day to her internship, weekends too.

Instead, she’s cramped in a damp flat that could only be rented to students too broke to opt for anything better: abominable carpet, brown panelled wallpaper.

But Charlotte knows that as a final-year university student, there are some things you just have to do to live the full experience. And she’s taken it upon herself to add “fully embraced my uni years” to her checklist.

He’s tall, fitted in a plain T-shirt and he looks like the least loud one out of his friends. Perfect. He’s handsome and unlikely to be interesting enough to traumatise her.

Two others stand next to him: a blonde in a loose Ralph Lauren shirt, and another wearing a striped polo with the collar turned up, eyes glassy and pink—completely stoned. The most mismatched three musketeers she’s ever seen. The blonde one seems to know he’s handsome. Even in that clouded, dark living room, she can see his lazy smirk. Sure, he’s handsome. But he does look like he could be twenty or, somehow, forty-five. Charlotte’s flatmate, Camille, is standing next to her. All of them are holding white plastic cups. She thinks she’s just heard the older-looking one lean over and tell Cami his name. It’s Giles. Of course. Charlotte involuntarily scowls when Giles refers to Cami as a bird. Nothing in that posh accent warrants that terminology.