Six Reasons to Stay a Virgin (2003)

Louise Harwood's comic novel, copyright 2003, follows Emily King, who has never slept with anyone, and her friends Jo-Jo, Holly and Caitlin. Then Oliver Mills, who kissed her in the sand dunes when they were sixteen and later worked beside her on the film Breaking Free, comes home after a year in New York. (Open Library)

Watches

Breitling (unidentified model): On the flight out with their friends, Oliver has just teased Emily through take-off with a story about a fear of flying, and the old easy friendship returns with something new under it. Reading beside him, she looks down at his forearm and broad flat wrist, where a Breitling has replaced the Swatch she remembers, and thinks how good their two arms look together. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Twice she looked up from her book to find him watching her, and, looking down at his forearm and broad flat wrist — a Breitling now in place of the Swatch watch she remembered — and at her own narrow arm beside his, she thought how good they looked together, his arm and hers. (Louise Harwood, Six Reasons to Stay a Virgin, scan cataloged as Berkley Books, 2006, p. 222, with the OCR's line-break hyphens closed up; Internet Archive scan OCR)