Heartbeats (or the lack of)

First kiss, first love, that special first time. Nobody ever remembers the first time they had to tell someone that they don’t love them anymore. An ignorant child of seventeen I took the coward’s option of completely avoiding her for an entire month, no mean feat considering we were in the same year at school. That morning she sat doleful and saturnine in the window of the common room keeping watch for me, that morning I saw her doleful and saturnine and legged it down the back stairs.