He had shaggy blond hair, the colour of ripened corn stalks, and deep blue eyes like a cloudless sky on an August afternoon. I’d never seen eyes that shade before (though years later I married a man whose eyes were the same). He wore a dark blue corduroy jacket and a floppy hat down over his floppy fringe when he rode his (push) bike to school, and he played the guitar, but he didn’t sing, though he liked Dylan, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles.
He was my best friend’s boyfriend.
One night I dreamt about him, and when I woke up I realised: this must be what being in love feels like.
Months later, after he’d stopped going out with my friend, but we were all three round at her house, he put his arm round me and kissed me – my first time. It was the week before my seventeenth birthday.
We never ‘went out’ anywhere together, but he came round to my house a couple of times, and we would play records and kiss and cuddle – very chastely (as I realised later). The last time, he brought me a box of chocolates for my birthday, but didn’t even try to kiss me. Altogether, I guess it lasted about three weeks.
And afterwards, I thought: this is what being in love feels like.
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