She watched him, during those long, late nights at the beach, wishing she might slip a finger through the irreverent, sun-dipped curls bouncing over his forehead as he coaxed his guitar between pain and beatitude, his smoke-scratched voice echoing flamenco heartache around the half-moon bay.

She watched the bonfire, too, reimagining the red-hot embers it cast towards the sky as love-prayers aimed at the celestial love squad. Surely one of them could see that her cause was worthy, that her heart had been his since he set his guitar-case down beside her on the school bench, all those years ago?

He caught her eye and smiled, and she gasped a little, love-speared, only to realise a split-second later that he was lost in a faraway musical dreamscape, and that to him she was as invisible as the gods of love themselves.

Get over him; musicians make terrible lovers, she thought, lying back in the sand.

A star fell and she caught it on an eyelash, shedding a single tear.

As far as he was concerned, it would be the last.