I stared at the one, unread email left in my in-box; one email from Jake_The_Man. Why was that email so scaring me? Because I had to tell him the truth and now that it came to it I didn’t know if I wanted to. Why had I done it?

Why had I joined “Friends Reunited”? It had been a moment of madness at work. I was supposed to have been writing the fillers for that month’s news section of the magazine, except I was listening to Jackie wittier on about she’d found her very first and only boyfriend on the Friends Reunited website and how he’d got all fat and middle-aged at thirty-one. He was married with three children, a mortgage and an ugly dog, yet he’d still wanted to “hook-up” with her, even after she told him about her girlfriend.

I’d just done it on a whim, that pleasure to see that time hadn’t been kind to those dull and self-centered people from my past (I can give you a list of those I hope had gone to seed), though I had to use my old name I had no intension of replying to them. I hadn’t forgotten about it, over the next few weeks it was there at the back of my mind, but the longer it went without any replies the less I worried about it. Obviously none of my “old friends” wanted to get back in touch with me, that was fine with me. I’m a completely different person now.

Then today, there was that message from Jake_The_Man, with the title “Remember Me Jake Gibbs”, just sitting there in my inbox. I read every email I had, which wasn’t many, but his. Now I couldn’t put it off any longer.

He’d been my first boyfriend, we’d been sixteen year olds at the same sixth form college. I’d been Claire back then, I was tall and “sporty”, lacking the graces to be “girly” and I knew they all gossiped behind my back if I was a dyke or not. Later I tried being a lesbian but I was crap at it. Jake was quiet and shy, but behind his eyes burnt a creative soul. We weren’t really boyfriend/girlfriend, what there was of a physical side to us soon faded, but it gave us a good cover. I soon lost touch with him when he left at the end of our first year.