She had decided that a letter would be the easiest way to end it.

She would slip it in his pocket at the end of a date, once she had worked up the courage. She would call him, tell him to check his jacket and then catch the closest shuttle aboveground.

She wrote it at two in the morning; the only time that her mind was really clear enough to think.

It wasn't much of a letter and she wasn't one for poetry, but reading through it, it sounded almost rhythmical. Free verse, hardly poetry at all, Artemis might say.

All that she had wanted to say was that now wasn't the time for her to be in a relationship. She had written more, more than she needed to, but still, it said nothing meaningful at all.

She read it over again, and added at the bottom something that commonly followed letters: a postscript. She folded it up and stuffed it into an envelope before she could have second thoughts.

The postscript read simply, I can't love you, not while I'm infatuated with a Mud Boy.