The Sixty-Second Heartbeat

The Sixty-Second Heartbeat

Qiu Yingying suffers from a rare condition called "paroxysmal tachycardia." Whenever her heart rate exceeds 120 beats per minute, she briefly loses consciousness. At eighteen, she lives like a delicate crystal doll. She can't run, jump, or experience intense joy or sorrow. Her youth is a pale sheet of paper soaked in disinfectant.

Then she meets Li Canrong from the class next door, the basketball team captain who shines like the sun on the court and can make the whole crowd scream. Every dunk he makes sets off the piercing alarm on her heart-rate monitor.

She is the most timid spectator of a forbidden dance, while he is a stubborn dance partner who wants only to take her hand.

"If being near me makes you lose control," the boy says, his burning palm pressed against the back of her cold hand as he places it on his chest, "then take my heart and make it yours. Listen. It's beating for you."

A treatment called love begins. And everyone wants to know: When the school's most dangerous "heart-throb" insists on becoming her one and only "pacemaker," is there any solution to this problem?