We study the Liouville heat kernel (in the $L^2$ phase) associated with a class of logarithmically correlated Gaussian fields on the two dimensional torus. We show that for each $\varepsilon>0$ there exists such a field, whose covariance is a bounded perturbation of that of the two dimensional Gaussian free field, and such that the associated Liouville heat kernel satisfies the short time estimates, $$ \exp \left( - t^{ - \frac 1 { 1 + \frac 1 2 γ^2 } - \varepsilon } \right) \le p_t^γ(x, y) \le \exp \left( - t^{- \frac 1 { 1 + \frac 1 2 γ^2 } + \varepsilon } \right) , $$ for $γ<1/2$. In particular, these are different from predictions, due to Watabiki, concerning the Liouville heat kernel for the two dimensional Gaussian free field.