The Tamesis
He wanted to sail to Greece. He booked a yacht until he could find enough people to join us. He worked his way down our list of friends, getting closer and closer to the trip. If he doesn’t fill the other beds, we’re facing a financially devastating holiday season.
One day, I received a text message from him: Would I mind if Duncan* came with us?
I remember my stomach tightening. I took a deep breath before answering, knowing he was stressed and this was a quick fix. I said of course.
Duncan was a friend of his from Oxford, where all three of us went, but he was also my first love. I haven’t seen him for ten years.
I met Duncan in 2014 during the second week of my freshman year in college. It’s the kind of romantic entanglement you get into when you’re 18, shy, and don’t know how to communicate properly. He’s a British boy who attended an all-boys boarding school at a very young age and doesn’t really know how to talk to women, let alone talk about his feelings. I’m from Berkeley, California, via Paris, France—both places prone to free expression of emotion—but I found his awkwardness endearing.
Duncan and I were matched in terms of experience (i.e. neither of us had much), and that year we learned how to have sex together. It was tender and I have very fond memories of that time. we say I love you But I never thought we were a couple. Neither of us was convinced, and the whole thing was left in an endless limbo. We graduated, our paths no longer crossed, and he sank into nostalgia.
Yet here he is again, aboard the 38-foot yacht that will leave Skopelos’ Lutchi Marina in the first week of August, a more articulate man than I remembered. And here I was, wearing a red bathing suit (neckline all the way to my belly button, slant back, ample side bust) that I bought specifically to please the man I loved, and was being ignored.
That trip was a disaster in many ways. One time I was changing shirtless in the cabin and my partner said in a pantomime reproachful tone, “Put them away.” Or there were a few times when he was working on some rigging or something and didn’t hear me, or maybe ignored me. Meanwhile, Duncan is lounging around, wearing baggy linen clothes and looking like an ad for a watch, all the sweet desires of a decade ago returning with a vengeance. The absurdity of it all struck me: How could I have entered this enclosed space when all of us were half-clothed? The worst part was that day my partner and I were alone on the boat and I suggested we have sex. without looking up from his book (How spies think By David Ormand) He said “no.”
I went to the beach and tried not to cry. My repressed things were churning inside me: how rarely he said “I love you,” how few compliments he gave me, how incredibly unaffected I felt, even now, when we were on vacation, supposedly relaxed and happy, floating on the Aegean Sea. For a while, my doubts about our relationship were like warning lights flashing in my peripheral vision: I was missing touch, casual deep kisses, compliments, the occasional sexy text. I felt respected by him and I knew he desired me, but it was starting to feel like I was holding on to a belief with too little evidence. At only 26 years old, I felt I had been deceived.
