Trapped on a Boat With the Ex I Still Had Feelings For

He wanted to go sailing in Greece. He booked a yacht before he’d found enough people to join us on it. He worked his way down the list of our friends, and the trip loomed closer and closer. We were facing a financially ruinous holiday if he didn’t fill the other berths.

One day, I got a text from him: Did I mind if Duncan* came with us?

I remember my stomach tightening. I took a deep breath before I answered, knowing he was stressed and that this was a quick solution. I said of course, that would be fine.

Duncan was a friend of his from Oxford, which all three of us had attended, but also my first love. I hadn’t seen him in a decade.

I met Duncan in the second week of my first year at college, in 2014. It was the kind of romantic entanglement you get into when you’re 18 and shy, and don’t know how to communicate properly. He was an English boy who’d gone to an all boys’ boarding school very young, and didn’t really know how to talk to women, let alone about his own feelings. I’d come from Berkeley, California, via Paris, France—both places where emotions tend to be expressed freely—but I found his awkwardness endearing.

Duncan and I were well-matched in terms of experience (i.e., neither of us had much), and that year, together, we learnt how to have sex. It was tender, and I have overwhelmingly fond memories of that time. We said I love you but never thought of ourselves as a couple. We were both noncommittal, and the whole thing wandered to an open-ended non-conclusion. We graduated, our paths no longer crossed, and he receded into nostalgia.

And yet here he was again, on this 38-foot yacht, set to depart the marina of Loutraki on the island of Skopelos in the first week of August, having blossomed into a much more articulate person than I remembered. And here I was, in a red swimsuit (neckline to my navel, crossbody back, sideboob aplenty), which I’d bought specially to please the man I loved, being ignored.

That trip was a disaster in several ways. There was the time I was topless in our cabin, getting changed, and my partner said, in a tone of pantomime reproach, “Put those away.” Or the several instances in which he didn’t hear me, or possibly ignored me, while he was dealing with some piece of rigging or other. Meanwhile, Duncan was lounging around looking like an ad for a watch, all loose-fit linen, and all that sweet desire from ten years prior came roaring back. The ridiculousness of it all struck me: How had I ended up in this enclosed space with all of us partially clothed? Worst of all was the 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 Omand) he said “No.”

I went to the beach and tried not to cry. Things I’d suppressed churned inside me: How infrequently he said “I love you,” how few compliments he gave me, how unbelievably untouched I felt, even now, when we were on holiday, supposedly relaxed and happy and floating on the Aegean. For a while, my doubts about our relationship had been like a panel of warning lights blinking in my peripheral vision: I was missing touch, deep kisses delivered at random, compliments, the occasional sexy text. I felt respected by him, and I knew he desired me, but it had started to feel like holding onto faith, with too little proof. At just 26, I felt cheated.