Does feigned indifference balance out the sharpness of desire? 

He knows that my favourite colour is touch and my love language is blue. I’m trying but it’s 36 degrees and the heat leaves me weak to charisma. His French is bad but at least he tries. It's Mabel’s 26th birthday and the eight of us that could save the coin and get time off work are celebrating in Bordeaux. A chateau on a vineyard, rented out by a sweet older couple. Spacious rooms, walled in a concoction of light-dark woods, kitsch ceramics and pastels. The soaps in the bathrooms— somewhat phallic shaped and fastened above the sink on a metal bar. We laugh at having to wank them off to wash our hands. 

I feel content playing in the sun, chasing the others around the pool with nothing better to do. Something healing my inner child as well as the teenager who dreamt of having friends like mine and summers wasted in the south of France. A need to immortalise the warmth on my skin, my sun drenched hair and the sound of my friends' laughter. Only one nagging twinge of desire to ignore. A recurring feeling; I know what he is thinking. 

Locked eyes staring at the sheep's brain in the supermarket, broke the trance and walked in time to the camembert. I need a veil between my face and his. Made an agreement to share supplies for negronis with a joke that we need something stronger than cheap white wine. It's ‘do nothing hours’ the time between lunch and dinner. 3.32pm, all sprawled out. Lucy and Nate lay on the lawn counting ants shuffling across the concrete sidewalk, Zena and Luke napping upstairs the fan humming full force, Lillith and Brooklyn playing chess in a pocket of shade while Noah reads. A small while longer and then I'll make a negroni because Mabel said that chaos is calling.

Fuck. 

Light streaming through the window, a pounding in my skull. My eyes burn. One second of calm—that’s all. A stomach dropping sensation and a crashing realisation. Touches and stolen spit bent over a kitchen bench. My head hurts. I should know better; I do not. If I insist on being self-destructive, can’t I at least have an interesting vice? I need water. If I ignore the dryness in my mouth, can I trace back every misstep and pinpoint a moment of destruction? Will it make a difference?

Maybe that first coffee along Angel canal the year earlier? I was visiting London. It was 28 degrees. You bought my coffee.

“It’s fine, it's less for me because I'm earning pounds”. 

A wink. 

A long walk and some awkward pacing because you are so much taller than me. No contacts in so I keep taking my prescription sunglasses on and off my head in an attempt to read your facial expressions. Sat here for hours “catching up”. We talk about your girlfriend who you adore, even when your eyes betray you with a lingering. You want to know about me though and my life in Melbourne, how's my relationship going? You manage a half-hearted pout when I mention it’s over and I'm single again. A smirk. We talk some more. About the summer. Our plans. We talk about desire, death and how much you adore London. It’s home you say.

Months later, a second pin on my way back from Malta. I’ve been travelling and you’ve been self-destructing. Single after 7 years. Wandering eye turned wandering touch. Our friends are hurt and people feel torn. Your ex handling herself with grace, and you making things worse. I text, “I’ve heard what’s been going on, I hope you’re okay”. You reply, “I’m not doing great, what are you doing tonight?” 

I explain I'm on the Stansted express, you offer to cook me dinner at the apartment that you’re minding for friends. I tell you that I’d be boring company, exhausted from travelling. You push. Tell me that you don’t want to be alone and that it’d just be some wine and dinner. Defenceless in the face of charm, I agree. 

Promise my friend that nothing will happen, look her dead in the eye while I nod. 

A third pin, smoking vogues out the window in a house you don’t live in, straddling your lap on a couch you don’t own. Fucking in a bed that’s not yours. Morning breath with an offer for coffee—a promise to stay in contact. 

“I’ll see you when I’m looking at you” as a hardwood door shuts. 

I fly home two days later.

Another pin with a little prick. A secret. “It wouldn't look good to others so soon”. A message every hour, a call every day and the constant hum of my phone making up for the 16,900 km separating us. Dates on Wednesdays—your mornings, my nights. We talk. About everything, an extra pin for the future faking, another for the way you look at me —big blue eyes that hold the world and keep me weak. 

A message: “I’m fucked”.

Another: “you have entered my psyche”.

Another: “I can’t stop thinking about you”.

One more: “I miss you so much”. 

Phone sex and more phone sex. Pictures—pussy, cock and tits. Videos of cum and sometimes spit because we share a freakness at least. 

A block, an unblock, a promise, "boundaries, boundaries, boundaries”. A splitting and a moving on, not without another pin—maybe one day. “If it was going to be anyone it would be you”.

A dog sitting with a bone between my jaws, something I just can’t drop. 

There was someone. It wasn't me. New partners. She seems cool—an artist with brown doe eyes. A reconnection, an agreement on “friends”. An offer to help me move to London. Boxes stored in your apartment. A friendship built under false precedent and actions that suggest one thing but meant another, a pin for each of my favourite novels I shipped to your address. 

A year later, 48 hours of travel and a pint at the Richard Steele. An awkward hug and glances that say let’s not be weird with side glances that say it’s impossible to ignore the time between the hardwood door closing and now. More pints and a little something else to fight the jet lag, gazes held for longer. I want to let it go, I swear I do. We leave for Bordeaux in two weeks, but your girlfriend isn’t coming. 

Fuck. 

More pounding in my skull and a St-Germain on an empty stomach to quench the thirst of an unrequited love. A tangy sweetness to help me swallow the consequences of negronis and sunshine. A pin for saying you missed me with your cock inside my mouth and a stab for telling me you love her afterwards. Rejection, jealousy and mounds of shame. Ill with regret. Caught a bus to Biarritz and spent days crying inside an Airbnb, staring numbly at a TV playing French news I don’t understand. Lorelai Gilmore was right, he really was Lindsay's Dean. 

He told her everything, especially that he loves her. 

My friend said it’s a beautiful thing to feel this much hurt, that means it meant something. I don’t have the heart to tell her I don’t think it meant anything at all.

I often imagined I would thrive being amoral in the south of France—an Anaïs Nin type with a penchant for hedonism. But I love too freely. Someone should tell you charisma without care is a dangerous thing and it's not self-destruction if you leave everyone bleeding. 

My boxes stay neatly stacked in your flat. As it turns out the embarrassment I assumed belonged to the girlfriend, belongs equally to the other as both are made fool by man. Are you willingly annihilated if the wolf is in sheep’s skin or just devoured?

If I’m a vortex what does that make you?

I’m sorry and I’m hurt.

I need another St-Germain. I can’t drink negronis anymore.

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