By Tessa Permar

Feet browned like an expensive wood stain, with callouses softened by sand, I watched him alight on the rim of the vessel like a spring bug on a leaf.  There are two of them, old friends.  One brought me roses last week.  The other I’ve been sleeping with since July.  It’s now late August and the boys are taking me sailing.  It’s not what you think.

Sliding through the harbor takes ages.  We nearly glide into several yachts, their owner’s necks red with top shelf drink. The sun pools on our white sails and tells the breeze where to touch. I watch them both.  One with his reflexes, so swift he’s approaching flight.  The other, the one who’s bed I shared, simply lifts it up and puts it down.  It being whatever obstacle is in his way.  I like watching this brute display of force.  It makes me laugh because there is a softness, a gentleness so deeply hidden, that creeps out in the night and asks me how I am and do I like it.  On the boat, with another man here, that softness exists only in my memory of him, and perhaps, when I let myself think about it, what might happen later tonight.

I’m in pink, a color I like because it is also the color of my summer skin.  I don’t like making choices about what to wear – I lose myself entirely in trying to send the right codes.  But when I’m already this close to naked, the textured two piece pinching my hips might as well be pink.  The swift one asks if I want to hold the rudder now that we are out of the harbor, away from other people.  He looks at me through his salty curls.  He becomes the teacher, an air of equanimity suddenly in his voice, as if there were thirty other pupils instead of just me.  This too is a form of preening. He’s aware that his experience, his mastery, is well-known in the harbor.  He has a gift, everyone says.  He somehow shares a language with the boats.  There is something in the way he dances up and down the length of this tiny sailboat, like Peter Pan taunting his shadow, and he’ll never fall. 

While the one flits under the bough, behind my back, below deck and back again with sparkling drinks, the other just sits.  He looks far, and gives nothing away.  I may not even exist.  I’ve crossed his eye line intentionally three times now and only once did he blink in my direction – as if I were an unwanted fish.  But this is part of it too.  It’s a game and the game is, who is the better actor.  Who can give nothing away.

I’m terrible at this game.  I’m giving it all away, to both of them.  I lift my eyelashes until they touch the bones of my face, giving both men a look of such exhilaration and awe.  I am nothing if not a generous guest.