But I did think of his family, actually I thought of nothing else. I wondered if he would leave his family, I wondered 84about it as I washed up the buttercup-patterned plates, as I walked to the bathing spot with Marthe, as I read old weeklies and replied to work emails I shouldn’t have replied to on holiday, I thought about him and wondered if he would leave his partner, I couldn’t assume so, obviously not, men never leave, but still, it happened occasionally, some did, some people fell in love with someone else. In the evenings I would lie where I’m lying now, maybe my skin had been warmed by the sun, I don’t recall it being particularly warm that summer, and I wondered what next summer would be like, wondered if he’d have left her by then, if he’d come here with me. I was a little drunk after dinner and I texted him about sex. I sometimes got the impression that he enjoyed our exchange of messages more than the act itself; when I was back at home in the city, he rarely had time to meet me. I didn’t want to think that way, I’d been on the receiving end of so much crap, I wanted to believe this was the real deal. I described taking him in my mouth, as deep as I could, looking him straight in the eye, and he replied with a picture of his penis, I felt the urge to masturbate before replying, ‘Wow,’ I wrote, I was at tipping point and he had stopped replying altogether, I waited for a bit, thrashed around in bed and stared and stared at the little blue bubbles on-screen, didn’t want to come before he had texted me back. ‘I’m going to come soon,’ he eventually wrote, ‘thinking about fucking you hard’, ‘Me too,’ I wrote, ‘want to talk?’ We’d done it a few times when he was alone, called each other up and listened in before bidding each other goodnight, voices hushed, giggly, as if we were lying 85side by side. But now he was taking forever, and then he wrote ‘too late’ followed by a smiley face, a fucking smiley face, and that was that. I remember masturbating until I came, fast and furious, still trying to maintain some sort of flirtatious tone when I replied to him afterwards, something about how we’d have to get together and do things properly. ‘Definitely,’ he replied, followed by a kiss emoji, and that alone was sufficient to reinflate my sense of hope, and I lay there, impassioned and tossing and turning and unable to sleep until long into the night. When I got back to the city, I couldn’t get in touch with him initially. After a while I received a message from him saying that things had gone too far, it had been nice, he’d said, exciting, that was the word he’d used, exciting, but he wasn’t cut out for this kind of double life in the long run, and he wished me well and good luck with everything. ‘Thanks,’ I wrote back, ‘no stress, good luck to you too’, smiley face.