They’d met the previous afternoon. After an unsuccessful hour cruising a twenty-something, muscle-bound god with a conch-shell tattoo where others might have an appendix scar, Eurig had given up the chase. Lying on his towel in a shallow hollow, his head cupped in his hands, he mused on what might have been. Dylan, attracted by the genial look of an older man, sat on a low dune, partly concealed by a tussock of marram grass, and watched Eurig for a good ten minutes; he took in the leanness of his body, the greying at his temples and the black thickets in his armpits and groin. He feasted on the fantasy of their bodies coming together… but the pips from his watch broke through the reverie and signalled that his time in the dunes was up for another day. Eurig smiled at the man whose watch alarm had drawn his attention, and though he was unable to make out his features in the bright sunlight, he beckoned him over. They shook hands rather formally, Eurig thought, given that so many in the dunes were considerably more intimate on an altogether anonymous basis. They introduced one another, and as Dylan explained that he had to get back to the hospital for an evening clinic, Eurig lost his head in the boy’s searching gaze.

Eurig

Still captured in the virid depths of Dylan’s eyes, you lie back into the warm, soft sand beneath your towel and enjoy the random collision of thoughts. His tanned skin inviting your touch… the affectionate smile that drew you in… the unfashionably long hair, bleached by the sun and the sea’s saltiness. And from the Mabinogi tales of your childhood comes the fabled Dylan Ail Môr, and Dylan becomes your child of the sea, within whose beauty you swim – until the shadow cast by a stranger dims your visions. The conch-shell tattooed boy stands over you, offering himself. Recognising that Dylan has stirred your emotions, you send the boy, by now quite confused and disappointed, on his way – and you dive back deeply into Dylan’s sea.

Dylan