That intrigued me for sure. So Dylan was on the swim team but didn’t fit into their decidedly laddish culture, and spent his free time outdoors. I wondered if he swam outdoors in winter – we’d had a bad January so far, full of snow and sleet and high-speed winds. I tried to imagine him swimming in such conditions then immediately regretted it.
Thinking about Dylan dripping wet and naked (though if he swam outdoors a lot he would probably wear a wet suit, which was somehow even worse for my brain) just as the young man in question walked towards me was a terrible decision…especially when he tilted his head to look me straight in the eye, freezing me to the spot.
My initial observation had been right: I really liked his face. There was a kind of innocence there – a softness – that appealed to my very core. It was odd because beneath the messy hair there was absolutely nothing ‘soft’ about the defined lines of his jaw and the sharpness of his cheekbones that gave off the distinct impression Dylan didn’t eat enough.
For a moment I thought his eyes were blue, but when Dylan was but two feet away I realised they were grey. Truly, genuinely grey, like a troubled sea or a stormy sky.
I couldn’t look away.
Dylan was so close to me that for one wild, insane moment I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead, he simply stood there until I noticed I was blocking the way to his seat. Recoiling as if I’d been slapped I performed a one-eighty-degree spin and headed into the office at the back of the lab, pretending that it had always been my intended destination.
As soon as I reached the office I closed the door and leaned against it, holding a hand over my racing heart as if I had to force it back inside my ribcage. I’d never felt like this before. Not when faced with any boy I’d liked at any age over my twenty-five years of existence. Not even when I was obsessed with Legolas in Lord of the Rings as a teenager and convinced myself I would somehow, some day, marry him.
If somebody told me this was love at first sight I’d have believed them. It felt stronger than lust. Stronger than desire. Stronger than any emotion I’d felt for anyone at any point in my entire life.
I’d completely fallen for a stranger, and he hadn’t spoken a single word.
Chapter Two
I’d lived with Louisa ever since the second year of our undergraduate degree. We had always been of the opinion that we’d eventually get our own places once one or both of us completed our postgraduate studies – or found a long-term boyfriend. Luckily the two of us were equally as useless at keeping boys around, but neither of us cared all that much. We had each other, and late-night TV, and vodka, and that was fine.
I really hadn’t relished the thought of living alone.
When Louisa finished her Masters degree and decided to embark on an impulse gap year to Australia the second she graduated I truly believed that was the beginning of the end of our happy, easy living situation. I’d be left unable to pay all the rent with no flat mate to share the financial burden – not that I wanted to live with anyone new, anyway – or I’d have to move into a smaller, more affordable one-bedroom flat – which I perhaps wanted to do even less. I loved our riverside flat. To move away from the water would be torture.
But Louisa’s parents were wealthy, and she didn’t want to give up her bedroom in our precious home any more than I wanted her to. It had an en suite, after all, and was ten minutes from a McDonald’s. This was very important to Louisa – and me, too, if I was being honest. And so it was that her parents agreed to pay her share of the rent and bills whilst Louisa was off gallivanting, leaving me blissfully, financially secure.
For the rest of summer I discovered the perks of living by myself. Walking around naked after a shower. Having all the space in the fridge to store my food with nobody around to steal my Babybels. Playing whatever music I wanted out loud whenever I wanted to hear it.
Going days on end without talking to a single soul.
But now that the second semester of the university calendar had begun, which marked six months since Louisa left for Australia, I was forced to admit that video messaging my best friend was a poor substitute for real, physical, human interaction.
I was alone, and it sucked.
Perhaps that was why I was so drawn to Dylan from the moment I saw him. After the students had gone home that fateful day I’d immediately checked the attendance sheet to learn his full name: Dylan Lir Murphy. Lir. I’d never heard the name ‘Lir’ before but upon checking it out I saw that it was Irish. His whole name was pretty damn Irish, to be honest.
I tried to imagine him speaking with an Irish accent but came up blank. I’d never heard him talk, after all. I had no clue what kind of voice he’d have. Was it low and lilting? Gravelly and masculine? Or incredibly soft and unsure? I decided I liked all three of those options.
But now that Georgia had returned to inefficiently watch her section of the lab I had no good reason to wander between her benches in the hope of hearing Dylan talk. After several days of sneaky observation it was clear he hardly spoke a word, anyway.
The students all left fairly swiftly as soon as their work was done, and because Dylan was efficient with their combined lab work he and Max often left early. Which explains why Max is lab partners with someone who doesn’t seem to interact with him all that much, I’d thought on more than one occasion. I supposed that wasn’t fair; for all I knew, Dylan talked non-stop to Max outside of classes.
But when I’d looked Dylan up on social media all I’d been able to find was a perfunctory Facebook page which he hadn’t updated in four years. There were no tagged photos of him, and his friend list was very, very small. Max had added me as a friend on Facebook immediately after I’d called him a sheep shagger, so that evening I’d browsed through the profiles of people he was friends with whose faces I recognised from the lab until I knew most of their names by heart.
None of them were friends with Dylan, not even Max.
Using social media to learn more about him was out.
The problem with Dylan leaving early from the lab was that I never had an opportunity to ‘casually’ talk to him at the end of the day, and I didn’t have the guts to go straight up to his bench just to talk to him during lab hours. I couldn’t do that even if I’d had the nerve to, anyway – I was working.
Which left me one option: I had to find another way to see him when I wasn’t teaching.
During my undergraduate degree I had a membership for the university gym that I’d used fairly frequently. Louisa and I would go for a twenty-minute run, spend some time stretching on yoga mats and then, sometimes, I would go on for a swim whilst Louisa left to have a pint in Glasgow University Union with some friends.
That all stopped after I began my PhD and Louisa her Masters. The best and most accurate excuse I could give for it was pure and simple laziness. We could argue for hours about how we were too busy to go to the gym, or too tired, or too stressed, but Louisa and I both knew that, if we’d really wanted to go, then we’d have gone. Still, we renewed our memberships every year in the vain hope that we would, indeed, return to exercise in the gym some day.
Now that day had come. For me, at least.
I felt self-conscious going to the gym for the first time in months, though it wasn’t as if I was in bad shape – or, at least, I didn't look like I was. The only exercise I got was walking to and from university, and running about the teaching labs trying to help everyone at once. This kind of low level of fitness had gotten me through three years of my PhD, but I could in no way survive a five-minute run or swim more than a dozen lengths of the pool now. And that was where I was ultimately headed as I entered the gym: the swimming pool. I knew fine well why I was there, and it had nothing to do with exercise.
I hoped to catch Dylan training.
“So disappointing,” I mumbled, as I finally called it quits after twenty agonisingly slow lengths of the pool. For Dylan was nowhere to be seen; I’d been naïve to think I’d ‘run into him’ on my first try. A cursory survey of the universe spor
ts website told me when the swim team practised, and I was relieved to see part of the pool was still open to the public during those times. It meant I could be there at the same time as Dylan without appearing creepy.
And yet he was not there.
Neither was he at practice the second or third time I went swimming, either.
The molecular methods lab ran three times a week – all of Monday, all of Tuesday, and half of Wednesday – during which time I saw Dylan but did not speak to him. For the next three weeks I wondered if he was watching me whenever I wasn’t watching him, and sometimes indulged in the delusion that he was. But I knew that, in all likelihood, he barely even knew I existed.
Sometimes I felt more confident in myself. I’d think, This is the day. This is the afternoon you say hi to him. But by the time it came around to acting on such thoughts my nerves pulled me back, the anxious beating of my heart making it so difficult to breathe I felt sure I was on the verge of a panic attack.
So I spent three to four days at the gym, instead, sometimes alternating swimming with running because I couldn’t face going to the pool and, once more, not seeing Dylan there.
Then – after the second-from-last lab – something changed.
Dylan was at practice.
He was so beautiful I could have cried.
When I was in primary school I had swimming lessons. It was a natural thing for any parent to put their child through when they lived beside the sea, so almost every kid from school learned to swim at the same time as I did. I continued swimming throughout high school for passive exercise and fun; I never even imagined swimming competitively. Even when I took swimming seriously as a ten-year-old I hadn’t been all that fast, though I did have the stamina for it, at least.
Now, having taken it back up at twenty-five years old, I was not in the least bit surprised to discover that my stamina had long since disappeared. But after three weeks of swimming constantly that stamina was finally beginning to recover. I was almost pleased with my progress…right until the moment I saw Dylan swim.
It was like watching the Olympics in real life. The rest of the swim team just could not compare. I realised, then, why Dylan was allowed to skip practice so frequently. He was miles better than the rest of them.
He cut through the water like a knife through hot butter even when he was swimming the butterfly (a stroke I’d always deemed inelegant). I’d never been the type to be attracted to someone purely for their body but watching Dylan in action changed that completely. It was a work of art, the way his tendons and muscles operated beneath his skin. He was lithe and he was efficient and he was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
Eventually I realised I couldn’t continue watching him from the edge of the pool – not unless I wanted to be noticed – so I quit my own swimming early, got dressed as quickly as I could, and went up to the viewing room above the pool simply so I could watch Dylan in action. I felt like a fan girl.
I didn’t care.
A crazy part of me hoped Dylan would notice me watching; a far larger and more sensible part of me absolutely wanted the opposite. Despite this, when it transpired that Dylan hadn’t looked in my direction even once it made me unbelievably depressed, though I knew I’d done less than nothing to warrant his attention. Unless he’d realised I was stalking him and wanted to know why, of course, which was a conversation I didn’t want to have. Ever.
When I got back from the pool that day I saw I had a message from my mum asking me to cat-sit Tom whilst they went on holiday some time in March. I hadn’t been home since Christmas, and I missed my blue-eyed, dove-grey pet dearly, so I immediately told her I would.
I also had a few missed calls from Louisa. I’d missed quite a lot of her calls over the last three weeks, which I knew was because all I did with my time was go to the gym and crash out, exhausted, afterwards. This made me feel awful; my best friend clearly missed me as much as I’d been missing her, yet all I’d done lately was ignore her. And so, after chucking my swimming gear in the washing machine and going for a shower, I pulled out my phone and video called her.
She rejected the call immediately.
My heart was going a mile a minute at her knee-jerk reaction – was she angry with me? Was she done with me? But all my fears were assuaged when Louisa promptly called me back with no video.
“Is something wrong?” I asked as soon as I answered the call.
Louisa laughed at my concerns, just as exuberant and enthusiastic as I’d always known her to be. “God, no, Grace!” she exclaimed. There was a hell of a lot of static in the call as well as so much background noise it threatened to swallow Louisa's voice completely. “It's just – I don't have any good signal here so I can’t connect to video – can you hear me?”
I nodded, then remembered I was on the phone and Louisa couldn’t see me. “Yes, just barely,” I replied. “Where are you right now?” I glanced at the clock hanging above the television and saw that it was four in the afternoon. Which meant it was very, very early morning for Louisa. “You out right now?”
An infectious laugh again. “At a festival, Gracie! I’ve tried to call you like a million times to let you know about it. It's – god, T in the Park is nothing compared to this. This is a million times better.”
Louisa had gone to T in the Park several times before we met each other. I’d only been once alongside her. I loved the music, and the atmosphere was admittedly electric. But I had never been one for getting into the muck and mess of things the way she had. It’s not that I wasn’t an outdoor person because I considered myself very much to be one. I loved going sailing with my dad, spending weekends away on the boat to fish and swim out on the open sea.
But camping in the middle of a muddy field during a torrential downpour…well, let's just say that was past my limit.
“That wouldn't have anything to do with the sunshine, would it?” I asked Louisa. “I imagine it being hot changes things a bit.”
“It's not just the weather, Gracie!” she replied. “It's – look, my signal is shit but I’ll send you photos and videos when I can, okay? I was really just calling to see how you are. No judgement but you’re definitely avoiding my calls.”
“I haven’t been avoiding them deliberately,” I said, which was the truth. “I've just been exercising a lot lately. Trying to get into shape.” That last bit was a lie, though in stalking Dylan I was in better shape than I’d been in years.
Louisa burst out laughing once more. “I thought our days of going to the gym were long since over. What gave you the kick in the arse to change things now?”
“Let's just say my impending thesis is the procrastination I needed to get me exercising.”
But Louisa knew me too well. Even over the unstable connection she knew what I was saying was a load of bull shit. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re – distracted. In your messages to me. It seems like your head’s somewhere else. There’s a boy, isn’t there? It better not be a new best friend, Grace. I’ll never forgive you if you –”
“No, new best friend,” I cut in, giggling at the notion. “I swear. But…yeah, I admit it. There’s someone I’m interested in.”
Very interested in.
There was a moment or two of silence from Louisa, aside from the static and roar of the crowd behind her. And then: “Just be careful. Don't get too obsessed.”
She said it jokingly but I knew better. We were super close; she knew exactly how I could get fixated on something or someone, which was why I was careful never to get that attached to anyone other than her. I wasn't this close to anyone but Louisa, because she understood me. She was my best friend and I loved her. We were all the two of us ever really needed back when we lived together.
Sure, I had plenty of friends for social occasions – all met through Louisa, who was so extroverted that it scared me on occasion. I had a great time with all of them. She’d have never introduced me to someone I wouldn’t like, after all. But, now that she was gone, I reali
sed I hadn't seen any of those friends for months. It wasn’t that they’d stopped inviting me to things; I simply hadn't responded to their messages.
I’m such a terrible person, I thought, sickened by my own self-absorbed nature. I decided I should at least try to meet up with them once or twice over the next few weeks. I couldn't revolve my life around stalking a boy, even though that's currently all my life was.
“You still there, Grace?” Louisa asked, breaking me from my reverie. There was a yell from behind her – someone screaming her name. “Look, this festival will be over tomorrow and then I'll be back at the hostel. Catch-up video chat then?”
I nodded again. “Yes, absolutely. Love you.”
“I love you too, Gracie. Speak soon!”
When Louisa hung up the call I threw myself onto the couch. I hadn’t realised how much I’d needed to hear her voice, even if it was over a terrible connection. Now the call was over, well…I felt alone.
I considered calling my parents but the thought of doing so only made me feel worse. Was my life really so sad that the only people I could call on a Friday night were Louisa and my mum and dad? There was always Louisa’s brother, Josh, whom I was fairly close to, but he was probably working a double shift in the children's ward and also had a girlfriend. It wouldn't be right for me to call him at the weekend just to talk.
A heavy sigh escaped my lips, and I glanced at my laptop sitting innocuously on the coffee table. I’d looked for Dylan on social media before. He was a ghost; it was pointless to search again. Yet there was a twitch in my hand urging me to do so anyway. Stop this, I thought. Do something else. Write your thesis. Watch Netflix. Do literally anything else.
I grabbed my laptop.
Chapter Three
The final day of the molecular methods lab ended the way most teaching labs did: students impatient to leave for a pint on Ashton Lane or in one of the unions. For this lab that held particularly true, as most of the students couldn’t wait to see the back of their weeks of molecular genetics training.
The Boy from the Sea Page 2