The Long Way Home Read online

  I want that back.

  Huddling together, keeping each warm through the long dark nights.

  God, I miss you.

  * * *

  C.

  [Email from Christian to Ava; 11:48 a.m.]

  * * *

  I’m en route down to Rio now and I found myself thinking about you, as I so frequently do. Thinking about your last email some more. The beginning of it, most of all.

  That first day we met, I’d had my eye on you for a few days, actually. I first saw you three days earlier, on the beach with a few other girls. You were wearing a blue bikini, sunbathing. I was surfing by myself. That bikini, or more accurately, your body in that bikini, god, it was like I’d been struck by lightning. I saw you as I carried my board down to the water. You were just laying there, big sunglasses on your face, arms at your sides, and your body was…god, so perfect. Your breasts were just the right size, big and juicy enough to sway to either side and almost spill out of the top, and your waist was trim and your abs taut, and your hips were a perfect bell curve. Your bikini bottom could barely stretch around your hips, and the tiny triangle of indigo fabric was being devoured by your pussy. Yes, I stopped, and I stared. I stared helplessly, probably creepily. I could see the outlines of your nether lips—you’re probably cringing as you read that phrase—and my mouth watered. I had to go run into the water then, or risk embarrassing myself at the beach with a monster hard-on in my swim trunks.

  I tried to forget you, tried to get you out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I surfed, and you slept and sunned on the beach, and when I finally came in from surfing, you were gone. I was forlorn. I’d been sure it was going to be love. But alas, you’d left. Imagine my pleased shock, then, when I saw you crossing the quad at my university. I was sure all over again, then, that it would be love. You were just as gorgeous as I’d remembered, even wearing more clothing. And god, I wanted you. I walked over to say hi and ask you out, and inside my head, I was thinking about how badly I wanted to get you naked and do all kinds of dirty things to you. If I’d known how bad you wanted me too, I very well might have asked you to get on your knees and suck me off right there and then. I thought about that, actually. We went out later that day, and it was a totally average first date. Wonderful, and amazing, and fun, and I fell for you even more, and we went our separate ways afterward without even a kiss.

  But I went back to my room and I imagined you in that blue bikini, and then I imagined myself tugging the string of the halter top and watching it fall to the floor of my room, and your luscious tits fell out and I pictured myself sucking on your nipples. In my imagination, I should point out, your nipples were nowhere near as plump and your areolae nowhere near as dark as they are in reality, and that was a pleasant surprise indeed. I jerked off twice thinking about you, after our first date.

  I jerked off thinking about you every single day, and sometimes more than once in a day.

  And then, after six dates, you finally let me kiss you on the beach. On the seventh date, we waited until we got back to your room, and you locked the door and my heart went crazy, beating in my chest so hard I thought I was having a heart attack. And then you kissed me with such aggression that I was shocked by it, by the fervor and suddenness of it. Within seconds of that kiss, you had my shirt off, and you wouldn’t let me at your clothes, wouldn’t let me undress you. You were too eager, too voracious. And then…oh god, and then you shoved off my shorts and yanked down those stupid boxers, and you took hold of me, and I almost came right then. For real, I nearly did.

  I’m hard as a rock, right now, thinking about this.

  Jesus, what a mess. I’m thinking about you naked, touching me, and I’m remembering how your hand feels, and your body. I’m remembering the way your breasts taste and the sound of your moans as I make you come. I’m remembering all this, and I’m jerking off. Typing one-handed, one-finger hunt-and-peck style, imagining you. Us. The away things were.

  And I’ve made a horrible mess all over myself.

  God, Ava. How did we get to this place?

  * * *

  C.

  18

  [Email from Ava to Christian; August 21, 2015]

  I don’t know if I can do this, if I can survive the sexting-emails, whatever you want to call them. I fucking miss you, and I’m so angry at you, and I can’t sleep at night and I can’t stop drinking and I fucking hate you as much as I fucking love you.

  How did we get here?

  I don’t know. I wish I knew. I have no answers.

  If you were here, I’m not sure what I would do. Beat you senseless, or fuck you stupid, or both.

  I’m just…

  SO ANGRY.

  Not just at you, though. At life. At God, or Fate, or Destiny, or who the fuck ever or what the fuck ever is in charge in this life, if anyone, if anything. I’m just angry and I don’t know how to cope. I miss you, and I don’t want to. I understand why you left, and I don’t want to understand. I want to wallow in my rage, but I get it.

  I still wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes, and reach for you. Or listen for Henry. But then I remember that I’m utterly and completely alone.

  Except for Darcy, of course, who now sleeps where you used to.

  Everything is a mess.

  Do you remember that time we both had too much to drink, and I couldn’t come because the alcohol had desensitized me, but you were hard and horny, so I told you I’d suck you off? I sucked you off like a damn champ that night, for real. It must have been a good ten minutes I spent going down on you, and then, on the spur of the moment, instead of swallowing, I took your load on my face and tits. You were so shocked, and you didn’t know whether to be turned on or disgusted, which was exactly how I felt. Equal parts of both, is what it was. God, what a mess.

  I would do that again, right now. Take your cum all over my face. All over my tits. I would…god, Christian, I would do absolutely anything for another taste of you, for one moment with you.

  But then all the other stuff comes back, and I feel this irrational hatred of you. I know it’s not your fault. It’s not, and I know that. I’m just as much to blame, and it’s also just one of those things that no one is at fault for, a horrible horrible awful tragedy no one could have prevented. But I still hate you for it, and I don’t know why, and I don’t know how to fix it.

  I’m not blogging. I can’t. My readers expect humor, and I have none. None at all.

  I think I’m going to need some time to figure things out, Christian. The tug of war between needing you, wanting you, loving you, and hating you, loathing you, reviling you…is just too strong and too painful. I need to figure it out. I need to decide what to do, how to get clean, how to live again, how to stop drinking, how to stop missing you. I want to beg you to come back, but I’m terrified of what I’d do if you did.

  Nothing is okay, and I don’t know what to do, and emailing you, hearing your voice even through email is too painful, too difficult.

  I’m not going to email you again. I don’t know for how long. I don’t know if I’ll ever get past all this.

  I’m not saying goodbye, I’m just…I’m done for now. I don’t know what else to say. What else to do.

  * * *

  P.S.: that vacation to Iceland remains one of my top ten favorite memories of my entire life. Top five, and number two or three in that top five. Our wedding day is my number one favorite memory. We did it so cheap, a little arbor on the beach wreathed in white lace and white roses, you barefoot in your tux and me barefoot in that incredible Vera Wang I bought off the rack. I walked down the aisle to you to Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” which was so great and ridiculous and just perfect. My parents were there, your mom, Delta, Lucy your agent, and that’s it. It was perfect. So romantic.

  What’s number two? I’d really have to say the Iceland trip. We ate fish every meal, and I think I still have an entire storage crate full of wool sweaters. The locals thought we were so crazy for being so cold all the ti
me, but sixty degrees is cold to us, whereas sixty to them is downright frickin’ balmy. I mean, I remember everything from that trip. Hiking for days, riding a motorcycle together around the coast, all the way around the whole island. Deep-sea fishing with Captain Didrik, but his name was actually spelled with that rune-letter-thing that looks like a “d” with a cross at the top of the upper part. Going out drinking, getting lost, and trying to find a cab to take us back to our B-and-B, but we couldn’t remember the name of it. Out of all that, though, yes, I remember the nights best. I was on my period for half the trip so we couldn’t have sex, but we had such an incredible, memorable time doing what we did, drinking and watching movies in that fucking frigid little room all night every night. It was amazing.

  Number three is having Henry. Giving birth, I mean, they say you forget the pain, but I haven’t. It was so, so, so worth it to me, the moment I held that warm squalling, mewling, nuzzling little bundle of warmth in my arms. Fuck, now I’m crying because I miss him so damn bad. His little hands, his little feet. The way his chin would tremble when he cried, and his little fists would shake with outrage because he’d shit his pants for the twentieth time in 24 hours. I miss all of it.

  For real. I’m done with these emails. I need time. I have all those fucking memories running through my head and I need you and I miss you and I love you, and then I remember that you FUCKING LEFT, and I’m just filled with rage all over again and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do, Chris.

  So, until I figure that out…I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Don’t email back. Just…give me time and space. Please.

  * * *

  A.

  II

  19

  [Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela; September 1, 2015]

  A hundred yards from the dock, I haul at the line hand over hand until the sheet is furled, and then belay the line around the cleat. I pull up to the mooring the rest of the way using the motor, and Jonny is there on the dock to tie me off.

  He’s my best friend, Jonny Núñez. The first friend I made on my first voyage out. He was the experienced, worldly, hard-as-nails, tough-talking first mate and I was the new kid from rural Illinois who didn’t know a clew from a cleat from a coxswain. I knew engines, but I knew nothing about sailing, and I suppose my eagerness to learn endeared me to Jonny, who’d learned sailing and deep-sea fishing from birth. He likes to joke that he was born with a bowline in one hand and a fishing line in the other, and that he hasn’t let go of them since. He could captain his own boat, but says he doesn’t want the responsibility, which I think is true enough. He signs on for a voyage or two or three with a captain, and then ends up staying wherever he feels like staying for as long as he feels like it. He might be in Jakarta for a few months, and then sail for a few months, and then end up in Grenada for a spell, and so on around the world. We exchanged emails on and off over the years when I was in school and then landlocked in Ft. Lauderdale with Ava; he kept me apprised of his voyages and described the people he met, and I in turn would tell him of the joys of pedestrian, home-bound, landlubber life. I don’t think I was fooling him any more than I was fooling myself.

  Every single day that I was at university and then living in Ft. Lauderdale, I missed the sea. I loved Ava, obviously, but the sea was always calling me.

  She’d hate that turn of phrase, though. Melodramatic, she would call it. But then, she doesn’t know the ocean the way I do, hasn’t lived upon the sea. She doesn’t know the caprice of the sea. That’s a common phrase in literature, to the point of ubiquity, if you study literature as we both did. But, like all clichés, it is deeply rooted in truth. The sea is a fickle beast, a harsh mistress—all that bullshit. It’s all true, though. Live on the sea, and you’ll find out.

  These are things I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about. Even more so since Ava quit corresponding with me.

  I miss her emails, dammit; I miss her, dammit. But like she wrote, I’m also pissed off at her. So, so, so angry. At her, at life, at God, at everything.

  It was torture, living so close to the ocean but never being able to venture out; Ava hates sailing. I took her once, during college. I rented a Sunfish and took her out, staying within sight of shore the whole time. She was a native Floridian who had somehow never gone sailing, which just seemed weird to me, and I thought I’d rectify it. She hated every second of it. She couldn’t remember to stay out of the way of the boom when we tacked, couldn’t remember which line to pull or when, even when I told her. It was just a mess. We spent an hour sailing, and then I finally relented and took her back to shore. We saw a movie and ate dinner and never discussed sailing again. She doesn’t mind boats, likes the water, loves swimming, enjoys fishing once in a while…but hates sailing.

  Which is the one thing I love more than anything else. Except for Ava, I’d usually say.

  But lately? I’m not so sure.

  Which makes me a horrible person, I think. It may be just the events of the past few months, the renewed joy I feel at simply being out to sea again, after years stuck on land. I’m a nomad by nature, I think. I’m not made to stay in one spot, and I’m certainly not made to live on land. My heart and my soul come to life at sea.

  Ava doesn’t understand that.

  She calls it melodramatic horseshit, and tells me to go surf, like that’ll get it out of my system. Which is rank nonsense.

  Surfing is to sailing as reading is to writing: surfing is a watersport, something you do on the ocean, and so is sailing, but they are not even remotely equal; reading uses words, and so does writing, but they are not the same, they are not equal; I cannot expunge my need to be on the sea by surfing.

  “You gonna sit there stewing all day or are you gonna get out of the damn boat and say hello?” Jonny says, snapping me out of my train of thought.

  I shake my head to clear it, and grin at him. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. Hold your horses, old man.”

  He’s not old: at forty-two, he’s only ten years older than me, but I like to tease him about it, and he in turn acts like I’m still the teenager he first met way back when.

  I step onto the dock and clasp forearms with Jonny, and then embrace him. “Been a while, amigo.” I don’t really speak Spanish, and I only call him amigo to annoy him.

  “Too long, my friend, way too long.” He wraps an arm around my shoulders and guides me toward downtown Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela. “I wish I could say it was good to see you. It is, but I wish it was under different circumstances.”

  I shrug. “It is what it is.”

  Jonny rears away and stares at me. “That don’t sound like you.”

  I pull away. “Maybe I’ve changed.”

  Jonny doesn’t follow me. “You’re livin’, you’re changin’. That’s just how things are. But what you been through? You don’t just shrug it off and say it is what it is. That’s stupid, and I ain’t stupid, Chris. Now for real this time. What gives?”

  I slow my steps, and Jonny catches up. I walk beside him in silence a while, and he lets the silence stand. He nudges me around a corner and across a street, and then into a dingy dive bar, where he orders us drinks in Spanish. We sit at a table outside under an awning, and we sip local cerveza, and I finally find words.

  “Sorry, Jonny. You deserve better from me than that answer. It’s just hard for me to talk about.”

  Jonny is sitting close to me, close enough that my American sense of personal space leaves me feeling uncomfortable, but it’s just how Jonny is, and it’s comforting in an odd way, being uncomfortably close to him, like old times.

  He shrugs, and then pats my forearm. “You been through a lot. You’re allowed to feel what you feel, right? But you gotta talk it out. I know you, man, and know you wanna bury it and pretend it ain’t there. Can’t do that, Christian. Won’t work. Not somethin’ like this.”

  I sigh and nod. “I know.”

  Jonny stares at me, expectant. “So? Talk.”

 
; I shake my head. “Not yet, okay? Give me time.”

  “Why? So you can bury it deeper?” He takes a long drink, eying me sidelong. “You been out there on that sexy new boat of yours alone for what, over a month? Stewing, thinking, brooding. You’ve had time. Now you gotta open up.”

  I glance at him, taking stock of my friend: he looks much the same as he always has, except there are new streaks of silver creeping in at the temples, encroaching on his jet-black hair, which is, as always, a little too long and combed straight back. His features are weathered and craggy, his eyes set in a permanent squint. The lines in his face are etched more deeply than the last time I saw him, and he has a new scar on his jawline, slicing through the permanent ten-day scruff. But despite all this, the guy is seriously handsome—even as a straight guy, I can admit that much about him. That, along with the fact that he tends to be a man of few words, makes the ladies go crazy for him; the whole tall-dark-and-handsome, strong-and-silent type and all that, I suppose. Jonny fits all that and then some.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “What happened? Why are you way down here, alone?” He picks at the label of his bottle. “I thought you and your old lady were tight, thought you two had that real-deal kinda love goin’ on. Now suddenly you’re on a fancy new boat by yourself. So…what happened?”

  “A lot happened. I thought we had that too, but…I guess I was wrong. I don’t know.” I try to put things into words, but it’s too big, it’s too much. “Jesus, man, where do I even start? So much happened. Like, between Ava and I, and then Henry, and…” I shake my head, trailing off. “It’s too much, Jonny.”