AllFreeNovel
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For most of the boat ride, I almost don’t think of it. I almost lose myself in the easy chatting with Emerson, the rhythmic vibrations of the boat, the sweep of sea air in my nostrils. Almost.
But... maybe it’s the sight of the growing shoreline. It comes back.
What I haven’t told him. What I need to.
But I don’t tell him when we get off the boat and head back to our rooms with plans for later. I don’t tell him after I’ve unpacked, showered, and gotten dressed. I don’t tell him when we meet up again and go for a swim in the pool with the blue and purple artistic mosaics of mermaids and angel fish, even though we’re basically alone.
I don’t tell him.
Not yet.
That night, it’s a calmer night than others, just us in Emerson’s room, at my request. I do love my activities, but in order to enjoy them fully, I need space between them too.
And lately, I’ve had enough excitement to last me several months.
“This is nice,” I say, relaxing my head in Emerson’s lap.
“Yeah,” he says, his hands idling in my hair.
He’s got a look on his tanned, sculpted face that I could read a lot into if I’m not careful.
The thing is, I’m tired to death of being careful. Careful to say the right thing. Be the right person. Figure out what ‘right’ actually even is.
“Hang on,” Emerson says, gently disengaging himself and heading to his keyboard bag.
“Seriously?” I say, half-joking.
He just grins as he gets back on the bed. He takes out the keyboard, sets it on his lap, and with one last sidelong glance my way, he starts to play.
The words come with the song, even without his singing them.
Past, present, future, you are
Whenever I’m far
... away
It’s all coming back to me, like a fingertip tapping my brain in just the right place. Every day, as I ate, worked, and went through the motions of living, I waited for the minutes to click away to when I would really start to live.
Half an hour before, I’d put on makeup, choose something other than the sweats I’d been wearing all day. If I’d forgotten to wash my hair for a while, I’d put it up.
At ten PM on the dot, his call would come and ignite my beating heart. How good he looked, tousled sandy hair, shy happy smile, even with his webcam’s crappy resolution. He was so close and present—even separated by a camera—that I could almost smell him, that deep musk I loved so well.
His voice was mostly untransformed by the internet connection, a deep warm baritone that made me smile even from such a mundane greeting as “Hey.”
That same warm voice and I would talk about everything, but most of all, the seemingly never-ending series of concerts he was doing, part of the world tour he was on. The different countries, England and the cheese rolling competition he stumbled on in Gloucestershire. Romania and the colorful Merry Cemetery he wandered with fellow musicians in Sapân?a. Japan and how a friend of his almost bought a car out of a vending machine.
We’d touch upon what was going on in my life too, of course, although I’d be careful to coat the truth—the friends I was seeing less and less of, the courses I was failing, the job to which I was calling in sick so much that they’d given me a warning—in vague platitudes he didn’t see through.
We’d talk about the trips and dates and things we’d do when he got back. We’d talk about the movies we’d seen, the books we’d read and wanted to. We talked philosophy and science and spirituality and meaning.
We’d have so much to talk about, night after night after night, that we’d sometimes talk well into the next day, early morning start for our jobs be damned.
The first time he was late to our ten o’clock talk, I wrote it off as a fluke. Then came the second. Then the time he didn’t call at all.
The apologies after always turned into fights.
Then, after it finally ended and we had broken up, when the hulking maw of nothingness was all that remained of what we had been, I’d reread our phone texts, our Skype chats, tried to see our future in the past. Tried to see signs that it would all fall apart. That I was a fool for ever thinking differently.
...It’s time to say
I gotta get back to you
I gotta get back to you...
“Stop,” I blurt out suddenly.
Emerson’s hand falls still.
“Sorry,” he says. “It just...”
I turn away from those guilty eyes wanting to make right what can’t be.
“Happened, I know,” I find myself saying. “Just like this. Us.”
Just like what I still haven’t told him.
“Wynona,” he says, reaching for me.
I don’t let him, even though I long for his hand, his touch, like a magnet to steel.
