“But...but we were going to see each other. Every weekend. That was the plan. You know the plans. I have them on my phone. On a calendar.” I turned to find my phone, laying silent and still among the rumpled sheets that were still warm and damp from sex. “We made plans. I can show you the plans!”

  “Dane, I know.” He reached around me to take the phone from my hand. I spun around and slapped him, hard, tucking my Blackberry into my chest to protect our plans as a mother would clutch a babe to her breast. He staggered back a step, hand rising to rest on his cheek. “Dane, please, try to understand. She’s my mother…all I have left. All she wants is to go back to Ealing. She’s my mum, Dane, she’s my mum. I have to take care of her. It was the one thing I promised my father. If anything happened to him, I’d take Mum home and look after her.”

  I fell to the bed, my numb legs unable to hold me up. My hand hurt from hitting him. My God, I had hit him. I started to cry, huge racking sobs, the pain was just too much. He hurried to my side, crawled into the bed, and pulled me to him. There was no fight in me. I shimmied up to lay on him, his back on the wall, me tucked between his legs. I sobbed bitterly as did he. He stroked my hair from my face as the first wave of grief slammed into me.

  “Let her go alone,” I finally coughed out.

  “I can’t do that. She’s my mum. You’d not let your mum go off by herself after your father died, would you?” His hand on my brow felt good, the tears slowing a bit. “Would you?”

  “No,” I gasped and hated myself for being honest. I should have screamed at him that I would leave my mother behind, alone and wailing, in widow’s weeds, if it meant I would have him but that was a lie. I’d been raised to be a good son, a son who protects his mother. I was raised to be a man, and a man did not turn his back on a loving mother no matter what that may cost him. “I don’t want you to do this.”

  He cinched me tighter to him, his chest tight to mine, my face in his neck.

  “We’ll talk. Daily. I promise on my life I will touch base every day.” He rubbed his cheek against my head, his voice thick with tears. “And we’ll fly over to see each other during breaks, yeah? It’ll only be until I graduate. She should be settled by then, you’ll see.”

  Two years. Did we really think we could maintain a relationship over that long of a distance for two years?

  “What about school?” I asked, hoping that maybe he’d not be willing to give up his college here in the states.

  “I’ve already transferred to Notting Hill College.”

  “What? So this has been in the works and you never told me?!” I tried to break away from him, but he held me tightly. Slapping him sounded good. Lashing out in any way would make me feel so much better. “Fucker!”

  “I wanted to tell you in person, Dane. Stop. Stop!” He wrestled me into submission then held me when I started weeping anew. “I had to see you and tell you face to face. That’s how adults do things, yeah? In person.”

  “You just wanted to fuck me one last time.” It hurt to even breathe. Everything ached. I wanted it to stop now. This was not the plans, God dammit, we were supposed to be forever.

  “Yes, okay, I wanted to make love to you again. I wanted to touch you and laugh with you, lie with you…see the beauty of you lost in orgasm. Yes, I wanted to fuck you one last time because I love you and not having this weekend to carry me through the long separation would probably kill me, Dane.”

  My anger dissipated, turned to mist that we breathed in with our trembling breaths.

  “I’ll come see you this summer, I promise.” I sniffled into his jugular. “I’ll spend the whole summer with you. Please promise me that you won’t forget me.”

  “How could I ever forget you, Dane? We shook the stars, luv.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Talking daily. How easy it was to make that pledge. It’s tossed around blithely and with no regard for how fucking hard it is to carve that little five-minute block into your life.

  ‘We’ll keep in touch’ or ‘I’ll drop you a line’ or ‘Call me sometime.’

  Kisses to both cheeks, social niceties riddled with lies. Perhaps that was too harsh though. Not all our vows to stay in touch are lies. Many, like the promises that Khalid and I had made to each other, were spoken in truth. We truly did mean it when we made the oath that miserable October morning. And God knows we did our best for months. Once a day for three months, we maintained contact. I mailed him gifts over the holidays, and he did the same. We talked and texted all through the Christmas break. Hell, we even discussed making some rough plans for my trip to the UK over the summer. And it seemed as if we could maybe do this long-distance thing. As one year turned into another with deep January snows, the twenty-year-old and the eighteen-year-old were still in that fantasy world that spins parables about the fortitude of love. They were still bouncing around in romance land where if the heart is pure enough and the love strong enough it can withstand any outside forces.

  Which, as any adult knows, is pretty much total horseshit.

  Love is a fragile thing, a delicate daisy spun of crystalized lace, the glacé petals breathtakingly elegant yet brittle. Like the rose that the Beast who loves Beauty so violently protects, love needs shelter from the elements of life. Woe to those who do not shield their fragile flower of affection!

  Woe indeed, for it only takes but one small misstep, one missed call, one time thinking “I’ll just finish this paper and call him back tomorrow” which leads to another tomorrow and yet another tomorrow and soon you’re speaking once a week because life…

  Then you find yourself in April, the shatters of that hand-blown love flower lying at your feet when he tells you that he’s going to the Middle East for the summer as you stare at the airline ticket lying on your desk.

  “What? But we had plans,” I said leaving my desk to look down on the city. “Khalid, I have the fucking ticket!”

  “I know, and I am so bloody sorry, but this just came up.” I started to protest but he snuck in before I could work up a full head of steam. “I’m making my hajj with five of my cousins. This is the first time anyone in my family has reached out to me. They’ve offered to let me spend some time in Belgrade. Dane, this is my pilgrimage. It’s me…who I am and where I came from. I can’t miss this chance to make this journey in my father’s name. Tell me you understand.”

  What kind of bastard would I be if I didn’t understand? Yet, I was hurt. So deeply hurt.

  “Khalid, this summer was supposed to be our reconnect summer.” I let my brow drop to the glass, the phone cradled between my head and shoulder, my hands coming up to rest on the window as Penn students enjoyed the lovely spring day. How was it they could be so carefree when I was up here dying? “We’ve barely spoken for two months.”

  His sigh was easily heard even though an ocean separated us. “I know. It’s not been good for us, has it? Missing that whole semester killed me. I had to double up to pick up the credits I needed.”

  I knew all this. And he knew that I’d been crushed as well. All I had done for months was work on papers and essays while ingesting coffee. That coffee pot from my father had truly been a Godsend. I’d written so many fucking essays. Being a creative writing major was killing the creative writer in me. I’d not written a word for Across the River since September. Who had time to write creatively when they were busting their ass to pen stupid papers about stupid dead British poets? But hey, I could deconstruct a poem with the best of them now so that would serve me well as a fiction writer. I hated college right now. Right now, I hated my entire life. Tears wet my cheeks.

  “The one thing that got me through the school year was you. Seeing you, talking to you, loving you. Now you want me to jump up and down in happiness because you’re going off with your cousins for a pilgrimage which leaves me doing what exactly?”

  “If you could come to Mecca I’d bring you, you know I would.”

  I sniffled and nodded even though he couldn’t see me. Deep down, I knew that he would. I cursed the chasm our differing faiths presented us with.

  “Why am I always so lost?” I asked whoever was listening.

  “Babe, you’re not lost. It’s just a delay.”

  I placed my palms on the window, pressing with my weight, confident that the glass was thick enough not to shatter yet wishing on some macabre level that it would break and throw me to the cement ten floors down. Then he would know my pain, understand that this delay was just another sign of how we were drifting apart, and perhaps he would see my dead body on the coroner’s slab and weep over it as I was now crying over the slow decay of our love.

  “You said you wanted to tour Europe. All the great writers love Paris. I want you to go. Have fun. Maybe when we’re done with our trips we can meet up somewhere great. New York City maybe.”

  “You want to meet up in New York?”

  “Yes, let’s meet up in New York City!” He was suddenly excited and launched into a long-winded explanation of the wonders of the Big Apple and how we’d make love in a Manhattan hotel room and sip designer coffee and see a Broadway musical. It sounded marvelous. So, having little recourse and a crushed heart, I agreed to two weeks in New York at the beginning of August.

  “Khalid…is this the end of us?” I had to ask because it sure as fuck felt like the end of what we’d swore would never end.

  “What? No, Dane. No, of course not. I love you. We’ll get together in August and things will feel better. I know it’s been a long time, and I miss you like mad. I still want to be with you. I want to make us work. Don’t give up on us, Dane.”

  “I won’t. I promise. I won’t give up on us.”

  We hung up with promises of August. I flung my phone to my bed, my forehead still on the window, and let myself vent all that disappointment. It escaped as tears instead of curses or fists in walls. Cheeks wet, I walked to my desk, fell into my office chair, and lifted the ticket to England into the air. Staring at it made me queasy so I let it flutter to my desk where it landed on top of one of my course books. A serious looking Victor Hugo peeked at me around the red and white ticket. Without thinking better of it, and this is probably one of those hand of the gods moments where a deity subconsciously directs a stupid mortal along a path that entertains them, I called the airline and asked if I could transfer from a flight to Great Britain to one to France.

  They were more than happy to help me with that once I had an idea of where I wished to visit in France. Paris would be too costly for my pauper status. All my savings from birthdays and holidays, plus a sizeable “gift” from my grandparents, had bought the ticket to Great Britain, leaving me with a nice little stash for souvenirs and food. Now that I wasn’t staying with Khalid, I’d need a hotel.

  Wiping my eyes and nose on my sleeve, I mumbled to the airline that I had no clue where to go in France. My boyfriend and I were kind of having troubles, and I just wanted to go somewhere cheap and drink wine to dull the agony of romance I told the woman on the phone. She was very nice and sympathetic. Perhaps she had experienced watching her love slip through her fingers when she was younger. Hadn’t everyone? Wasn’t that why poets and songwriters penned songs and odes about loves lost? Sweet Mary, I was growing disgustingly maudlin.

  “Am I old enough to drink in France?” Yes, she assured me that at nineteen I was old enough. “Good,” I said, sitting down at my desk to glare at the ticket that had brought me so much excitement just two days ago. “I need a fairytale setting because I’m losing my real-life prince.”

  She assured me that she knew just the place, so I let her book me on a flight to France then recommend a little hotel that she’d stayed in when she visited the town during her junior year. I thanked her and hung up, called the hotel in Èze, and booked myself the cheapest room they had for four weeks in July. After fumbling through the reservation process since my French was paltry even though I’d taken four years of it in high school, I pushed back from my desk, tore up the ticket to Great Britain then tossed it into the air. Sick to heart about the impromptu confetti cloud I had just made, I had an epic night of mourning, tears, and all the beer I could round up from my neighbors. After the first two six packs, I chuckled at just how predictable I was. The heartbroken author—drinking alone. It was so cliché yet so perfectly Dane.

  ***

  His name was René Gosse.

  He came into my life six days after I had made my way to Èze, blowing into my existence like a water spout that appears out of a summer storm. He was tall and sinewy, wearing snug, form-fitted, plum swim trunks. His eyes azure blue as the Mediterranean Sea lapping over the tiny gray pebbles of Le Plage d’Eze. His skin a golden cinnamon color, and his hair a bush of golden curls that made him look cherubic, but I could tell he was far from angelic. There was a touch of the devil about him.

  “Hello, pretty pet. I’ve watched you from afar two days now. Way up there on the hilltop, hidden among the bougainvillea.” I tore my sight from his and looked back at Èze seated above us like a scene out of a sultry romance movie, the town glowing with atmosphere and charm. “My name is René Gosse. I am twenty-nine, gay as a Peruvian foxtrot, and I am completely enamored of you.”

  All of this was quite scandalous for the shy Roman Catholic boy from Cheltenham. He was so amazingly European, his confidence taking me aback slightly. When he deposited himself down beside me on the beach on that cloudy day, he leaned in close, violating every personal boundary I had, and blatantly stared at the picture Khalid had sent me from Saudi Arabia. Yes, I had been sitting on a beach in France drinking some lovely red wine and pining, my journal and notebook—I feared getting my laptop wet just as much as I feared getting my feet wet—on the yellow towel under me.

  “What is this big black box?” René asked, his words were richly tinted in an accent so thick it could have been cartoonish if it weren’t so exotic. It sounded like a manic blend of France and Spain perhaps. But what did my untrained ears know? Maybe all gay men in southwestern France spoke in such a mishmash way.

  Brow furrowed, I glared at him, wondering where a man who looked so good could have been hiding where I hadn’t seen him. He had several small freckles across the bridge of his nose, which broke up the perfection of his face and made him a little less flawless and a tad more commonplace. I liked the freckles. The impeccable beauty of his face unsettled me for several reasons, the most disturbing being that once you gazed upon him it was hard to look away.

  “You do know sticking your face into someone’s personal messages is rude, right?”

  He waved that off with a circular motion of his hand, the bangles on his wrist singing out. “Curiosity and rudeness are twin stones on the same tiara.” He crossed his long legs at the ankles which also were thick with chains and golden anklets then patted his thighs as one would when they were trying to entice a dog to leap onto their lap. “Come sit on my legs, pretty boy.”

  “I’m not a poodle.” He smiled wickedly then clapped his hands as if proud of my biting reply.

  “My pretty boy has bite. I like that. So, we will make with the flirting slow since you are American and repressed for sex.” He wiggled closer. His curls were breezy and billowy, dancing in the strong wind blowing in from the sea. Rain was on the air. Perhaps tonight if not sooner. You could smell the subtle difference on the wind. “What is two questions for pretty boy. What is your name and what is that big black box?”

  “My name is ‘I have a boyfriend’ and the picture of the big black box is the Kaaba Stone.”

  “Oh, so is a stone. Marvelous! Where is your boyfriend?” He looked around me and behind me, looked out to sea and then glanced over his shoulders, left and right. “I am not seeing this boyfriend. Is this boyfriend make-up lover?”

  I wriggled away. “No, he’s not made-up. He’s the one who sent me this picture.” I waved my dinged and dented Blackberry under René’s freckled nose.

  “This is upsetting me. Such a pretty boy all alone on the beach with boyfriend off making pictures of big black stone box!” He turned to face me, those big blue eyes stunning and mischievous. “If you were my boyfriend, I would keep you on my lap like pampered pug dog. I would brush you and pet you and feed you tiny sweet treats when you made pouty face.”

  I stared at him despite myself. It wasn’t the man’s beauty that had me entranced, it was his brash outlandish humor. He blinked long, thick lashes at me.

  “Where is the boyfriend?”

  “He’s in the Middle East completing his pilgrimage,” I answered brusquely wishing I had more wine. They had really good wine in France. I’d been partaking of one bottle a day since my arrival. For some reason, my vacation wasn’t lifting my spirits as my mother had said it would. She’d been so sure that this summer away would do wonders for my funk. Dad said nothing about Khalid and my fractured relationship because he was trying his best to keep a civil tongue because his year was about up.

  “This pilgrimage is for religious?” He laid down on my blanket as if he owned it. Coconut-vanilla fragrance rose from his sun-warm skin. How do I get rid of the man? I glanced up and down the beach but saw nothing but brightly colored umbrellas, tanned legs, and pebbles glistening with salt water and sea foam. Shouldn’t there be lifeguards or police somewhere? His hand landed on my knee, jerking my attention from the shore to the man stretched out beside me. I pushed his hand off my knee and got a lazy, confident smile for my effort. “Is this boyfriend off for the religious journey?”

  “Yes, it’s religious. He’s doing this pilgrimage in his father’s name.”

  “Ah, posthumously. I feel such sorrow for his loss.”

  “Thanks. Don’t touch me again, please,” I said when his hand lifted from the blanket. He giggled then pushed his fingers into his curls, rolling to his back from his side. “Why are you here?”

  “I tell you. I am wild smitten with you. Do you know the café next to the perfumery?” He stretched like a cat who’d just found the perfect sunbeam even though the sun was hiding behind ever-thickening clouds.