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“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, Wild accepted Gerry’s invitation to do some fishing on the Florida panhandle and Wild quickly learned that Gerry was fishing for more than Marlin. He confronted Wild about the journal he discovered and after some persistence, got Wild to tell him when he will die. Gerry didn’t take the news well that he had just a year left and Wild regretted that he let his disdain for his brother-in-law allow him to share something so devastating. June never would have let him do such a thing.
The birthday getaway hadn’t gone at all like June had hoped it would. Wild had been distracted and distant for most of the twenty-four hours they were away and, on the drive back to Atlanta, she was struggling to conceal her frustration.
“You’re angry,” he said, breaking the silence that was a very different variety than the companionable one they had on the drive up.
“No, I’m not angry, just disappointed. I wanted to make this special for you, but I feel like nothing I did was right.”
It was late afternoon on Sunday. Traffic was stacking up on I-85 South heading back into the city and they had slowed to a crawl. Clouds hung low in the sky. Wild had been staring out his window but turned to address June.
“Can you um… can you just pull over up here?”
“What is it? What’s wrong? Are you going to be sick?”
“No, just please, pull off to the side. We’re going nowhere fast anyway.”
Reluctantly, June switched her hazard lights on and steered the car over onto the median as far as she could so that two wheels were on the grass. No one in the history of road trips ever pulled off to the side of the interstate for something good. She braced herself, certain he was about to initiate their first actual fight. As she was putting the car in park and turning to ask what was going on, Wild unbuckled his seat belt, pulled her face to his, and kissed her.
In that moment, everything inverted. At some unknown point over the past few months of deprivation, June had assimilated the utterly foreign concept that their touching would be a catastrophe. The act of kissing him had taken on this mythical status, some days crowding out any other thought when they were together. But when his lips actually touched hers, it elicited an involuntary fight or flight response, and she gasped in horror, pulling away, her hands pressed to his chest.
“Oh my God, what have you done?”
He looked as if she had struck him. She reached out slowly, her hand completing a gesture she had performed in her mind a thousand times. When she held his face, some of the sting in his expression faded but he didn’t answer her question.
She studied his face, trying to read the unknowable terrain she had never been so close to before. June had witnessed many of his first-contact experiences by this point and she tried to map the spacey look in his eyes to her memories of the encounters. But it was no use. He had said each time was different based on variables he couldn’t fully understand. She had tried to be scientific about it, to get details on what he experienced relative to the characteristics of the person, his relationship to them, and the proximity of their death date, but it was wild conjecture. This was fucking crazy and irresponsible, and she was suddenly angry.
“How could you just do this without talking to me about it first?”
“I was afraid you’d say no…”
He was okay. He didn’t seem shaken. That was good, right? If it was bad, he wouldn’t be okay.
“Wild, you seem… okay. What does that mean? Does it mean I’m not going to…”
“Oh, you’re going to die, just like the rest of us.”
His hands were trembling. He broke eye contact and did this thing with his mouth that she had seen him do on a few occasions when he was uncomfortable. It was like his lips were moving in an almost imperceptible pantomime of speech. She felt a tightening around her heart until he looked up and smiled.
“You’re going to be one hot ninety-year-old. Now can we get back to the kissing thing?”
“Only ninety? Did you round up or round down?”
“June, I’m terrible at math. Please, I just stuck my balls way out there for this.”
“I know you did. Oooo, and now I can touch those gross things.”
“You’re welcome.”
The curve of his crooked smile melted her lingering shock and resentment. When she leaned forward to kiss him, it was the kiss it was meant to be, the one she had fantasized about. Their bodies fully understood each other and this step was just confirming the fit that she had already drawn in her mind. What had been a simple ink sketch before was now a vibrant oil painting with shocks of color layered and blending into one another, thick upon the canvas.
“Do we have to wait until we get back,” she panted. “I don’t know if I can…”
“I don’t think we want to get arrested.”
The rest of the ride back to Atlanta in stop-and-go traffic would have been torture for any other couple, but June and Wild enjoyed the ecstatic pleasure of holding hands. They drove to June’s apartment in Buckhead just because it was ten minutes closer. They left everything in the car, ran up the three flights of stairs and were undressing before the door slammed behind them. They were giddy and ravenous, Wild knocking over a floor lamp as he tried to pull his shirt off, June tripping over the jeans bunched at her ankles. There was a clumsy desperation to do everything at once and their bodies couldn’t keep pace with the rush of instructions their fevered brains were sending.
June had always been comfortable in her body, and had always enjoyed sex, but that afternoon with Wild was something she had never experienced with another man. It may have just been the tyrannically long abstinence of their courtship, but it seemed more than that. It was an intense feeling of immediate belonging, of fitting inside someone as they were fitting inside you.
Hours later, as they lay together on her bed, their legs intertwined and bodies spent, she traced lazy circles on his chest with her fingertip and her mind drifted, jumping back and forward in time now that the present was secure or at least tangible. Until today, their future hadn’t been a safe place to explore, but now she was tiptoeing into it. She was glad she didn’t go off the pill last month as she’d considered doing because it wreaked havoc on her body. In their previous sexual encounters, Wild’s sperm finding its way inside her would have required medical intervention. She’d never even considered a child with him, but then she’d barely considered having a child with anyone. All these new possibilities were both exhilarating and terrifying. There was something safe about their weird arrangement. It was as though the physical distance they had to maintain extended into the emotional realm for her as well. Until that afternoon, when he was inside her, a part of her that resided in a quiet back room, the part that she didn’t consciously acknowledge, regarded him as a rich kid, a fuck-up, a mental patient, a wounded animal– anything but a serious candidate for a life partner. But he had crashed through the door into that safe room and now, all bets were off.
“Hey,” he said softly. “I can literally feel the gears grinding in your head. Everything okay?”
“Sorry, I was just thinking about tomorrow. Work stuff.”
“So, you’re not quietly making plans to leave the state?”
He was teasing, but she detected something more, a hint of insecurity which was entirely new. Wild was confident to the point of recklessness even with his curse which would have put anyone else in the fetal position. She knew he had been more vulnerable with her than anyone else in his life. She could feel the depth of his love which made the stakes so much higher in the gamble he had taken that afternoon.
“You’re not getting rid of me that easy,” she whispered, and after a pause continued. “I know what a risk you took today. It could have gone really badly. What would you have done if you knew I was going to die next week?”
“I don’t know, honestly. I’ve thought about it so many times in so many different ways. Today, I just took a leap because thinking wasn’t getting me any closer to you. What would you have done? I mean if you were me.”
“And I found out after our first kiss that you were gonna die next week?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know but I like to think I would tell you. I’d have to, right? It would be your right to know.”
“Yeah,” he said again, his response like an echo.
They lay in silence for a moment listening to the muffled laugh track from a sitcom playing on the next-door neighbor’s television. Their thoughts spun out in infinite, overlapping, and unknowable spirals until Wild spoke again.
“Before this happened to me, I mean the premonition thing, I didn’t believe in fate. I thought everything was free will. We could change the course of events in our lives. But I don’t now, at least not like I used to. I believe in free will now like a kid believes in Santa Claus. Isn’t that fucked up?”
“Yeah, it is. But you also may be the only person alive who can see behind the curtain. The belief that we can change our circumstances is a powerful part of being human and you’ve been robbed of that.”
“I can’t believe how lucky I am,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah. What are the odds I would find you and you would love me. I don’t think there’s anyone else on the planet who could hold this fucking idea in their brain without completely losing it.”
“I won’t lie. I do question my sanity more than once a day. But I love you and if that’s the cost, I’ll pay it.”
“Can we just be here naked together for the rest of the week?”
He rolled over and pulled her to him. He kissed her forehead and each of her eyelids. She breathed in the scent of him, the musky smell of their joined bodies. She understood the meaning of the word knowing as it was once used to refer to sex. This was a knowing. She knew him now and he knew her. To know something was to commit to it forever. It could not be taken back any more than you could un-ring a bell.
“And here I thought you might be one of those boys who quiver in the face of commitment,” she whispered in his ear.
“I’ve already been committed.”
“Haha. That doesn’t count.”
“Sure, it does. I would have gotten myself out sooner if I didn’t want to see you every day. I wasn’t staying for the wardrobe or the food.”
“But seriously,” she said. “You want this? You want us now that it’s not just some hypothetical you couldn’t have?”
“More than anything I’ve ever known. If there’s anyone who should be having doubts about now, it would be you. I wouldn’t want to hitch my wagon to this if I were you.”
“What are we, settlers? It’s 1988, I’m a liberated woman. I don’t need your wagon to make my way across the frontier.”
“But there’s a pretty sweet beach house…”
“You have a beach house? Oh, well then, I’m definitely hitching my wagon to you. And here I thought it was just the dusty rooms above the theater.”
“Seriously, we should go there. You’d love it.”
“You might need to meet my parents first.”
“I see. So even liberated women in the year of our lord 1988 must present suitors in the ritual of courtship?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“What if they don’t like me?”
“It wouldn’t matter to me, but they will.”
“How can you be so sure? They’ll know my family and most people hate my family even the ones who pretend not to.”
“They won’t see any of that, I promise. Or they will, but it won’t matter.”
“How come?”
“Because they’ll finally get to meet the person who’s been making me so happy and that’ll make them happy.”
“Wow. So that’s what parents do.”
Later, after Wild was asleep, breathing slow and heavy beside her, June began to feel the gravity of what she was taking on. Was this it? Was he the one for her? How could they navigate a lifetime together with this albatross he carried? Before today, it was just a thought experiment. Wild meeting her parents made it real. It meant she was opening herself up to know things she didn’t want to know. Committing to Wild meant she would be taking on the burden he alone had carried. It was a lot. Her heart began to race, and she had a sudden urge to get out of bed and run away. But her father had taught her differently. When you feel most scared, that’s when you lean in, June.
She rolled over and pressed her body to the warmth of Wild’s wide back and her heart slowed and found its rhythm with his breathing.
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If you’re enjoying “Departures,” chances are you will also like my two previously published novels. I’ve made the first two episodes of each free for you to preview. If you prefer reading the old fashioned way, you’re in luck because “The Memory of My Shadow” is now available in print, ebook, and audiobook anywhere you purchase books. I give you all the details in this announcement post.
In 2052, Magdalena, a brilliant programmer invents a device for telepathic communication with AI, seeking to decode the mind of her twin, the shooter in a school massacre she alone survived, but when she resurrects his consciousness, she unleashes a malevolence that could destroy her. Fans of the movie “Ex Machina” will love this story.
In the reality show competition for Houze, a revolutionary eco-home, six contestants face a winner-takes-all challenge. Beneath the surface of sustainability, altruism battles greed, turning a hopeful vision into a life and death struggle. Fans of “Nine Perfect Strangers” by Liane Moriarty will love this story.
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June Leans In