An Ocean Apart

She turned away from me for a moment as she shifted contents from her regular purse into a much smaller evening clutch, and I saw that the dress was entirely backless. Running gracefully down the entire length of her golden skinned back was a tightly braided ponytail. It looked like a rope. I imagined wrapping it around my hand and snapping her head back as I entered her from behind...

It finally hit me that she was going on a date. A hot, sexy date, and dressed like that, she was probably getting laid. A busload of powerful emotions hit me head-on. Anger that she was placing her social life, her sex life, ahead of her daughter and her granddaughter; lust, as my pulse pounded, and my cock throbbed to full hardness at the thought of this goddess writhing and moaning in passionate release.

But by far the most powerful emotion at that instant was a jealousy as powerful as the volcanoes that had formed the island where I now stood. She was the most desirable woman I had ever seen, I had once been special in her life, and I was still madly in love with her. But tonight, she would be fucking someone else. It didn't matter that she was my aunt or that she was 25 years older than me. The feelings were as raw and real as anything I'd ever felt.

I walked quickly into the kitchen. My hands trembled as I poured myself a glass of water and chugged it down. I felt her eyes on me. It took a superhuman effort, but I brought myself back under control.

It was time.

"Giselle," I began, "I know how good our family is at creating pain and anger and divisiveness. I know that some terrible things have happened to you and Jenny."

"I'm glad you understand that concept," she said, "but trust me, you have no idea of the reality."

"Fair enough," I said. "You're right. I don't mean to minimize anything you've gone through. But I know that Jenny's been through some of that with you. Some of the pain belongs to her as well. I believe that the pain you both share can't really be left behind, can't really be healed, unless you do it together."

Her sea-green eyes were locked on mine. Her face was solid stone. Her emotions were on complete lockdown, and I couldn't read her at all. I could only plunge ahead.

"Jenny desperately wants to heal those wounds," I said. "She desperately wants to see you, to talk to you, to touch you. She wants you back in her life. She wants to be your daughter again, and she wants you to share in the birth of her daughter. Your granddaughter."

I wanted her to say something at that point. Anything. So I waited her out. Finally, she spoke.

"It took me a long time to realize what's so toxic about this family," she finally said. "It never sees you as a person. A human being with a life and an independent agenda and desire to live freely. You're always defined by what you are to someone else. You have this never-ending obligation to play a certain role, to fill someone else's need, to be something that everyone else thinks you should be. And then you wake up one day and you realize you've never really had a chance to live for yourself. You've never had a chance to BE yourself. In my case, when I finally woke up and realized that, I saw that it wasn't too late to make a change. And that's what I did. Now I'm finally living my real life."

"You don't think every family is like that?" I asked, but she ignored me because she was on a roll now and it was all going to come out.

"I was the baby of the family, and my mother decided I was going to be perfect. The four kids before me...your mom, in my opinion, is amazing, and the rest of my sibs turned out fine, but my mother viewed them all as being flawed in some way. But she was going to have one perfect child, and it was going to be me. Perfect athlete, perfect student, perfect wife, perfect mother."

She gazed wistfully out the window before continuing.

"I know she hasn't aged well, and she's lost a few marbles, so you kids don't take her very seriously. But in my day, she was an iron-willed dictator, and you did things her way. I met her expectations and more, and I earned her pride and her love. But I always knew that it wouldn't take much to lose it."

"I know she always thought the world of you," I said, but the compliment wasn't well received.

"Yeah, until she didn't," she said bitterly. "I went off to college and got pregnant."

"How did she react?" I asked.

"She was angry and bitter and controlling. Which really describes how she always was, but then even more so. She viewed me as another failed experiment, her last chance at perfection flushed down the toilet. But she decided she was going to force some lesser version of perfection on me. I would now skip the athletics and the schooling and just go straight to being the perfect wife and mother. I knew that marrying Daniel wasn't the right thing for me, or for him, but he came from a prominent family, and she basically blackmailed them into making him marry me."

"What else could you have done?" I asked.

"I thought about giving up the baby, but I couldn't do it," she said. "And of course, I made the right decision, because..." She paused, but I finished the sentence in my mind: because you had the most amazing and wonderful daughter, and she was the brightest thing in your life until you walked away from her.

"What I wanted to do," she continued, "was raise the baby as a single mother. Which was basically what I ended up doing anyway, because Daniel was never really in our lives. That's why I went to my mother, to tell her I wanted to do it on my own and hoping she'd support me until I could get on my feet. She had plenty of money after dad died, she could have done it."

"So, she wouldn't help at all?"

"Not only that," Giselle replied, "she threatened to cut me off completely if I tried to do that. And she would have turned the rest of the family against me, that's how she operated. I wanted to stand my ground, but I would've been completely on my own with a newborn. I just wasn't willing to put a baby's life at risk like that."

"Don't you think my mom would have helped? I can't imagine she'd let her baby sister end up on the street."

"She had just given birth to your brother Howie, and your dad was struggling financially. They were getting help from mother, and she would have cut them off. She was a tyrant; you just didn't dare cross her." A tear ran down her cheek as she remembered the pain and fear she'd suffered in those dark days.

"So, I married Daniel," she said. "We were never hurting for money, and he wasn't abusive. In fact, he doted on Jenny, on the rare occasions he was around. But he'd go in drinking binges and be gone for days. And he'd move away from us with some other woman and be gone for weeks or months. But then he'd always come back. That was the worst of it. He'd clean up his act for a little while, just long enough to give us hope, and then he'd break our hearts again. I gave up caring eventually, but Jenny always thought we'd become a real family someday."

"So, you stayed with him for Jenny's sake?"

"Also because of pressure from my mother," Giselle said. "She liked the connection to wealth and fame. She could brag to all her friends about her amazing daughter marrying into a fortune and having this beautiful child. So that's who I became to her. Perfect wife, perfect mom. Didn't matter that the marriage was a sham, it was the appearance that mattered."

She'd reached the end of her story. She was no longer crying. She reached into her purse for cosmetics to repair the damage from the tears. I knew my time with her was almost over.

"Why did you react so negatively to Jenny coming out as a lesbian? You wanted to be your own person; why wouldn't you let her be hers?"

"I guess I made the same mistake my mother did," she said. "I tried to make everything perfect for her. I thought we could avoid all the things I went through...that she'd eventually find the perfect guy who made her perfectly happy. But instead..."

"I think she found that," I said. "We want you to come and see that. See that she found perfection and happiness in her life."

"Maybe she did. If so that's great. And I'm not doing anything to get in her way, so why don't we just leave it that." She paused again, and I saw her cheeks reddening in anger.

"And by the way," she said. her voice rising in anger, "if she feels I was unfair about the lesbian thing, guess what? She got her revenge. She put the final nail in the coffin of my marriage when she ratted me out to Daniel for taking a lover. After he'd cheating on me for twenty years. Did perfect little Jenny tell you about that?"

"She told me about it," I said. "I think you and I both know she didn't do it for revenge. I think she feels terrible about how it played out and she would apologize if you gave her the chance."

"At this point in my life," she said, "I don't think I owe anybody in your family another chance. I've got a life out here, without any of you, and it's the happiest I've ever been."

"And I think you'd be even happier if you let your daughter back into your life," I said. "If I didn't believe that I wouldn't be here."

"Look, Jake. You're a great guy. Probably the best of the whole rotten bunch, and you and I always had...I always...I was always fond of you. And that's the only reason I agreed to see you. But guess what, here you are, doing the same thing as the rest of them, trying to pressure me into being what you need me to be. You don't see me as Giselle, you just want me to be Perfect Mom again."

"Yeah, maybe so," I said, anger finally starting to break through. "And maybe Perfect Grandmother too. But I guess I'm just being selfish thinking that way."

"You keep throwing the granddaughter thing in my face!" she shouted. "Do you know the last thing she said to me, right before I left for Maui? 'You're not my mother anymore. You're dead to me.' So, what connection do I have to this baby? The product of a daughter who disclaimed me, and a father we don't even know. Just some stranger who jerked off in a cup. So there, you played the grandmother card, and it didn't work. You got anything else, or can I go salvage the rest of my evening?"

My anger vanished as quickly as it had flared up. I realized I had failed. Maybe I never had a chance anyway, but turning this into a shouting match had left me with nothing.

Well, almost nothing. Maybe I had one card left.

"You're wrong about the father," I said. "It's not some stranger."

"Who is it then?" she asked, a puzzled look replacing her anger.

"I am," I said. "I'm the baby's biological father. And I didn't jerk off in a cup. The baby was conceived the natural way, between two adults who care deeply for each other and wanted to bring a new life into this world."

She couldn't have looked more stunned if I'd slapped her in the face with a large trout. The stone mask had broken, and now a riot of emotions struggled to take control.

"You...you fucked my daughter?" she said. She sounded more amazed that angry or disgusted.

"I did," I told her, "and if you care about that, then you still care about her, and you're lying to yourself if you say you aren't."

That was it. I'd done my best, pathetic as it was. I started toward the doorway but paused one last time before I left her.

"Thank you for hearing me out," I said. "I'm going to take a cab to the airport first thing in the morning and see if I can catch an earlier flight. So, I'll say goodbye now. For what it's worth, I'm glad I got to see you. You're...you've always been really special to me, Giselle. I've missed you."

She sat in stunned silence as I walked away.

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

I tossed and turned for hours. Sleep remained far out of reach. Eventually, I went out onto the little balcony. The moon was nearly full, so I thought I might see its reflection in the nearby ocean, but I couldn't. Maybe there was a patch of fog, or the angle was wrong.

Most of my other senses could pick it up. I could smell the saltwater, and I tasted a light salty mist on my lips. And I could hear it, waves surging in the warm night, restless and sleepless like me. If I knew the path to get there, I might have gone to it to engage my sense of touch. Maybe go for a swim, even at this late hour.

I heard a light tapping somewhere behind me. Some sort of bird or small animal, most likely. I ignored it at first, but there it was again, more insistent.

Someone was knocking lightly on my door.

It was Giselle, of course. We were the only ones in the house. She stood in a pose similar to Christmas Card Giselle, turned at a slight angle and giving me a shy side eye. on cue, she brushed away a strand of her hair, which was now loose and unruly.

She was wearing a cutoff t-shirt and very brief walking shorts. Her nipples were prominent, and her breasts moved freely when she shifted her weight. Oddly, she was wearing hiking boots, and she had something like a soft sided picnic basket slung over her shoulder.

"Did I wake you?" she asked. Her voice calm, rich, beautiful. No trace of the harsh anger from earlier.

"Couldn't sleep," I said. "How was your date?"

"Who said it was a date?" she asked, feigning mild annoyance, but one corner of her mouth gave me the half Mona Lisa.

"I've never seen anyone go grocery shopping dressed like that," I replied. She laughed, and it brought back years and years of happy memories with my beloved aunt.

"The date was a bit of a disappointment," she said.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Would you like to come in?"

"I wanted to show you something," she said. "Would you walk with me?"

"Sure," I said. "I'd like that."

"Sturdy shoes," she said.

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

After accepting my offer to carry the basket, she led me though a gate on the backside if her property. We were on a narrow but well-worn trail. I remembered tales I'd heard of nasty traps set by marijuana growers in the Hawaiian back country. On my own, I would have proceeded slowly and cautiously in the moonlight, or perhaps not gone at all, but Giselle obviously knew the path and set a brisk pace.

After a time, we came to a wider path, maybe a narrow road, and we were able to walk side by side, so conversation was possible.

"Giselle," I said, "I'm really sorry if I ruined your evening."

"Shhhh," she said. "We'll talk when we get there."

So, we proceeded in silence until we branched off onto a narrower, overgrown that I probably wouldn't have spotted even in daylight. The trail ran next to a vegetation-covered fence, and then we came to a gate. Not a broken-down old gate, but something six feet tall and sturdy. Giselle worked the combination lock while I looked at the large NO TRESPASSING sign.

"Don't worry, I know these people," she said.

We walked a bit further, passed through an unlocked gate and came to top of a low rise. We'd reached the ocean. The moonlight reflected on the water in a beautiful little cove. I could hear waves crashing in the distance, but the cove was protected, and its surface was quiet.

We walked closer to the water, and she took the basket from me. She took out a blanket and spread it on a grassy area just behind the beginning of the sand.

"What is this place?" I asked. "It's beautiful."

"It's a very special place, filled with mermaid magic," she said. "It means something to me...I'll tell you after we swim."

"We're going in?"

"Not yet," she said. "Let's talk some more."

"Okay," I said. I had a fairly good idea what her first question would be, but she kept me hanging for a moment as she watched the moonlight sparkling on the cove.

"Jake," she said finally, "please tell me about how you ended up getting my daughter pregnant." Yup, I nailed it. Fortunately, her voice was calm. No anger, just curiosity.

"I mean, I shouldn't be too shocked," she continued before I could answer. "You two seemed very close, very connected, like..."

"Like us," I said. She smiled, and the moonlight caught her eyes.

"Like us," she agreed. "I guess what I really want to know...was it planned?"

"Yes," I said, "but it almost wasn't."

"That requires more explanation," she said.

"When we actually conceived, that was planned," I told Giselle. "Jenny and Dalia asked me to be the father, and I agreed. But something happened about a month before that, before we'd reached that...arrangement. Dalia had to go out of town for a couple of days, and I went to visit Jenny. We were both going through some emotional stuff at the time, and... we slept together. Without protection."

"Did Dalia find out?"

"Jenny told her," I said.

"And she didn't have a problem with that?" asked Giselle incredulously.

"No," I said. "They had already been talking about getting a sperm donor and making a baby, so Dalia agreed they'd keep the baby if Jenny ended up pregnant. She didn't, but we tried again the next month, and got it done on the first official try."

"Wow," said Giselle, shaking her head. "That's quite a story. I'm surprised Dalia wasn't jealous. I think you and Jenny are lucky you didn't destroy that relationship."

"Well, first off, it helps that Dalia and I are also very close," I said. "So, she knows this wasn't about hurting her. And she understands that Jenny have a special relationship that's hard to define. But the main thing is, Dalia is very confident and secure. Maybe more than anyone I know. She's not afraid I'm going to take Jenny away, and she knows it makes Jenny happy to have me around, so she makes room for us."

"She sounds like quite a remarkable person."

"She really is," I said. "I hope you meet her. I can't imagine you wouldn't end up liking her."

Giselle gazed at the smooth water again for a moment.

"What I don't get," she said finally, "is why Jenny defines herself as a lesbian, but she seems so willing to jump into bed with a man. With you. Do you think bisexual might be a better term? Or is she really still just figuring this out?"

"I think she knows who she is," I said. "I don't mean to be argumentative, that's just how it looks to me. The...the man thing, I think is more biological. She tells me that her, um, libido kind of goes crazy when she's, uh, fertile..."

"Oh, THAT," Giselle said, and then shocked me by breaking into uproarious laughter for half a minute. Finally, I got it.

"You too," I said.

"Yeah, me too." She still had a big grin and wiped a tear from her eye, this time a tear of laughter. "I thought I was just some kind of freak. Turns out it's genetic, apparently."

"Wow," I said. "Well, I suppose that may explain some things about Grandma."

"Noooo!" she shrieked and punched me hard in the arm. "How could you put that image in my head, you evil boy!" Her laughter echoed off the rocks at the mouth of the cove.

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

We were lying on our sides now, facing each other. Not close enough to kiss, had we been inclined to do that, but still quite intimate. I was lying oh so close to the most beautiful woman I knew, in the most romantic place I had ever been, talking about sex. My cock contemplated this, and decided it was time to go from rock hard to diamond hard. I shifted awkwardly, trying to make a subtle adjustment. I was fairly sure Giselle noticed, but she didn't say anything.

"So, this biological thing," I asked her. "Does it go away over the years, or does it, ummm..."

"For god's sake, Jake," she said, but she was smiling.

"Asking for Jenny, of course," I said.

"Oh, right, of course." Eyebrow arched, struggling not to laugh.

"So..."

"So, it gets easier to manage," she said. "But, based on recent data, no, it doesn't seem to just fade away."

"How recent?" I asked.

"Oh my god," she said, rolling her eyes, but the smile was still there. I waited her out.

"Tonight," she breathed at last.

"So, your date..."

"Yeah, I was going to get my world rocked tonight, wasn't even planning on coming home, but I was kind of distracted after that little discussion you and I had this evening. So, the poor man went home disappointed."