Current mood: blessed

Hi Everyone,

My latest release for eXtasy Books, Shipwreck Bay is available at 9pm PDT/midnight EDT. I have been reflecting on the fact that it is a "Fantasy Game" story - mine is around 7.500 words - very short for me. I write that in about a day but this story as I said before was based on something that really happened to me so it was like extracting long poisonous thorns from my body as I wrote about the hero Dragan’s anguish.

Of course, Dragan’s story has a happy ending. My relationship did not. I saw my ex at a function yesterday when my close friend Jackie Kallen was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame. It was quite an event and I was having laughs a million with my pals Norma and Twink (yes, that really is her name), dissing the food, the long speeches and I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but there was my ex strolling towards me under those halogen lights.

My body reacted the way it always did when it saw him. I was instantly switched on, electrified...the desire to strip and get under the sheets was still there. How weird! I kept thinking. Then I had to remind myself, we didn’t break up because love and passion weren’t there. We broke up because he cheated on me with two people and I left him. That doesn’t mean your body stopped reacting to him. Or your foolish heart.

So all these thoughts ripped through my brain which then reacted the way it has since he hurt me. I wanted to scream and shout obscenities. My friends deftly removed the fork from my fist and stuck a bread roll in my mouth.

How odd after two years to still have that chemical response. He finally reached our table, sexy and bad as all hell and said, "Hey."

That’s profund, right? He was trying to read me, how open I was to his intrusion and the interesting thing was, past that momentary natural response, I was able to act quite normally. I managed to exchange pleasantries.

And then I realized I was left with nothing to say.  I honestly had nothing to say to the man who once filled my world and when he circled back later and whispered in my ear from behind, "Let’s go home and fuck," I actually laughed out loud. Was he joking?

Apparently not. When my friends looked at him and I had to mop the tears from my eyes with my lunch napkin, he realized he’d stumbled, or fumbled or whatever you want to call it.

"Be a lamb," Norma said to him, oblivious of our history, of gaping, bloody wounds invisible to the eye. "And please go find me some bread rolls? The food really sucks."

My ex wandered off and I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t return with the bread. I wasn’t surprised that he soon left the banquet. I think love is so fragile and I have no idea honestly what he feels for me. It isn’t love. There is still some physical attraction there, undeniably. But what is left is like a shipwreck. Plenty of debris that will eventually was ashore or disappear to the depths. But it is debris. Some of it is no longer recongizable as what it was...once a thing of wonder.

I think my ex finally realized last night at that banquet room in a crappy casino, as S.E. Hinton once said, "There are some things broken that can never be fixed."

My ex was sitting at a poker table as we all left and he got up from the table and walked me to the stairs. He said he was losing. "I had all the chips when I had you," he told me. "I just didn’t treat them very gently."

I gave him a smile and walked out into the twilight of Los Angeles and felt such deep loss for those words. Two years too late. But I am sure they cost him more than he lost at poker last night.

Aloha oe,

A.J.

Currently listening : Evolution of Poi By Henry Kapono