My lovely long-legged blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me this story over a long period. She'd always hinted at having a dark secret, a shadow from her teens that carried over into her late twenties. This is what she finally told me, back in 2012:
I can't stop fantasising about my uncle (for clarification - he's my mothers cousin, but I shall refer to his as my uncle for convenience). He must be...62ish now. He's tall and tan and solid. He owns a pub in the outback in Australia. I first met him when I was in my mid teens, he taught me how to blow smoke rings, we drank sambuca and we fucked. Now I can't stop thinking about the last time I saw him...it must have been 2008? Or 2009? It was at a family funeral. When I saw him after the funeral I went up to him and hugged him. Brushing my hands around his waist, I felt something like an electric shock. 'Hey there, beautiful' he whispered in my ear, then kissed my cheek. An hour or so later I noticed him watching me, and nodding his head towards the bathroom. I swallowed the rest of my gin & tonic and walked ahead of him. I was wearing black heels and a black skirt. After he shut the door, he ran his fingers up my thigh, lifted my skirt and kissed my bare cunt.
I need him again.
And again, another story, some months later, in the spring of 2013---
it has been years. but there will never be anyone else. i met him when i was 17. not so young, i suppose. but give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. cards on the table, right from the beginning. first cousin once removed is the technical term. and thirty-odd years between us. our first night together i was drunk. sambuca flowed through my veins. but it was electric. i knew at the time it was different to anything i'd ever felt before. i didn't know that i'd never feel anything like it since. it was a cheap motel room. we fucked countless times that night, then the next day he flew back to australia. a month later he flew me to his pub in the outback. we had a whole month together. to date, that was the longest time we ever spent together. i started to understand that it was love. we'd pour drinks at his bar all night, then take a bottle upstairs with us. we would drink and talk until dawn. the sex was amazing. he went down on me for hours. i'd had men before...but not like this. i felt so powerful, so needed, and so loved.
we've been together all over the place. vancouver, tokyo, auckland, sydney, the outback, fiji, wellington. we steal long weekends. we fly each other wherever, whenever we have the chance. for a long time i wouldn't let him cum in my cunt. my mouth was fine, preferred. i got over that though. its been ten years now. and nobody touches me like he does. nobody looks at me like he does. he is the only man i want, and i can never have him.
“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”
and i have tried to not let it consume me. i slept with men his age. boys my own age. girls. there is only him. i've had long-term boyfriends, who thought nothing when i flew to fiji for a 'girls weekend' and spent four blissful days with his tongue in my cunt and his arms around my waist. when i flew to vancouver with friends he arranged to be there for a weekend too...i told them i was catching up with my uncle, and had his hand in my cunt in the lift up to his hotel room. another time we were together for four nights in auckland. we stayed at a house in devonport, and it was like this 'what we could have been' experience. we cooked for each other, and read aloud to each other. we played cards, and mixed each other drinks. we walked around naked. we bathed together. we came together all week. it was agony to catch the plane home after that.
he is my addiction. we're a chemical reaction.
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
some nights i stay up late, drinking straight bourbon and smoking. habits i learnt from him, of course. they aren't my only bad habits. on those same nights i might cut and purge. i didn't pick up those habits from him, but i'd say he inspired them. it would kill him to hear me say that. what we have together chokes me. it annihilates me. it is everything, yet it can never be anything. how did it end up like this? i was young and drunk, our first night together should have been just that, a drunken regret. not the start of an affair which would come to both doom and define me.
and a few weeks ago i got a text. i will see him soon.
this is my secret.
I told other, trusted girls about the stories, and they always doubted it. It was too pat, the said, too cliched. That my Wellington friend has always liked older men isn't open to doubt, but her "uncle" ('first cousin once removed') as the key affair in her life? Well...it is a bit too much like a soft-erotica novel, isn't it? And certain things don't quite hold up.
He owns a pub in the Australian outback? Okay, fine. But her stories include tales of him taking her off for weekends--- or weeks ---in Fiji, Noumea, Japan, and every major city and beach resort in Australia (ten days in a rented villa in Noosa Heads, a week in Cairns), as well as a rendezvous in Vancouver and that rented house in Devonport, an Auckland beach suburb. He owns a pub--- a perfectly respectable social status, but how does he afford to fly her everywhere or fly to meet her? Three nights at the Fairmont Hotel in Vancouver? How did he--- and he is supposedly married ---afford that, or explain just suddenly needing to jet off to the States and Canada?
The affair has, according to my friend, lasted since since she was seventeen. That's almost half her life. No one has never discovered the affair. Not his wife, not her family. A month after they first fell into bed, he flew her to Australia for a month. How did she explain that--- at seventeen or eighteen ---to her parents? How did he explain to his wife that a blonde teen distant relative would suddenly be arriving and staying? How did she hide it from all her various boyfriends (and her supposed first husband) for sixteen or seventeen years?
She calls him B., though whether that stands for Bryan, Bob, or Bill I'll never know. She was claiming as recently as last summer to still be calling him frequently, to still be longing for him and planning or hoping to go with him to Mauritius or the Maldives. Nonetheless, it doesn't hold together. Too many security risks, too much time and money involved. As much as I care about my NZ friend, I can't believe the story. Her "uncle" B. would be almost seventy now. I don't know that he was ever real; I don't know what to think of any of this.
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