The Third Time
He stopped coming back after the second time.
She had waited on that bluff all day for dusk, and dusk had came and went, but there was no green flash to announce his arrival.
If she were truly honest with herself, she might have been disappointed. She might have been angry even. But it wasn't something that she did not expect. It had nothing to do, she knew, with the fact that she had aged and he did not, something they had both been painfully aware of when he had last landed a decade ago.
The first time he had returned, once the frenzied lovemaking was over, once her buttons were in place again, there was a silence.
"How are you?" he had asked at last, in a quiet voice. His eyes held shadows in them which she had not remembered; Lord only knew what he had seen in that other place, she shuddered as she considered it later, alone in her bed. But then again, there were shadows in her own eyes now. While he dealt in death, she had been busy in the new life they had created.
Money was hard to come by. Doubtlessly, her father had left her some inheritance, but for a growing boy and a grown woman, that had hardly amounted to much. Determined to survive, she had resorted to every last means short of selling her body in order to make ends meet. Once, she was the pampered daughter of the town's governor with at least two personal maids at her beck and call, not counting the household staff. Then, she found herself knocking on the doors of women who had once been her playmates, and who had once held her in awe for her parentage all but begging for a position in their household staff.
How was she supposed to tell him, that while he was off fulfilling his divine purpose, she was here struggling from day to day? How was he supposed to understand the mundane indignities she put up with simply to keep herself and their son alive?
As he waited for an answer, she knew it would be unfair to thrust these things at him.
It wasn't his fault his heart was cut out after all.
"Go play with your boy," was all she said to him at last, with a smile that did not quite reach her eyes.
The second time he had returned, his touches were more hesitant, as though he was handling a strange woman. There was heartache in the shadows of both their eyes. The silence was deafening, and stretched out between them, squeezing at their chests.
Their son was an apprentice to the blacksmith, quietly resentful of his father who did not look a day older than him.
"I'm sorry," he had whispered in her graying hair, grasping a calloused hand to his heart, his arm wrapped around her ever-aging, frail frame.
"I'm so sorry,"
As the dawn of the second day approached, she turned away from the view of the horizon and begin to walk home, where her son slumbered with his young bride. Her son who had never heard the call of the sea, the way it had once tugged at her very being.
There was simply nothing to see across the ocean.