The winter hadn't been difficult, but it had been long, and in any long stretch away from home there were difficult days. He missed Zelda. He didn't say so in his letters home. He told himself it was because it was needless to say; that she already knew. Really it was because he was afraid that when she replied she would say then come home. She hadn't asked him to stay behind this year to help her take care of the baby, but she also hadn't told him she was going to quit the Ministry until it had already happened. Alfred didn't think she was keeping anything from him, but it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that she didn't know what she needed or wanted right now, until all of the sudden she did. And he did not want Zelda to tell him to come home. Part of him was already home. The Voyager; the dark waves; the wind filling the sails. He loved Zelda and their child, but he did not want to be told to come home. He wasn't ready to be home again.
The dichotomy wasn't new, but it was more acute this year. Maybe because of the baby, but maybe because Zelda hadn't yet seemed herself when he'd left, so things back in England felt unfinished. Some days it bothered him more than others; sometimes he hardly felt it at all. When it was particularly sore, drifting back to the edge of his thoughts like so much troublesome driftwood on a high tide, he had no one to talk to about it. Pablo would listen, but he didn't have a wife or a family, so he didn't really understand. Jo, Alfred had thought, might have understood. They didn't talk any more, and he had no idea how she felt about her child or even where the baby had come from, at the end of the day, but if anyone might have understood the pull to go when there was so much to stay for, it might have been her. So she'd been on his mind more this winter than she had been for a long time, and then in their last port call he'd had too much to drink and done something stupid. How stupid was something he was trying not to spend too much time thinking about — he didn't remember exactly what he'd said in the letter he'd apparently sent her, but anything at all was mortifying enough. It almost made him miss the days when the worst trouble an over-indulging sailor might find themselves in was to wake up dangling upside-down from the mast.
His birthday might have been over a week ago, but Alfred was going through dinner as though he still had a hangover, nursing a single pint of weak beer long enough that it had grown lukewarm. The woman's voice surprised him and his first thought was that she was probably a prostitute. English itself wasn't rare in Capetown, but her lack of accent was; the local dialects had a different cadence that typically carried over to any language spoken. The exceptions would have been travelers, which typically didn't mean women dining alone in pubs, or prostitutes who had worked hard on an accent that would make their customers feel comfortable.
"Not interested in —" he started as he turned, and then recognized her. He stopped mid-sentence and his mouth fell open, and it took nearly two full seconds before he'd recovered himself enough to close it again. "Fuck me," he muttered, tone not exasperated but rather astonished.
The dichotomy wasn't new, but it was more acute this year. Maybe because of the baby, but maybe because Zelda hadn't yet seemed herself when he'd left, so things back in England felt unfinished. Some days it bothered him more than others; sometimes he hardly felt it at all. When it was particularly sore, drifting back to the edge of his thoughts like so much troublesome driftwood on a high tide, he had no one to talk to about it. Pablo would listen, but he didn't have a wife or a family, so he didn't really understand. Jo, Alfred had thought, might have understood. They didn't talk any more, and he had no idea how she felt about her child or even where the baby had come from, at the end of the day, but if anyone might have understood the pull to go when there was so much to stay for, it might have been her. So she'd been on his mind more this winter than she had been for a long time, and then in their last port call he'd had too much to drink and done something stupid. How stupid was something he was trying not to spend too much time thinking about — he didn't remember exactly what he'd said in the letter he'd apparently sent her, but anything at all was mortifying enough. It almost made him miss the days when the worst trouble an over-indulging sailor might find themselves in was to wake up dangling upside-down from the mast.
His birthday might have been over a week ago, but Alfred was going through dinner as though he still had a hangover, nursing a single pint of weak beer long enough that it had grown lukewarm. The woman's voice surprised him and his first thought was that she was probably a prostitute. English itself wasn't rare in Capetown, but her lack of accent was; the local dialects had a different cadence that typically carried over to any language spoken. The exceptions would have been travelers, which typically didn't mean women dining alone in pubs, or prostitutes who had worked hard on an accent that would make their customers feel comfortable.
"Not interested in —" he started as he turned, and then recognized her. He stopped mid-sentence and his mouth fell open, and it took nearly two full seconds before he'd recovered himself enough to close it again. "Fuck me," he muttered, tone not exasperated but rather astonished.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER