The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 6: Gent
Coming of Age Sex Story: Chapter 6: Gent - He died at seventy-nine and woke at twenty, same body, same year: 2003, in Leuven, the whole thing still ahead of him. James knows what's coming: the crashes, the fortunes, the people he'll lose. This time he'll go slow, build quiet, keep his head. But a second life is still a life, and knowing the future doesn't make it hurt less when it arrives. Least of all when it's her.
Caution: This Coming of Age Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Romantic Heterosexual Fiction Military Rags To Riches Restart School Sports DoOver Cream Pie Exhibitionism First Oral Sex Safe Sex Voyeurism Geeks Slow AI Generated
On the last Saturday of November, I woke before the alarm and lay still while the room waited for orders.
The notebook was open on the desk. Roadwork at seven. Anatomy review at nine. Laundry before noon. Train to Gent written in the afternoon column, underlined once, as if a city could be handled by scheduling it. I had added the return time too. A man could pretend a visit was spontaneous until he had already chosen which train would bring him back to discipline.
The house was quiet except for the radiator and one soft cough from the room beside mine. Morning had not yet gathered enough courage to become day. I lay there and looked at the ceiling, aware of my body in the narrow bed, of the ache in the shoulder from bag rounds, of the stiffness in my neck from the boy at the gym, of the pleasant soreness that meant the body had worked and not broken. The room smelled faintly of soap, old wood, and the coffee I had spilled the night before and failed to clean properly because even systems have borders.
Gent waited in the notebook.
Lizzy waited outside it.
I got up, ran, showered, ate two eggs and bread, burned the first piece of toast because I was thinking about train times instead of water, and cursed softly enough not to wake the house. By ten, I had reviewed anatomy with the clean, punitive focus of a man trying not to admit that his mind had already left Leuven. At eleven, I closed the book and looked at the page I had read three times without absorbing.
Then I went to Marieke.
She opened the door in a sweater too large for her, hair pinned badly, pen behind one ear. There was ink on the side of her thumb. She looked at me, then down at the envelope of notes in my hand, then back at my face.
“You brought work,” she said.
“I was passing by.”
“You are a terrible liar in the mornings.”
“I’m not lying. I was passing by.”
“With work.”
“Yes.”
“Like a man bringing a chaperone.”
That was close enough to truth that I looked away.
She stepped back and let me in. Her room had the warm disorder of active intelligence: papers on the desk, two cups, an open book face down on the bed, one sock near the chair as if abandoned during an argument. I had begun to like that she did not make rooms ready for me. It meant she expected me to survive them as they were.
“You’re going to Gent today,” she said.
“Yes.”
“To see Lizzy.”
“Yes.”
She took the notes from my hand, placed them on the desk without looking at them, and leaned back against it. “You made a schedule for seeing her.”
“I make schedules for everything.”
“Yes,” she said. “That is the disease speaking in complete sentences.”
I smiled because she had earned it.
She did not smile back immediately. “Is she old history?”
“Yes.”
“That was fast.”
“I mean I’ve known her a long time.”
“I know what you meant. I am objecting to what you avoided.”
The radiator clicked beside the wall. Somewhere downstairs a door closed, followed by the faint sound of someone dragging a chair over floorboards. Marieke watched me in the quiet way that did not permit me to decorate the silence.
“She was my best friend,” I said.
“Was?”
“Is.”
“Better.”
I put my hands in my pockets and took them out again because it made me look younger than I felt. “We grew up near each other. She knew me before I knew how to be around people.”
Marieke’s face changed slightly, adjusted around the information. “That is not small.”
“No.”
“And you put her in the afternoon column.”
“Yes.”
She nodded once, as if some private suspicion had been confirmed. “Do not make her a test.”
“Of what?”
“Whether you have changed enough. Whether the boy she knew still gets a vote.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“No. That is why I said it now.”
I wanted to tell her that Lizzy was not a test. That Gent was not an escape. That I was not using one woman to measure the distance from another, or one city to prove the room no longer held me. All of it sounded suspect before it reached my mouth.
Marieke came closer and corrected my collar. The gesture had no practical purpose. Her fingers lingered a moment at my throat.
“Go,” she said.
“That sounded almost generous.”
“I can be generous when it is efficient.”
“Is this efficient?”
“No.” Her thumb moved once over the seam of my shirt. “But it may be necessary.”
I looked at her hand rather than her face.
“James.”
I looked up.
“If she matters, do not punish her for having mattered before you were ready.”
The sentence landed quietly and stayed.
“I’ll try.”
“I know.” She stepped back. “That is why I am worried.”
The train to Gent was full of students pretending not to be tired.
They sat in clusters with bags between their knees, scarves undone, hair still damp from showers taken too late, voices rising and falling with the rhythm of the tracks. A girl across the aisle highlighted notes with the grave attention of someone colouring a map out of enemy territory. Two boys near the doors argued about football with the same certainty men reserve for subjects beyond their influence. The window held a pale version of my face and, beyond it, November fields spread flat and wet under a sky that had not decided whether to rain.
I opened my anatomy notes.
I closed them again.
My phone buzzed before the first change.
Do not behave like a tragic man on a train.
I had planned to look quietly out of the window.
Exactly.
There are fields. They invite reflection.
Fields are innocent. Do not involve them.
I smiled down at the screen.
How is your work?
Annoying. Predictable. Less emotionally evasive than you.
Low standard.
Correct.
I put the phone away and looked out anyway.
I knew the Lizzy from home. I knew the Lizzy who had stood outside the bakery with sun on her hair and told me not to disappear in Leuven. I knew the Lizzy I had lost once by never trying, by standing close enough to call it friendship and far enough to keep myself safe. I did not know the woman waiting in Gent.
That should have comforted me. Instead it made the train seem faster.
In the first life, Lizzy had become a series of absences. Missed birthdays. Delayed replies. A wedding invitation I had held in my hand for too long before writing that duty would keep me away. Photographs seen years late, her smile caught beside a man who looked kind enough to make resentment impossible. I had turned her into proof of my own restraint because calling it cowardice would have required changing.
Now she was twenty, alive, and in Gent.
So was I.
The phone buzzed again before the train reached Gent.
Still coming?
On the train.
Good. I was worried Leuven might refuse to release you.
It tried. I negotiated.
Did you bring medical books?
I looked at the anatomy notes on the seat beside me.
No.
Liar.
One envelope.
That is a medical student’s idea of spontaneity.
I am learning.
We’ll see.
I put the phone away and did not touch the notes again.
Lizzy was waiting beneath the station clock with her hands in the pockets of a dark coat, hair loose around her face, cheeks pink from the cold. Gent-Sint-Pieters moved around her in waves: students, older couples, men with briefcases, girls laughing too loudly, people pulling bags with damaged wheels over stone. She stood still inside it all, not as someone waiting to be found, but as someone who had chosen a place and expected the world to arrange itself around the decision.
For a second I saw the girl from home.
Then she turned and saw me.
The smile came first. Familiar. Immediate. Then her eyes changed. They moved over my face, my shoulders, the way I stood, the bag in my hand. Not slowly enough to be rude. Not quickly enough to hide.
“You look different,” she said.
“I passed an exam. It was very transformative.”
“No,” she said. “Not that.”
She stepped forward and hugged me.
Memory had kept her still. Time had not. She was the same height and not the same height, the same warmth and not the same warmth, the same person held in a body that had continued without asking permission from the past. Her hair smelled of cold air and shampoo. Her hands pressed briefly against my back, then tightened as if she had noticed the shape beneath the coat and did not know what to do with that information.
I did not hold too long.
She noticed that too.
When she pulled back, she looked almost annoyed.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“That sounded like a full nothing.”
“It is. Very complete.”
She turned toward the exit before I could answer, and I followed her into Gent.
The city received us in damp stone and tram noise. Leuven had weight; Gent had theatre. Canals appeared where streets seemed to forget themselves. Bicycles leaned against old walls with the casual confidence of citizens. Posters layered over posters on boards near the station, concerts and debates and student parties already half torn by weather. Everything felt looser here, not less serious, but less willing to admit seriousness in public.
Lizzy walked beside me with the ease of someone who had begun learning a city by body rather than map.
“You look well too,” I said.
“Too?”
“You started.”
“I said different.”
“You meant well.”
“I meant different.”
“Reduced contempt?”
“That is someone else’s phrase.”
I looked at her.
She smiled. “Pieter said you had acquired people.”
“Pieter suffers from narrative inflation.”
“He also said you became hard to describe, which for Pieter is almost a medical emergency.”
“Is that why you invited me? Diagnostic curiosity?”
“Partly.”
“And the other part?”
She looked ahead, hair moving in the damp wind. “I missed you.”
The old James would have taken the words and built a house in them. The man walking beside her only let them enter.
“I missed you too,” I said.
She glanced at me. Something in her face registered the difference between hunger and answer.
Then she looked away first.
Her friends were waiting in a café near a narrow street that seemed to exist mostly to argue with umbrellas.
The place smelled of coffee, wet wool, beer from the night before, and something sweet baking behind the counter. Tables crowded too close together. Students occupied them with coats on chair backs and notebooks pushed aside for cups. A man near the window read a newspaper with the solemnity of a judge. Music played low enough to be felt as mood rather than heard as song.
Fien saw us first. She had short blonde hair, quick hands, and the open, interested face of someone who enjoyed people before deciding whether they deserved it. Beside her sat Annelies, darker, thinner, with clever eyes and a mouth that looked as if it had been born knowing other people’s secrets. Bram stood when Lizzy approached, though not quite for the table. For Lizzy.
He was tall, fair-haired, good-looking in the tidy way of men who know which shirts suit them. He touched Lizzy’s shoulder as he greeted her, light and familiar, a gesture small enough to deny and large enough to be seen.
Lizzy’s mouth tightened for half a second.
I saw it and gave him my hand.
“James,” I said.
“Bram.”
His grip was firm, a fraction firmer than necessary. That was fine. Some men introduce themselves twice, once with the mouth and once with the hand.
Fien smiled at me. “So you’re the medical student.”
“One of many.”
“No,” she said. “Lizzy made you sound singular.”
Lizzy sat down too quickly. “I did not.”
“You did,” Annelies said. “But with restraint, which is worse.”
I took the empty chair beside Fien and across from Lizzy. Bram sat on Lizzy’s other side, not touching now, but close enough that the arrangement spoke for him.
I had learned how to enter rooms in Leuven. In Gent, I had to learn how to enter hers.
The first twenty minutes were easy because they were not simple. Fien studied art history and asked questions as if answers were doors she expected to open. Annelies studied languages and corrected Bram’s French pronunciation twice without mercy. Bram was in political science, which explained some things and excused none of them. Lizzy seemed different among them. Brighter, quicker to laugh, more willing to interrupt. At home, she had always carried part of the room for me. Here, she spent herself more freely.
I liked seeing it.
I disliked liking it from the outside.
“So,” Bram said after the second round of coffee arrived, “Pieter says you are becoming famous in Leuven.”
Lizzy’s eyes moved to him.
“Pieter says many things,” she said.
“He said there was a party before everyone left.”
Fien leaned forward. “A party sounds promising.”
“It was mostly beer and poor judgment,” I said.
Annelies smiled. “That describes most youth.”
“Is anyone else cold?” Fien said, and pulled her sleeves down over her hands. Nobody answered her.
Bram watched me. “Nora was mentioned.”
Old-town gossip had found the table with its shoes wet.
Lizzy looked into her coffee. Not embarrassed exactly. Attentive.
I put my cup down. “Pieter needs a hobby.”
“He made it sound dramatic,” Bram said.
“Pieter can make buying bread sound like a siege.”
Fien laughed. “That is useful. We need more people like that.”
“No,” Lizzy said. “We do not.”
Annelies tilted her head. “And was it dramatic?”
The table watched me. Not cruelly, except perhaps Bram, and even that was more performance than malice. They were curious because stories from other cities arrive already shaped.
“No,” I said. “It was private.”
That changed the table more effectively than detail would have. Fien’s smile softened. Annelies looked amused in a more respectful way. Bram opened his mouth, thought better of it, and drank.
Lizzy looked at me then. The old Lizzy would have expected me to vanish under the attention. The new James remained at the table.
Fien, perhaps to rescue or perhaps because she wanted to, turned the conversation toward medicine. “Do you like it?”
“Medicine?”
“No, being mysterious at cafés. Yes, medicine.”
“I like the work.”
“That is not the same answer.”
“No.”
She waited, chin in hand.
I considered the question properly because she had asked it properly. “I like that the body does not care what story you tell about it. It works or fails according to rules. There is comfort in that.”
Fien watched me a little too closely. “That is a strange kind of comfort.”
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