The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 7: Walls
Coming of Age Sex Story: Chapter 7: Walls - 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
I went to Marieke straight from the station.
The sensible choice was my room, my notes, a late meal, sleep, perhaps a short entry in the notebook that would make Gent look smaller by giving it lines and headings. I could still feel the train in my legs when I crossed Leuven, the faint sway of metal and track continuing under the pavement. My bag pulled at my shoulder. The city had gone wet and dark around me. Students moved in pairs under umbrellas. Lights shone in upper windows. Somewhere, someone was playing music too loudly for the hour and not loudly enough to be happy.
Marieke opened the door wearing a dark shirt and no shoes.
She took one look at me and said, “Gent followed you home.”
“Yes.”
“Did you invite it in?”
“I tried not to.”
“That is rarely enough.”
She did not step back immediately. Her hand stayed on the edge of the door. Behind her, the room was warm, lamplit, scattered with papers and books and the smell of coffee gone cold. The sight of it hit me harder than expected. Recognition. The desk where she worked. The cup near the stack of articles. The sweater on the chair. The bed at the far wall, made badly.
“Are you here because of her?” she asked.
The safe answer was no. The truthful answer needed more care.
“No,” I said. “I am here because I wanted you before I reached Leuven.”
Her eyes stayed on mine.
“Better,” she said, and stepped aside.
I entered. She closed the door behind me, and the click of it sounded too loud.
I set my bag down. For a second neither of us moved. The distance between us was small and full of things that had not been named properly. Gent. Lizzy. The platform. The hug. The precise woman. The train text. Marieke standing barefoot in front of me, knowing too much and asking anyway.
Then she crossed the room and put her hand on my chest.
“You are cold,” she said.
“I walked.”
“Heroic.”
“I thought you liked practical men.”
“I like practical men when they do not confuse discomfort with virtue.”
Her hand moved under my coat and pushed it open. I helped her because suddenly the coat was intolerable. She took it from my shoulders and dropped it over the chair without looking. Her fingers went to my shirt next, closing once in the fabric as if testing whether I would remain.
I had thought of Marieke all afternoon as mind: precision, questions, the clean cruelty of accuracy. At her door, with her hand fisted in my shirt and her mouth already close enough to make thought stupid, I remembered the rest of her. Skin. Heat. The slight hollow at her throat. The small dimple low on her back my thumb always found before thought did. The weight of her breast in my hand. The way her nipple tightened under my tongue while she tried, unsuccessfully, to make breathing look voluntary.
She saw the change in my face.
“There,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“You came back.”
“I said I would.”
“No.” Her fingers opened the first button of my shirt. “You came back.”
The difference reached me at the same time her mouth did.
The kiss was not careful. It was a decision made with teeth and breath and the hard press of her body against mine. I backed her into the door, or she pulled me there; afterward, neither version seemed more true. Her hands were in my hair, then at my collar, then dragging the shirt from my trousers with an impatience that made my blood turn fast and dark. I caught her wrist once, not to stop her, only to feel the strength in it. She made a sound into my mouth that was almost annoyance.
“Do not start managing this,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You were considering it.”
“I stopped.”
“Good.”
She bit my lower lip, hard enough to make the room shift. I put both hands on her waist and felt her breathe. She was warm through the shirt. Alive in a way no memory could compete with, because memory had no pulse under my palms and no impatience with my hesitation. I kissed down the side of her neck and felt her head tilt, granting access as if granting a dangerous argument more time.
Her shirt came off badly. One sleeve caught at her wrist. She swore softly, and I laughed once against her collarbone.
“Do not laugh at me while undressing me.”
“I would never.”
“You are doing it.”
“I am admiring the tactical problem.”
She freed her hand and shoved the shirt against my chest. “Solve it quietly.”
I did not solve it quietly.
The bra was black, plain, practical, and somehow obscene because it was hers. I touched her through it first, the curve of her breast filling my palm, the nipple already hard beneath fabric. Her breath caught. She gave me a look as if I had made a point too early in a debate.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do not sound pleased with yourself.”
“I’m pleased with you.”
Her face changed before she could discipline it.
Then she reached behind herself and unfastened the bra with a sharp efficiency that made me ache. It fell between us. I looked at her because not looking would have been false discipline.
Her breasts were warm and weighted in the yellow lamplight, moving with her breath, nipples dark and tightened, skin marked faintly by the edge of the bra. I lowered my mouth to one and felt her hand close in my hair. When my tongue circled her nipple, her breath broke, then returned with effort. I drew her deeper into my mouth and felt the small, helpless shift of her hips against me.
“James.”
Her voice had changed. That was my undoing more than her body, though the body was doing its own thorough work. I wanted her with an almost humiliating specificity: the heat of her skin under my hands, the give of her stomach when she stopped holding it in, the firm curve of her backside when I pulled her against me, the softness at the inside of her thigh, her mouth when she was serious and when she stopped being able to remain so. I wanted the taste of her. I wanted the wet proof that she wanted me too.
She knew. Of course she knew. Cruelty was unnecessary where accuracy would do.
“Say it,” she said.
“What?”
“What you are trying to turn into restraint.”
I lifted my head. Her eyes were dark and bright and too close.
“I want you,” I said.
“That is not news.”
“I want your skin. Your mouth. Your breasts. Your taste.” The words came slower after that, less polished because wanting them polished would have been another kind of hiding. “I want my hands on you. I want you wet because of me. I want you to stop thinking long enough to hate me for it afterward.”
Her mouth parted.
Then she kissed me so hard my back hit the wall beside the door.
“Bed,” she said.
We did not reach it cleanly. My shirt ended up half off, trapped at one elbow. She laughed against my mouth, breathless and surprised, and the sound did more damage to my control than her hands. I got the shirt free. She opened my belt. I lifted her, and her legs went around me with a certainty that sent heat straight through the body and into the place beneath thought.
At the bed she turned me instead, pushed me down, and stood between my knees with her hands at the fastening of her trousers.
“You look very sure of yourself,” I said.
“I am not sure of myself. I am sure of you looking.”
She pushed the trousers down with her underwear, stepped out of them, and stood there naked in the lamplight.
For once, desire made me quiet.
Marieke put one knee on the bed beside me. I reached for her. She let me touch her hip, her thigh, the curve of her backside, the dimple low on her back when she leaned over me and took my face in both hands.
“Here,” she said. “Not Gent. Not the train. Not whatever tragic cathedral you build inside your head when left unsupervised. Here.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
I kissed her stomach. Her fingers moved through my hair, then tightened when I went lower. She smelled of soap and skin and the private heat of a woman who had already chosen the answer and was now making me earn the rest of it. I parted her with my hands and put my mouth on her.
She swore once, quietly.
Then she stopped trying to speak.
I knew enough now to know the first place my tongue made her hips shift. I knew she pretended not to like my hands firm on her thighs until the moment I loosened them and she told me, with considerable irritation, not to become decorative. I knew she made less sound when pleasure frightened her than when it merely pleased her. I knew that if I looked up too soon she would accuse me of vanity, and if I did not look at all she would accuse me of hiding.
So I did both wrong, and she dragged me upward by the hair just enough to make her point.
“Present,” she said.
“I am.”
“Then stop being good at it.”
I held her hips and stopped performing care. I gave her my mouth because I wanted to taste her, because she was wet and hot and becoming less exact under my tongue, because the hand in my hair had stopped guiding and started holding. She came with her thighs tight around my head and a sound that began as anger and ended as my name.
When she pulled me up, she kissed me without hesitation. She tasted herself on my mouth and did not flinch from it. If anything, it sharpened her. Her hand went between us and found me hard enough that her eyes changed again, satisfaction passing through them like a match.
“Condom,” she said.
“Drawer?”
“Adult,” she said, reaching past me.
“Prepared.”
“Still adult.”
She handed it to me and watched while I put it on. That should have made me self-conscious. It did not.
When I entered her, she closed her eyes for one second, then opened them again and looked at me with an expression I had no defence against. Recognition made physical. Her body took me slowly at first, then with less patience as we found the rhythm. She was soft and strong beneath me, breasts moving with each breath, hands on my back, nails marking where restraint had failed to impress either of us. I kept one hand at her hip and the other beside her head. She wrapped one leg around me and drew me deeper.
“Like that,” she said.
I obeyed.
She smiled, which under the circumstances was unfair.
“Very good.”
“Do not grade me.”
“Then stop improving.”
I laughed, and she caught the laugh with her mouth, bit it short, and moved under me in a way that took the room out of language. There was force in it, but no roughness. We were not careful. We were not careless either. She met me with a hunger that had nothing to do with softness and everything to do with choice. Her hands wanted me. Her mouth wanted me. Her body made no intellectual argument against wanting me, and when I felt control begin to go, I did not retreat into technique.
“Marieke,” I said.
“I know.”
She held me there, inside her, eyes open as I came.
Afterward, the room returned in pieces: the radiator, the lamp, rain beginning against the window, her breath near my ear, my own heart behaving like something recently chased. I had one arm under her shoulders. Her leg remained over mine. Neither of us moved for a while because moving would require admitting that the world had resumed.
Eventually she said, “This is becoming inconvenient.”
I touched the dimple at the base of her spine.
“Yes.”
“I dislike inconvenient things.”
“No, you don’t.”
She turned her head and looked at me.
“No,” she said. “Apparently I don’t.”
Later, when we had cleaned ourselves badly and she had stolen most of the blanket by moral force, I told her what Lizzy had said at the station, and what I had answered on the train. Marieke listened without making the story smaller.
“You came anyway,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do not make that sound like proof.”
“It isn’t.”
“Good.”
Her hand found mine under the blanket and stayed there.
That was all the definition she allowed. For that night, it was enough.
By Monday morning, Gent had not become smaller.
Neither had Marieke. The empty page from the train remained in the notebook, a small white refusal between lists. I did not tear it out. I did not fill it in. I ran before breakfast, five kilometres through cold streets with my calves tight, my hips sore, and a faint mark from Marieke’s teeth at my lower lip.
Leuven resumed around me with its usual lack of interest in private revelation. Bicycles hissed over wet stone. Students hurried under grey skies. The library opened. Lectures waited. My room still needed sweeping. The rice pot still had evidence in it. Desire did not cancel laundry.
I was halfway through reviewing renal physiology when my mother called.
She rarely called in the morning. That alone made me sit straighter.
“James?”
“Everything all right?”
“Yes, yes. I’m sorry. Are you in class?”
“No.”
“You sound busy.”
“I’m studying. It can survive interruption.”
She gave a small laugh that did not reach ease. Behind her, I heard the kitchen at home: a cupboard closing, water running, the faint hollow of the room where my father read the newspaper as if it were a legal document against happiness.
“Do you know anything about washing machines?” she asked.
“Only that they should not smoke.”
“Well,” she said. “Then you know more than ours.”
I closed the book.
“What happened?”
“It made a noise. Then a smell. Then it stopped. Your father says he will look at it later.”
Later. The most dangerous word in that house. Later meant the object would become guilty for breaking. Later meant my mother would work around the problem until the workaround became normal. Later meant my father would eventually stand in front of it with tools he resented needing and speak to everyone nearby as if the machine had failed out of personal disrespect.
“I can send something,” I said.
“No, no. That is not why I called.”
“Why did you call?”
“To ask if you knew anything about washing machines.”
“I just told you the full extent of my expertise.”
This time the laugh was real for half a second. Then it faded. “You need your money for school.”
“I tutor.”
“You tutor children, James. You do not support households.”
“Then let me support one machine.”
Silence.
I kept my voice ordinary because urgency would make her refuse. “Get someone to look at it. I’ll transfer money. If it is small, good. If it is not, tell me.”
“Your father will not like that.”
“I am not asking him to like a washing machine.”
“James.”
“I’m not trying to make trouble.”
“No,” she said softly. “I know.”
“Let me help,” I said.
The pause stretched long enough for the old house to enter the line.
“All right,” she said at last. “But not too much.”
“Not too much,” I said.
After we hung up, I transferred three hundred euros and sat looking at the confirmation screen. The amount was small enough to explain, large enough to matter, and nowhere near enough for what I wanted money to become.
The room felt too narrow.
I looked out the window at the courtyard, at the damp wall opposite, at the old brick and bad paint and gutters that would overflow in hard rain. The thought that had been circling for weeks landed with less romance than before.
Walls were not metaphors when something broke.
They were invoices.
The landlord came on Tuesday because the light in the hallway had died and the shower on the first floor had begun leaking through the ceiling below.
His name was Van Acker. He was a tired man in his late fifties with a soft stomach, a good coat, and the expression of someone who had stopped expecting repairs to stay repaired. He owned at least three student houses and seemed to experience them mainly as phone calls.
He arrived with a toolbox too clean to inspire confidence and stood beneath the dead hallway light, looking up.
“Students,” he said.
No one had spoken.
He glanced at me because I was coming down the stairs with laundry. “You people shower like you are putting out fires.”
“I will inform the committee.”
He looked at me, unsure whether to be offended. Then the ceiling dripped into a bucket someone had placed below the stain.
Van Acker sighed. “Every year. Roof, pipes, wiring, parents calling because their son saw a mouse.”
“The mouse has been discreet.”
“The mouse pays no rent.”
He climbed the first two steps, stopped, and put a hand on the wall as his knee objected. The building smelled of damp plaster, old cooking fat, and wet shoes. Somewhere above us a radio played badly through a closed door.
“Needs work,” he muttered.
“The building?”
He gave me a look. “Yes, the building. What else?”
“Are you planning to do it?”
“I am planning to look. Looking is still free.” He tapped the wall with two fingers. “My wife says I should sell the thing before it eats another roof.”
I did not move too quickly.
“Are you thinking of selling?”
Van Acker looked at me as if the stairs had asked for credit. “You buying?”
“No.”
“Then why ask?”
“I’m curious.”
“Curious people don’t pay roof bills.”
He resumed climbing. I followed with the laundry because suddenly the machine could wait.
On the first floor, water had stained the ceiling near the shower. Van Acker opened the cupboard under the sink and made several noises that suggested a man confirming bad news he already expected. I watched the way he looked at the pipes, with fatigue rather than attachment. There are men who own buildings because they love property. There are men who own them because selling requires energy. Van Acker belonged to the second category.
“What would it be worth?” I asked.
“More than you have,” he said.
“Everything is more than students have.”
“Not beer.”
“You would be surprised.”
He glanced at me again. This time the look stayed longer. “Location is good. Rooms are full. Roof is old. Wiring needs attention. If the city starts making new rules about student rooms, half of Leuven will pretend surprise. A buyer would use all that to push the price down.”
“And you would listen?”
“I would complain. Then I would listen.”
“How many rooms officially?”
“Six.”
“And unofficially?”
He closed the cupboard and stood with a grunt. “You ask too many questions for a tenant.”
“I’m studying medicine. We are trained to be unpleasant before diagnosis.”
“Then diagnose this,” he said, pointing to the pipes. “Bad work. Old. Functional until it isn’t.”
He returned to the leaking shower, but the conversation had shifted. He knew I was curious. I knew he was tired. Neither of us said anything large enough to become foolish.
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