The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 8: The Safety Net
Coming of Age Sex Story: Chapter 8: The Safety Net - 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
By the first week of December, Van Acker had named a number.
He did it in the hallway, which was appropriate. The building had no room suitable for serious conversation. Every space in it smelled faintly of damp, cooking oil, old shoes, or other people’s laundry. The hallway at least did not pretend to be anything else.
“Two hundred ninety,” he said.
I was carrying groceries. He stood beneath the repaired hallway light, looking at the ceiling as if expecting it to betray him.
“Thousand?” I asked.
“No, francs and a prayer. Yes, thousand.”
“For this?”
“For the address,” he said. “The problems come free.”
He had a folded paper in his hand. Not an official document. A list, perhaps. A number made less hypothetical by ink.
“You spoke to your wife,” I said.
“I speak to my wife every day. Marriage has paperwork even when nobody writes anything down.” He looked at me, then seemed to remember he was not supposed to be entertaining either of us. “She wants it gone. I want fewer phone calls. The roof wants money. Everybody wants something.”
“Are you putting it on the market?”
“Not yet.”
The words landed with more force than they deserved.
Van Acker saw that. He was tired, not stupid. “Do not look like that. I said not yet, not that I adopted you.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t. Students understand exams and beer. Buildings are not exams. Buildings keep failing after you pass them.”
He unfolded the paper. “Roof within three years, maybe sooner. Wiring old. Shower needs proper work. Six rooms official. Location good. Parents like location. Students like being able to fall home from the centre without dying.”
“What are the rents?”
He gave me a look.
“I live here,” I said. “I know mine.”
“You know yours. That is not the same thing.”
“No.”
He considered me. Water moved somewhere behind the wall, as if the house had chosen that moment to remind us it was listening.
“If I speak to an agent,” he said, “you are finished before you begin. They will make it clean and expensive and full of phrases. If you are serious, you show me seriousness before Christmas.”
“What does that mean?”
“A bank letter. Proof of funds. Something from someone wearing a tie who can be blamed later.”
“I don’t wear ties.”
“That is among your smaller problems.”
“How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“That is not long.”
“No. That is why it is called serious.” He folded the paper again. “And do not start telling other tenants. Half of them will panic, the other half will imagine rent no longer applies because ownership has become theoretical.”
“I won’t.”
He started up the stairs, then stopped after two steps. His knee did what knees do when a man has spent years pretending ladders were good exercise.
“Why this building?” he asked without turning.
Because the bank could not understand me yet. Because my mother’s washing machine had smoked and my father had noticed the money. Because owning the place I lived in sounded less like ambition than a defensive position.
“Location,” I said.
Van Acker grunted. “At least lie less romantically.”
Then he continued up the stairs.
I stood in the hall with the groceries cutting into my fingers and the number expanding inside my head.
Two hundred ninety thousand euros.
Close enough to become dangerous.
In the room, I made the numbers obey.
Bank account. Cash. Investment account. Pending slips. Tutoring income so far. Projected tutoring income if the sessions doubled before exams. Estimated fees. Registration. Notary. Repairs. Reserve. I wrote each line slowly, because speed made arithmetic feel like certainty.
Purchase price: €290,000.
Possible down payment: €60,000 to €70,000 if I stripped myself nearly bare.
Remaining: impossible without bank.
Fees: ugly.
Repairs: uglier.
Emergency reserve: not optional.
I wrote that last part twice.
The future sat behind the page like a man who had already seen the trick. I knew markets that would rise. I knew companies that still looked ridiculous to serious men in suits. I knew matches no one else knew had been played. There was an Anderlecht result in January I could still see because I had watched it in a barracks years later while a sergeant from Liège cursed at the screen with religious seriousness. I knew, with a precision that should have felt like power, that money would come if I kept my nerve and did not become greedy.
None of that manufactured three years of payslips.
None of it made me less twenty years old across a desk.
I could remember wars, crashes, promotions, funerals, and the names of men who had not yet enlisted. I could remember the smell of Afghan dust baked into uniform seams and the shape of hospital light above my final bed. I could remember the old life clearly enough to place bets, avoid certain roads, and understand which technologies would stop looking like toys.
But the bank needed boring.
So I opened a new page and wrote:
Make money boring.
Then beneath it:
Tutoring account.
Receipts.
Regular deposits.
No cash drama.
No betting story.
Tax? Ask.
The words were sensible. That made them insulting.
My phone lay beside the notebook. For a moment I thought of calling my mother. Not because I had anything to tell her. Because two hundred ninety thousand euros had made her kitchen more present in my mind, not less. The old washing machine. The repaired one. My father’s comment moving through the house like damp.
I did not call.
Instead, I copied the figures onto a cleaner sheet and prepared to take them to Mrs. Claes.
That, too, was avoidance. But it had columns, and therefore looked respectable.
Mrs. Claes did not react to the number.
Men had probably brought larger dreams into her office and worse documents. She looked at my notes, the projected tutoring income, the account summaries, and the address of the building. Her pen moved occasionally. The plant in the corner continued its slow private defeat.
“You have made the idea clearer,” she said.
“Is that good?”
“It is better than unclear.”
She turned one page. “The down payment is not impossible. But it would leave you with little margin. A building like this will require margin.”
“I estimated repairs.”
“Rough estimates are usually optimistic.”
“I assumed that.”
“Assume it again.”
I took the correction.
She tapped the tutoring column. “This is the useful part.”
“Not the savings?”
“The savings matter. But regular income matters more than impressive deposits.”
“I can grow it,” I said.
“Then grow it in a way that can be documented.”
“How?”
“Separate account. Written records. Names if possible. Receipts if they will accept them. Do not mix it with betting winnings. Do not arrive with large unexplained cash deposits. If the tutoring becomes substantial, ask an accountant how to declare it properly.”
“An accountant.”
“Yes.”
“I am twenty.”
“That is not an exemption category.”
I almost smiled. She did not. Her eyes moved back to the papers.
“If you were asking for a studio,” she said, “this conversation would be easier. A full student house is different.”
“The rent supports the loan.”
“In theory.”
“In practice too.”
“In practice, students leave, boilers fail, roofs leak, parents complain, regulations change, and young owners discover that rent is not the same as profit.” She placed the pen down. “You may be right about the opportunity. That is not the same as being ready to finance it.”
“What would make me ready?”
“Time.”
The word irritated me. Refusal I could have argued with.
“Time,” she repeated. “Records over months. Proof that income recurs. A larger reserve. Cleaner source of funds. Perhaps a guarantor, though I understand from last time that this is not your preference.”
“No.”
“Then documentation must do more work.”
I looked through the glass wall at the people waiting outside. A man with a briefcase. An older woman holding forms in both hands. A young couple whispering over a folder, hopeful in the way people are before numbers are explained.
“What if Van Acker wants seriousness before Christmas?”
“Then show him seriousness. Not completion.”
“What does that look like?”
“A letter stating that you have discussed financing and are preparing documentation. Proof of available funds. A written expression of interest subject to financing and inspection.” She paused. “Not a promise you cannot keep.”
I nodded slowly.
Mrs. Claes gathered the pages and returned them in order. “You are trying to make the bank move at the speed of your certainty. It will not.”
At the door, she added, “Mr. Vandael.”
I turned.
“Boring is slow because it has to survive inspection.”
I carried that line into the street and disliked it all the way back to the library.
Tutoring grew because panic had a calendar.
Elise found a larger room through a student association whose secretary owed her a favour and seemed frightened enough of her to remain useful. Mathis made new exercise sheets with margins too wide and explanations too careful. I opened a separate account. I bought a receipt book from a stationery shop and felt absurdly criminal carrying it back in my coat pocket.
Fifteen euros per student.
Four free places listed as note-takers.
Mathis paid every session, in cash at first, then by transfer after Saar stood in the doorway and said, “If you want it to be real, make it leave a trace.”
She did not smile when she said it.
The second expanded session had twenty-three students. Too many. The room smelled of nervous breath, cheap deodorant losing a war, and the hot dust of an overworked radiator. I explained renal clearance until the board became a field of arrows and fractions. Mathis handled the basic group in the corner. He stumbled less now. When he did stumble, he stopped, breathed, and corrected himself without looking at me for rescue.
Afterward, while Elise counted names and payments, Saar placed a bottle of water beside my notes.
“Drink.”
“I’m fine.”
“No. You’re talking too fast.”
“I always talk too fast when teaching.”
“You talk fast when you want the room to keep up with the plan.”
I took the bottle and drank because arguing would prove something I did not want proved.
She watched me with her arms folded. Saar’s intelligence had no velvet on it. She did not circle. She pointed.
“You’re tired,” she said.
“I can manage.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
Elise looked up but wisely chose the list.
“I sleep,” I said.
“How much?”
“Enough.”
Saar made a face. “That is what people say when the answer is stupid.”
Mathis approached with the remaining exercise sheets and then stopped because he had walked into weather.
“What?” I asked him.
He held out the papers. “Nothing. Just these.”
“Thank you.”
He stayed. That was new.
“You did well,” I said.
Mathis looked uncomfortable. “They asked me questions after.”
“And?”
“I answered.”
“Good.”
“One girl asked if I could explain it again next week.”
“That is generally what tutoring means.”
“No, I mean me.” He looked down at the papers. “She asked if I would be there.”
Saar’s expression changed by almost nothing, but I saw it. Elise smiled openly.
“Then be there,” I said.
Mathis nodded once, quickly, as if too much acknowledgement might damage the fact.
After he left, Saar returned to me.
“You like this,” she said.
“Teaching?”
“Being necessary.”
I did not answer.
“I’m not saying it’s bad.” Her tone suggested she had considered saying exactly that and rejected it for accuracy. “But you should check which part is helping and which part is eating.”
Elise’s pen stopped.
The room had mostly emptied. Rain tapped at the windows. Someone in the hallway laughed, too loud and too free.
“That is a strong accusation,” I said.
“It wasn’t an accusation.”
“What was it?”
“A warning.”
She picked up her bag.
I waited for the elegant final line. It did not come.
Saar only said, “Eat something.”
Then she left.
That stayed with me. Contempt I would have shaken off by the library.
Fien asked if you are coming back to Gent.
I received the message while standing outside a sandwich shop, calculating whether I had time to eat before the library. The answer was yes if I walked while chewing, which meant the real answer was probably no.
Are you asking for Fien?
No answer came for long enough that I noticed myself waiting.
No.
Good.
I didn’t mean that to sound like something.
I stood under the awning with the phone in one hand and the sandwich in the other, suddenly aware of both as inadequate tools.
It sounded like something.
Then ignore the sound.
I don’t want to.
There was a longer pause.
I don’t know where to put you sometimes.
Where was I before?
Easy place. Old place. I knew it even when it hurt.
A cyclist went past with one hand on the handlebar and a cigarette in the other. He looked briefly immortal, as young men often do before consequences acquire names.
And now?
Now you answer differently and look different and women in cafés notice your hands and I am proud of you and annoyed at the same time.
I read it twice.
I don’t know how to answer that well.
You don’t have to answer well. Just answer.
I should have answered then.
Instead, my phone rang.
The display showed Van Acker.
I looked at Lizzy’s message, then at the call. It was a small choice, and I treated it like one.
I took the call.
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