Sail Away (A Short Story)

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

The wave didn’t knock--it punched. The bow lifted, stalled, then dropped as if the sea had let go on purpose. The hull shuddered, a deep, animal sound that traveled through my bones and teeth. Somewhere below, something heavy broke free and slammed.

Liam swore under his breath as he looked over at me for a split second and then back at the ravenous sea before us. I was holding onto a rail I don’t know the name of.

The deck tilted hard to port--too far, surely too far--and my stomach lurched like it was trying to leave my body behind. Somewhere above me, canvas snapped violently, a sound like gunfire.

“What can I do?” I hollered into the wind, “What needs to be done?”

“Stay by my side,” Liam shouted back as another swell lifted us uncomfortably high into the air and then dropped us on our asses. All the while, Liam put all his strength into maintaining our heading the best he could.

Rain needled my face, stinging my eyes. I tasted salt and panic and something metallic--blood, maybe mine. I didn’t remember hitting anything, but everything hurt, so it hardly mattered.

I imagined the mast snapping like a matchstick. I imagined the ocean closing over my head, filling my mouth, my lungs.

The boat crashed down again. Water flooded the deck, racing toward the stern, dragging at my boots like hands. I yelped and crouched instinctively, curling in on myself like the sea might overlook me if I’m small enough.

“Eyes on me, Hunter!” I heard Liam over the wind.

I snapped my eyes open. I caught his gaze through the thick globs of rain coming down on us. He looked...focused. Not fearless. Focused. Like this was awful, yes, but also familiar.

---

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I remember boarding a ferry in Santa Margherita Ligure three weeks before the Bay of Biscay, headed for Portofino, with my stomach in my balls. From the moment I left home for Italy to meet a stranger I’d met online, I couldn’t help but think I was making the second biggest mistake of my life.

But as I approached Portofino under the noon sun, I could see the soft pastel colored buildings along the shore. Smell the salt enveloping me with the calling of gulls in the distance. All types of craft in the port bobbing with the ebb and flow of the sea.

As we pulled up to the dock I immediately saw Liam among the sparse crowd from the upper level of the ferry. I had spent hours watching him on TikTok, and he was just as beautiful as he was on social media, if not more so, with his shaggy semi-curly milk-chocolate hair and light-brown eyes that shimmered in the light. Scruffy beard-mustache combo along his chiseled jawline. His skin glowed in the sunlight, with a partial sleeve tattoo down his right arm and left leg.

He had the same look in his eyes then. Focused. Ready for whatever may come.

Another blast of wind hit us broadside. The boat shuddered, groaned deep in her bones. Liam leaned in close, voice sharp now, precise. “You don’t need to know everything. You just need to listen.”

A loud bang echoed below deck.

I froze, “What was that?”

Liam didn’t answer immediately. His eyes flicked to the companionway, then back to the sea. He turned the wheel a fraction, jaw tightening.

“If the engine stops, don’t panic.”

My chest tightened.

“What do you mean by if?”

As if in response, the boat lurched again--harder this time--and I felt it: a subtle change beneath my feet. A loss of something steady, something invisible I didn’t even realize we were relying on. The boat’s scream changed pitch.

Liam exhaled through his teeth, “Okay. We’re sailing now.”

The storm felt louder, closer, and suddenly there was nothing between the Atlantic and us but Liam’s hands, my terror, and a boat that sounded like she was begging us to survive.

As we were making our way through the traffic seaside in Nice, France, Liam had taken back control of the vessel. The sun was setting, and the way the sun caught his eyes really did give them a twinkle.

By the time the sun had set, Liam enabled autopilot and all of his other systems and sat with me on the deck. I was busy looking up at the sky, starting to fill with distant lights that shimmered like gemstones.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Liam said beside me.

“Yeah, can’t see this in the city.”

“Just wait until we’re further out at sea. The sky lights up like the Fourth of July. It never gets old,” he said, grinning with an ease that made my heart skip a beat.

“You really love it out here?”

“Don’t you?”

“It’s growing on me, but I can see you absolutely love this.”

Liam laughed as if I had told a mildly entertaining joke.

“Yeah, I really do. I don’t even remember what life was like back in Las Vegas. I’m a completely different person than I was six years ago when I took the plunge and started sailing full-time. You’ll see, it’s great fun, a chance to meet a lot of people, travel the world, and you can make a lot of money depending on how you want to deliver your experiences.”

“It can’t be that easy?”

“It’s not easy per se, but it’s certainly possible. I’ve been making a living with my audience for the last four years. It took a while to build up and get noticed, but once the gates opened, a flood of opportunities came in.”

Liam winked and tilted his head toward the sky. I couldn’t help but stare at the side of his insanely beautiful face. It was a crime that he was straight--at least that’s what I thought. Was he sitting awfully close for a straight guy?

“Did you have a girlfriend back in Las Vegas?” I asked.

“At some point,” he responded, still looking up at the stars. “But for many a reason, it didn’t work out. So focused on work, so focused on me--me, me, me--I didn’t make time for her.”

“Oh, wow...I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Don’t be,” he looked back at me. “We weren’t right for each other anyway. I realized that too late,” Liam laughed. “What about you? Any girlfriend...or boyfriend? No judgment here.”

“And to think, I was afraid you’d find out I was gay and feel some type of way.”

Liam laughed again, “That would never be an issue. My ex-best friend was actually gay.”

“Ex?”

“Weird way to put it, huh?”

“Sort of, but not really. I get the sentiment.”

“Yeah, all the people from that life are pretty my ex-this, ex-that. If I did go back to land, it wouldn’t be to Las Vegas,” he laughed, as if laughing at himself and not the situation.

“Where would you go?”

Liam settled down and took a moment to consider his response. I tried not to stare at him unnecessarily.

“What was life like for you back in the Big Apple? Do people still call it that?”

“Don’t do that,” I said, knocking my shoulder into his.

“Do what?” He said, knocking back.

“Avoid the question.”

“I’m not avoiding the question...I’m just switching the focus back to you,” Liam said with the broadest smile I’d ever seen up to that point.

“And why would you do that?”

Liam hesitated before saying, “Anyone who would meet a stranger they met online halfway around the world in a bougie fishing village to sail the open seas must be the most interesting person in the room.”

“The most interesting person in the room, huh?”

Liam shrugged, got up and made his way to the cockpit to check our heading, I assume.

“So what about New York?”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know...how are the people? Did you have many friends? Or a boyfriend you left behind? You said earlier that you lost your corporate job? What was that like?” Liam offered from the cockpit.

I sighed, but then said, “Yeah, it just didn’t make any sense to me. I brought a lot of value and joy to that fucking company, and they just cut ties like I was on the male end of a #MeToo allegation.

“I’ve never felt more humiliated in my life.

“And no, I didn’t have a boyfriend or very many friends, in fact, because I spent most of my time working. I haven’t even told my best friend that I’m out here with you. Like, you could totally throw me overboard to die, and no one would know or care.

“I haven’t spoken to him since he moved out to Seattle to lead some IT company some years ago. I’m really hoping to find myself out here.”

“Mmmh, sounds like you did everything you could where your job was concerned. You can’t blame yourself for the sins of executives,” Liam said.

“And it wasn’t enough,” I rebutted.

I dropped my gaze and allowed my words to swirl around in my head. I could feel my heart racing. And why? Because Liam thought I was the most interesting person in the room. Or was it the thrill of finally telling someone how I was feeling?

“I won’t pretend to understand what you’re going through, but I am here to help.”

“How do you mean?” I looked up at him again, unblinkingly.

“As you said, you haven’t spoken to your best friend since he moved. I’m not saying I can take his place, but maybe we could be friends? I mean, we’re out here getting to know each other on our way to the Isle of Wight.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to leave then, but I’m hoping you’ll choose to stay. I really think we can help each other out,” he said with what I perceived as a genuine smile.

I wondered if maybe there was a possibility that Liam was at least curious. Curious enough for a kiss. My hand running up his thigh. I wasn’t yet sure.

The last thing I wanted was to misread the signs and fuck everything to high hell.

“I might stick around for a bit...you said you wanted to take me where again?”

“Cowes Yacht Haven in Cowes, Isle of Wight. It’s real nice around this time of the year. It’s going to take a few weeks to get there, but we’ll have a few months docked as we wait for the seasons to change. At which point you can decide whether this is the life for you before we cross the Atlantic.

“No pressure, of course,” Liam laid out.

“Let’s get it!” I screamed with excitement, throwing my hands into the air as if riding a roller coaster.

Liam smiled back at me like an adolescent who had finally met the love of his life.

In the storm, night didn’t arrive all at once.

It seeped in.

The black thickened between waves, filling the gaps where the horizon used to be, until there was nothing to measure distance against--just sound and motion and the sickening sense that we’ve been swallowed. Time lost its edges. Minutes stretched. Hours collapsed. The storm didn’t rage anymore. It endured.

Which was far worse.

The rain became a constant hiss. Not violent, not dramatic--just relentless. The kind of sound that drills into your skull and never leaves. The waves kept coming, steady and ugly, lifting us, dropping us, lifting us again like the sea was breathing and we were caught in its lungs.

My body started to fail quietly.

Not all at once. Piece by piece.

My thighs burned from bracing. My hands shook so badly that I had to clamp them together between waves, embarrassed by how weak they looked even though no one was watching. My jaw ached from being clenched for so long. I couldn’t tell if my teeth were chattering from the cold, from fear, or from both.

“Drink,” Liam said at some point.

I didn’t remember when he handed me the bottle. I only remember staring at it, confused, like he’d offered me something abstract. I tried to drink and spilt half of it down my chin, coughing, gagging. Water had never tasted so foreign.

“You need it,” he said. Not unkind. Just firm.

I nodded, because nodding was easier than explaining how tired I was.

In Gibraltar, we refueled and restocked supplies. By then, Liam made sure we practiced sailing during the day and at night when visibility was horrid.

My arms were too thin to pull the sheets fast enough to catch the wind. At first, he would get angry and snap at me when he had to give me an instruction multiple times.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. You’ll get it,” he would say.

Liam, ultimately, had much more patience than I did.

“You’re going to get it. Just don’t give up,” he would encourage.

We set sail from Gibraltar early in the morning, as Liam had carefully chosen a small window in which we could motor our way through the strait, avoiding the crazy winds, the traffic and the likelihood of being attacked by orcas.

So we sailed north along Portugal’s Atlantic Coast via Cape St. Vincent. We encountered Atlantic swells and strong headwinds near Cabo de São Vincente.

The wind shifted without warning, sharp and impatient. The sail luffed once, loud enough to make my chest jump. I move for the line a second too late, hands unsure, waiting for Liam to tell me which way.

“Now,” he said.

I pulled. Too slow.

Before I could adjust, Liam reached past me and took the line from my hands. His movement was quick, practiced. The sail filled. The boat steadied. Order returned.

It worked. Of course it did.

I stepped back instinctively, giving him space. My hands hovered uselessly at my sides, still curved like they were holding something.

“Watch the angle next time,” he offered, already turned away. Not sharp. Not angry. Just efficient.

I nodded. I would have nodded even if he hadn’t said anything.

He doesn’t look at me again. His attention stayed on the horizon, on the telltales, on everything except my face. The moment closed as cleanly as it opened.

I stood there for a beat longer than necessary, feeling something small settle in my chest.

Then he called out another instruction, steady as ever, and I answered. We kept moving.

Navigating the open seas--calling out to each other as we wrangled with the sheets and ropes.

Another day and a half out from A Coruña, Liam was in the cockpit, and I was lounging on deck, reading “Crime and Punishment” under the lights.

We were cruising, smooth sailing as Liam would call it.

“Two weeks in, how do you feel?” Liam asked nonchalantly.

“The quiet can be eerie,” I said, looking up from my book. “But knowing you’re here with me makes it less like I’m out here in an environment where I’m clearly out of my depth.”

“Oh, stop that. You’re doing way better. No, you can’t sail the Marie-Elizabeth on your own, but I wouldn’t expect you to. You are more than capable of helping me,” Liam added with a soft grin.

“Alright, alright. I appreciate that.”

“You’re welcome.”

From that day on, Liam and I drew incredibly close. He told me about his mother, who, for lack of a better set of words, was a wild cooky broad who did one good thing by having Liam. Even if she didn’t love him the way a mother should, he was told he loved with every ounce of his heart.

In turn, I told him stories about guys I had dated, and what life was like with my best friend before he moved away.

He told me the truth about his girlfriend. How she had slept with his best friend’s brother. Then lied about it, and then dared to run off with him.

That was his breaking point--the reason he decided to turn to the sea. It was better than being humiliated by lanlobers, he said.

“Octopus or fish?” Liam asked from the galley.

I was in my cabin checking emails.

“Octopus sounds nice.”

“You got it, Romeo.”

We were anchored off the coast of A Coruña. I closed my laptop and made my way into the saloon. Liam was busy frying up the octopus he had gotten from the fish market that morning.

“Anything I can help with?” I offered.

“Nope, I want you to rest well. We’re about to cross the Bay of Biscay, a very challenging pass, and I need you at your best. Once we get through this, Cowe is not much further.

“Are you missing the land yet?” He added haphazardly over his shoulder.

I grinned for a second and shook my head, “Not even a little. So far, this has been peaceful, revealing, and inspiring. I don’t know what I would have done had I not found your ad on TikTok. A stranger who has turned out to be one of the best human beings I’ve ever met. You’re handsome, intelligent, resourceful, and damn good at sailing.”

“I’m handsome, huh?”

“I wouldn’t let it get to your head, but yeah. You must know that?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve been told I’m a pretty boy, but I’m much more than that, as you know,” Liam said over his shoulder. The smell of the octopus hunger-inducing.

Under the brunt of the everlasting storm, the boat creaked. Not sharp, panicked sounds like earlier--these were lower, older noises. The sound of wood and metal flexing under weight. Every so often, something rattled below deck, and my heart jumped out of my chest, certain this was the moment everything finally gave out.

It never did. That’s the cruelty of it. We didn’t get a breaking point. We got attrition.

“Your turn,” Liam said eventually.

I blinked at him. “My turn for what?”

“To sit with me,” he said. “Eyes open. Talk to me.”

I almost laugh. “About what?”

“Anything,” he said. “Doesn’t matter.”

I didn’t understand at first. Then another wave hit, smaller than the rest, and I feel my knees dip, just slightly, like they’re considering the option of giving up. I realize what he was doing.

He was keeping me awake.

So I talked.

I told him stupid things--half-formed thoughts. I told him about songs I never finished when I started producing music on the side, about a job I quit without a plan when I was in my twenties, about how I thought this trip would feel like freedom instead of...this. Words tumbled out of me without shape or dignity. I hear myself slurring and hate it, hate how exposed I sound.

Liam listened anyway.

Sometimes he responded. Sometimes he just uttered my name. That alone seemed to tether me back into my body.

At some point--I don’t know when--he made me take the wheel.

“Just for a minute,” he reassured me.

My hands closed around it, and I hate how alive it feels, how much feedback there is. Every wave punched back through my arms. The wheel jerked, heavy and opinionated, and I fought it clumsily, overcorrecting, apologizing out loud to a piece of machinery as if it might hear me.

“You’re fine,” Liam said. “Just don’t wrestle her.”

Her.

I focus on breathing. On not blinking for too long. On the dim lights, the compass that won’t stay still, the endless black. My eyelids kept sinking, traitorous. Every time they closed, even for a heartbeat, my body tried to follow.

It’s the way fear was being replaced by something softer.

Sleep.

A wave hit harder than the rest, and I stumbled, saved only by the harness biting into my chest. Pain flared. Sharp. Welcome.

I gasped, laughed once--hysterical--and kept my eyes open. Somewhere in the dark, the sea kept breathing. And we stayed with it. Not heroic. Not brave.

Just awake.

Later that night--after the octopus, asparagus and potatoes--Liam and I were in the saloon portside, still anchored outside of A Coruña. We were set to start our three-day journey across the Bay of Biscay at dawn. Meanwhile, I was finishing up “Crime and Punishment,” and he was reading “Becoming Supernatural.”

There wasn’t always the need to speak between us. Sometimes we would just sit in each other’s company doing our own thing. I might be on my MacBook writing or surfing the web. Liam might be in the galley. He spent a lot of time in the galley. Preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner. Or maintaining the vessel and a litany of other things that needed to be done, always in each other’s presence. It was nice. He was nice. More than a pretty face.

Liam suddenly put his book in his lap and turned to me.

“Do you ever wonder why I chose you out of thousands of other people?”

“No, why did you choose me?” I asked, putting my book down.

I hadn’t thought about it before, and I wondered why I hadn’t. Quite the feat to be chosen out of a pool of thousands of people to live out a dream.

“Simply, you weren’t like the others. Not only was your application real and authentic, but you didn’t want anything from me besides an adventure.”

“So you think you made the right choice?”

“Absolutely. But I’m still figuring things out just as much as you, but it’s nice to have a friendship with someone not because we grew up in the same town or went to the same school, but because you chose me and I chose you.”

“We chose each other...”

Liam was making a lot of sense. After I got let go, I didn’t know what my next move would be. I was scrolling on TikTok per usual when I decided to look up sailing videos.

“Yeah,” Liam said with one of his million-dollar grins.

It warmed my heart whenever he smiled. He was sitting close. His leg against mine. I leaned in without meaning to, but wanting to. Liam, staring back at me with those twinkling eyes, I don’t know what came over me.

I leaned in further like a viper and kissed Liam on the lips.

I immediately regretted it, looking into his eyes and seeing the moment of confusion. But then he leans in. Liam cupped the back of my neck and pulled me into a passionate kiss. Like he had been wanting to for the longest. I absolutely lose myself. His lips were as soft as silk. His tongue in my mouth, my tongue in his mouth. There was no divide.

Liam pulled away, out of breath.

“I’m sorry, I...”

“No, it’s my....”

“It’s our fault,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know what came over me. I just...I’ve never...up until now...”

“Kissed a boy?”

“Yeah...”

“Did you like it?”

Liam didn’t say anything. Like he was processing his feelings. Looking down at the floor.

“I don’t know. I...I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I don’t know what came over me either...I mean, I’ve wanted to kiss you the moment I thought I knew you.

“I don’t know...I’d never treat you the way she did.”

“Thanks,” he said, looking over to me with a dazed look in his eyes and a smile that wasn’t all there.

After that night, an awkward distance grew between us. We spent our time tending to tasks around the yacht. The only time we spent together was at the helm, and we barely exchanged words.

A day after our kiss, we set sail for Brest.

The sea was rough as we made our way across the Bay of Biscay. The first day was uneventful, and there was still no meaningful dialogue between us.

Just that look of focus in his eyes.

The second day of our voyage, we encountered some light storms, but before Liam could issue a warning, he shouted, “shit!”

Realizing something I didn’t have the acumen to comprehend. But as the winds began to pick up and the waves grew more violent, I, too, understood what was taking place.

We had gotten caught in a rough storm, and the only way out was through. The waves didn’t knock--they punched. The bow lifted, stalled, then dropped as if the sea had let go on purpose.

Liam swore under his breath again as he looked over at me for a split second and then back at the ravenous sea before us, the first time he’d looked at me, to my knowledge, since our kiss.

The morning doesn’t arrive with relief. It arrives with the gods’ permission.

The wind loosened first. Not gone--just no longer intent on killing us. The waves rounded themselves off, losing their sharp edges, turning from walls into long, exhausted backs that lift us gently and set us down again. The rain turned to a mist, then stopped entirely, leaving the world washed clean and gray.

I didn’t realize how loud the night had been until it wasn’t.

My ears rang in the quiet. The sudden absence of violence felt wrong, like a trick. I kept waiting for the sea to inhale again, to remember us, but it didn’t. It just rolled on, indifferent now.

Liam stood at the helm, shoulders slumped for the first time since the storm had engulfed us. He looked older in the daylight. Not dramatically--just...worn down. Like something inside him had finally been allowed to sit.

I sat on the cockpit floor, back against the wall, harness still clipped because neither of us had said it’s safe to unhook. My hands were trembling now that they didn’t have to work. My whole body hummed with aftershock.

“So that’s it?” I asked, my voice cracked. I clear my throat and try again, “We’re out?”

“For now,” Liam said. He squinted at the horizon, at nothing in particular. “Weather’s moving east. We’re in the back of it.”

I nodded, even though I don’t fully understand what that meant. I nodded because it sounded like survival.

There’s a pause. A long one.

“The engine’s not coming back, is it?” I asked.

He didn’t look at me when he answered. “No.”

Not probably not. Not, we’ll see. Just no. I absorbed that slowly. The idea that something essential was simply unavailable. Broken in a way that couldn’t be fixed at sea.

“So I guess we sail the rest of the way to Brest?”

“Yes,” Liam said back shortly.

I laughed quietly because it felt absurd. “Of course we do.”

The sun broke through a tear in the clouds then--weak, pale, but real. It turned the wet deck silver. Steam lifted from our jackets. The world looked almost gentle, like it hadn’t just spent the night trying to erase us.

Liam finally turned toward me.

“You okay?” He asked with a longing I hadn’t heard from him before.

I think about lying. I think about saying ‘fine,’ ‘yeah,’ or something that didn’t require effort. Instead, I said, “I don’t know.”

He nodded once, like that’s the correct answer.

Neither of us moved for awhile. Then--without ceremony, without discussion--he stepped closer.

I don’t remember who closed the distance first. I only remember the heat of him, startling after the cold, and the way his hand hesitated at my jaw like he was giving me time to stop it.

I didn’t.

The kiss was brief. Careful. Almost apologetic. No hunger, no promise--just contact. Proof.

His lips were cracked. Mine tasted like salt and exhaustion. For a second, just a second, the space between us disappeared.

Then it came rushing back.

He pulled away first. Not abruptly. Gently. Like he was setting something down. And we didn’t look at each other right away.

When I finally do, his face is focused again--not cold, just...focused. Whatever happened in the storm stays there, packed away with the night.

“We should check our course,” he suddenly let fall from his lips.

“Yeah,” I replied too quickly.

I stood, legs protesting, and busied myself with nothing--coiling something, tightening something--anything that didn’t require me to ask what that kiss meant. Or why it already felt like something we’re not going to talk about.

The yacht moved steadily now, sails full, pointing toward land that still was’t visible.

The storm behind us. The engine was dead. And whatever passed between us in the dark had survived--but only just. Like everything else out here, it existed now under sail alone.

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