[This is my first real story in years, although I’ve fancied myself a writer this entire time, and have taken classes and the like. I used to be pretty good, or at least my friends and teachers thought so. I’m technically published, but in a way irrelevant to the work at hand.
This is also my first time writing erotica, ever, although I’ve been reading since the first ‘Whats New’ back in 1997 or whenever it was. I did once submit a piece I’d worked on, but didn’t write, in 2000 (the intro in that story will explain why it is attributed to me, and why I haven’t cleaned it up since that time).
There are way too many inspirations to list for this story—ten years worth of tales, the quality only getting better every year, the best of them helping to nudge me towards this point. I don’t mean to slight any author by not giving them credit, and would like to thank everyone who’s written for this site.
Gentle reader, I hope you enjoy this humble tale. It’s ambitious to start off with what’s meant to be something of an epic, but this is the way the story came to me. This is turning out to be maybe the longest thing I’ve written. Let me know what I’m doing wrong—and if I’m doing anything right.
Oh, and I promise my intros will be shorter in the future. Well, I’ll try anyway.]
My life was almost half over before it really began. Even before then, I was marching down the road less traveled, but it wasn’t until that summer that my future became clear. It’s kind of a long story.
Zoners
Prologue: Introduction
I dropped out of college three years in, and didn’t go back until the summer I was 28.
By the time I decided to go back to school, I’d already bought a house in Phoenix, so my only reasonable choice was Arizona State. I’d never settled on a major the last time around. This time, I’d decided to put two degrees on my plate: Architecture and Urban Design. As a professional sculptor, I considered a minor in sculpture, but that made things too complicated, so instead I just took as many sculpture classes as I could get away with.
On the bright side, I kind of had a baby face; I managed to fit in with most of the 18-24 crowd, mostly surprising them when I revealed my actual age.
My mother was Italian, and I’d picked up enough of the language from her and from my uncle to coast through the basic levels of Italian, but in order to finish my language requirements, I had to take the advanced levels. Mom had died before the family could visit Italy, and they say immersion is the best way to learn a new language, so I decided to do a summer abroad in Italy, and drown myself in my mother’s tongue, so to speak. Sure, Spanish might have been a smarter choice—definitely more useful in Arizona—but Italian was the easier choice.
It was the first weekend on that trip that things started to go haywire. A small group of us arranged a trip across the Mediterranean to Africa—Tunis. It involved an overnight ferry ride, followed by a night in Tunisia, and ended with another overnight ferry ride.