Blurb; He chose her over the company. He’s about to find out the real cost of romance…
Brian’s love for Romina may be strong, but he’s sailing into troubled waters. And he’s even prepared to endure torturous months apart working like a dog on another ship, if it means he can get them back together. Though he’s unprepared for the sadistic challenges his cruel new boss implements to break him body and soul.
Enduring extreme anti-Americanism, food deprivation, and 100-hour-long work weeks, Brian’s only beacon of hope is the messages sent from his soulmate. With her emails to sustain him, he vows to stay the course and outsmart the higher-ups of the cruise-line giant.
Can Brian survive the stormy conflict threatening to drown his hopes of reuniting with Romina?
Wet Orpheus is the second book in the wild Gone with the Waves romantic comedy series, entirely of true events in the author’s life. If you like insider accounts of work below deck, heart-aching emotion, and passionate love stories, then you’ll adore Brian David Bruns’s tale of overcoming impossible odds.
Extract;
Black Sea
JUNE 2, 2003
1
I feel a distance between Romina and myself that was never there before. It is because of her indifference when she left Conquest. I only hear from her every couple of days, and that is hard for me. I can feel the difference in her tone, the resumption of happiness (she is traveling a lot).
Romia is meant for paradise, and our spending this vacation together is our way of reaching that. I want another Eden like last time, and I certainly am ready to make it happen. It is a two-way street, though, and it was lacking on board from her direction. I will not waste my time if she is not interested. We both know that we will be apart afterwards.
We’ll see what happens.
—Brian’s diary
I was in Romania again.
Had I really been gone seven months? It didn’t feel like it. But those months had been a blur of crushing newness—to get to sea, to learn the sea, to survive the sea.
The sea and the job were one and the same.
For every day a passenger lived on a cruise ship, the crew lived two. Like the sea, the work was eternal. The work was vast. The work pummeled, eroded. It inspired awe, inspired fear. In my four months on the job I never had a day off, nor a sub-eighty-hour work week.
I was ready enough for a break.
That was an important term, ready enough. I could keep going. But I recognized how the micro-tears in my body, in my mind, would only deepen. I now understood why the military recruited the young. I was no longer particularly young. I also now understood why Romina had lost her spark. She was no longer particularly young, either.
But she was in Romania again, too.
Would Romina be the same provocatrix as when I first met her? Or would she be Conquest-cold?
At the airport, she didn’t greet me with a white rose. She greeted me with a bone-crushing hug and countless kisses. Her red lips made pajamas out of my face. She purred.
So too did Albișoara purr, as she took us to our happy place.
Everything was better. Instantly. Me. Her. Us. Gone was the labor, the stress. Gone was the indifference to each other’s presence. Gone was the rain, the gloom. Not the traffic. That was still there. But gone was its effect on Romina. She had released her inner donut.
I secretly wondered if she was sucking up.
But when Albișoara entered the verdant foothills of the Carpathians I began to understand Romina’s almost euphoric happiness.
The green spoke volumes.
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