Last touch.
Last kiss.
His last kiss with Jill had been an afterthought as she lay in the hospital bed, the beeping machines turned off, her blood pooling where her body had touched the steel-framed bed, her body lifeless and Jill—what made up the real Jill—gone. Evacuated. Banished by the brutal finality of death, ravaged by mutating cancer cells that finally hogged all that was left of her.
He’d pressed his lips to hers and the cooling flesh had not bothered him. He’d expected that.
What had bothered him most was that he’d not kissed her enough when she had been warm. responsive. Wanting.
Alive.
He set the picture down and as he reached for another, he caught a glimpse of himself in a door mirror and laughed, the sound rusty and creaky, like a snicker in church at a funeral, like a fart in the middle of prayer.
Natural, but really unwanted.
Jill had been alive two years ago, though in the middle of chemo, when he offered himself as a “Date With a Hot Bachelor” for a local charity auction. She’d been the one to suggest he saunter down the runway wearing no shirt and half his firefighting uniform.
If she were here right now, she’d go with him to the show. Her hands would be the ones spreading oil across his thick pecs, massaging his tight neck muscles, roaming over the broad, rolling hills and valleys of lats and triceps well-defined by work.
The thought made parts of him harden. Most of all, his heart, because he couldn’t continue to do this to himself. Torture himself. Make himself remember her.
Absent-minded and full of too many loose thoughts, he shook his head slightly to jostle himself out of it, hand holding the second picture. In it she was on the beach, wearing a smoking-hot bikini, hips jutting out and ribs a little too close to her skin. She was smiling, but he remembered that picture all too well. Jill had just been diagnosed and the chemo was ravaging her body. The doctors had given her a three week dose and sent her home. Told her to go and recover and have fun.
Then come back for more.
They’d tried to surf that day, on a sunny Florida beach, but she’d been too tired. Mike and Dylan had paddled her out past the beach buoys, out where you could pretend no one else was around, and she’d tipped her pale face to the sun, worshipping the quiet. The waves had lapped at all three of them and Dylan felt a stabbing pain in his solar plexus at the memory.
It was the moment he’d realized this wasn’t going to end well.
His phone buzzed. The ringtone was from work. He was on call—no choice, had to answer.
“Hey, dumbass. You coming in for staff meeting, or what?” Murphy from the station. Dylan’s fire chief was an uncompromising sonofabitch, but a softy, too. He’d been great through Jill’s death. At the fire station, his fellow brothers only knew her as his girlfriend.
They just thought of Mike as a roommate.
Dylan never corrected them.
“Shit,” Dylan muttered. “I forgot.” Work first, then the auction tomorrow night. Right now, he was just doing a test run to make sure he had his look down pat. Years of modeling when he was younger had taught him to over-prepare.
“You forget lots of things lately.”
“Like your face,” Dylan shot back, grabbing clean clothes from his drawers.
“Hah. I’d forget my face too, if I could. Just get your pretty little ass down here. Maybe you can prance down the runway for us after we take roll.” The guys knew he’d volunteered again for the bachelor auction and wouldn’t let up. Still shots from the video on YouTube the charity organizers had uploaded dotted the locker room at work, pictures of Dylan smiling a sexy smile, using his finger to lure the winner on stage, dipping her back for a saucy kiss.
Someone had made a fake Dancing with the Stars poster and superimposed his face and red suspenders on it. Nice. Jill had found immense joy from that picture, and it pleased him now to remember how her laughter had pealed like church bells on the somber oncology ward, how the video of his antics made her day.
“I could teach you how, Murph,” he said after a long silence on the phone, shaking himself out of his memories. “You could surprise your wife. Give her the full monty.”
Murph let out a bellowing howl. “I walk into the bedroom half naked wearing my uniform pants, dancing like a stripper, my wife’s gonna think I overdosed on something from the police evidence room. Not get all ready for sex. Out—see ya in a few.” Click.
