Work Text:
It started with a kiss on my cheek.
You startled me. It was careless, you weren't thinking about it. As if it were a habit, as if you had been still kissing me for the twenty years since we were kids, hello and good-bye. Kissing in celebration and to heal a bruise or a broken heart.
One day, Dad gave me a look. I think he knew. I was sick with pain and grief. No more. I don't know if you noticed at the time. No more touching, except when sewing up a wound or a manly pat on the back. No more lips brushing against your hair while we snuggled under a shared blanket in a chilly motel room, watching an old black and white gangster movie at 2 am on a community access channel.
No more, no more.
Dad is long dead. We've stitched each other up a hundred times since. I fantasized that your fingers lingered, checking for the heat of an incipient infection or something hard and unforgiving caught under a deep cut in calloused hands.
I would dream, determined to be satisfied with what we had, and then you kissed me.
You walked out the door of the motel room, keys jingling in your hand, offered to find takeout to make us both happy. Something with meat, something green. We'd split the fries.
I heard you stop, silent. You paused, and I knew. You realized you just kissed me. You were surprised as I was. But then I heard your footsteps, the key jingling, Baby's door opening and closing, the throaty purr of her engine. She roared out of the parking lot; you raced away.
Was this the day you wouldn't come back?
I stared at the computer screen for the thirty minutes it took you to track down a delicatessen and return with two small shopping bags filled with Italian-style sandwiches layered in meat and cheese on toasted bread and three kinds of salads and glass bottles of old-fashioned soda pop and travel cups of very good coffee and some pastries that looked homemade, with names in French and German and Swedish and Yiddish, handwritten on the receipt.
The goods covered the work table in the center of the room. At the bottom of one of the bags was a stack of napkins and plastic knives and forks and spoons. Little packages of real cream and sugar.
You were smiling. Me, too.
I stood up, pulled you close–you didn't resist– and kissed you on the lips, just a soft peck.
And we sat down and celebrated.