The Perks of Dying

“I mean, I kissed him and he just… stood there,” I swirled the wine around in the glass before taking a sip. “Like a fucking statue. It’s just like… seriously, what the hell? Don’t tell a girl you’re interested and then pull that crap; major mixed signals and contradictions. I mean Jesus, I knew he was docile but I didn’t realize it was going to be like making a move on a fucking corpse.”

At my side, Val let out a sputtering noise. I looked over to find him coughing into his arm as he leaned forward. The laugh that escaped me was unintentional; his scrunched face an unorthodox and amusing sight.

“Seriously? I’m choking and—“ He coughed again. “You’re laughing?”

“Oh god, you make the most adorable face when you choke though, I can’t help it,” I chuckled as he straightened himself up, grey eyes settling me with a cool stare.

“I’m mid-sip and you throw out a line about your adventures into the land of necrophilia, what did you expect to happen?”

The disheveled strands of his almost white hair seemed to go in every direction, one or two falling unceremoniously in front of his bright eyes. I always loved those eyes; they were such a peculiar color and always so distracting. They were pale, like faded silver and seemed to lighten in color closer to the center.

I gave a slight shrug, taking another drink from the pink-tinted glass. “How bad would your dad flip shit if he knew I snuck this in your room?”

“Probably a bit more than the time you accidentally sat beside me with a peanut butter sandwich, but less than when you brought me a pack of smokes two weeks ago.”

I laughed at that. Val was in ninth grade when I met him my senior year, and at a football game two months later I had found him in the bleachers with his father, who promptly had a minor freak out and positioned himself between us when he discovered I was eating a peanut butter sandwich; a bad allergy of Val’s. Not long ago I had snuck a pack of cigarettes into his room at his request. Denying Val was something I had found impossible as the years rolled by. He would ask for things he wasn’t allowed to have and I would acquiesce. My age made some of the things he couldn’t legally obtain like alcohol easy to get, others were just things he couldn’t acquire on his own due to other reasons.

“He’d been cleaning out the fridge before he came upstairs because he smelled the smoke, and he just started throwing week old lasagna at me. Oh my god, that was hilarious. It took me three washings to get all of the pasta and sauce out of my hair.”

“And it took me a week to convince him to let you come back over,” Val added, tilting back the wine bottle.

“Please, we both know he wasn’t going to keep me away for long.”

“Of course not.” Val tilted his head towards me with a half smile, quirking his eyebrows up a bit. “Oh, the perks of dying.”

Neither one of us said anything after that; the light sips of the floral wine I’d been taking suddenly turned to large gulps, and a minute later my glass was empty. I reached over, extracting the bottle from his hand before refilling my cup and passing what was left back to him. There were things we didn’t speak of, and he had dared to venture into the land of the taboo.

“I laughed at your joke, you know,” he sighed childishly.

My taupe nails tapped rapidly against the wine glass as I looked down, examining the chipped polish. “Yeah, well mine was funny.”

“Of course,” he chuckled. “So how precisely did that go again?”

And just like that, he managed to diffuse the tension in the air and restore the light feeling that had previously been there. I smiled a bit, shoulders relaxing as I leaned back against the wall behind his bed.

“It was like kissing a wall. Or a statue. Or just something that wasn’t living.” I pressed my finger to my lips for a moment before I spoke again, “Dead frog, definitely a dead frog. His lips were damp? And not like lip balm damp, like what-the-hell-did-you-stick-your-face-in damp. It was just… ugh. God. It tasted like regret.”

“I mean, did he know you were going to kiss him?” Val asked. He both looked and sounded amused, and I noted a distinct drop in the amount of fluid in the bottle, even when considering what I had poured into my glass.

“When you follow a girl out to her car, and stand there and talk to her for twenty minutes when you were supposed to say goodbye at the door, I’d damn well say he was anticipating it, if not asking for it.”

“So what happened?”

Taking another drink, I paused for a moment before turning to look at Val. “It fell into an awkward silence and we both know he wasn’t going to do anything, so I leaned in, and he just stood there like a fucking meat puppet.”

The blonde grinned, inclining his head towards mine. “So you leaned in.”

“Yep.”

“And he just…”

I hadn’t realized how close his face was until the tip of his nose brushed my cheek, lips lightly pressing against mine. They were soft and warm, the gentle touch coaxing a response from me as I kissed him back. It only lasted a few seconds; he tasted of wine and smoke—presumably from one of the few cigarettes I had given him that he’d managed to hide from his father.

He pulled back slowly, the tips of our noes barely touching as we watched each other. “Like that?”

Dazed, I slowly shook my head, looking down toward his lips before meeting his eyes; grey pools that pulled me back in. I kissed him without thought. His response was gentle, hand finding the small of my back as he pulled me towards him.

There was a warmth in his kiss I hadn’t found before; a soft desire to contradict the hungry, sometimes violent passion of the other first kisses or the stone cold rejection I had experienced. It was welcome and inviting, it was encouraging, and I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt it shouldn’t have been.

My fingers tightened on the cool wine glass that was in the hand that wasn’t knotted in his hair and I carefully pulled myself back with a ragged sigh. He watched me with patient eyes as I sat up, setting the glass carefully on the table. I focused on the old lamp beside it, slight touch of my fingertips not diminishing the tingling sensation on my lips.

“You’re dying.”

“I’m still alive.”

“Why did you have to kiss back?” I asked.

“I could ask you the same thing, Adelaide,” Val replied quietly.

“Because it felt—“ I cut myself short as I whirled on him, hard glare faltering as he met it with a passive understanding. “I don’t want to miss you more than I’m already going to.”

I was the only one still there for Val, aside from his immediate family. His friend pool had diminished completely when they learned of the time limit hanging over his head; it wasn’t the disease they were afraid of—it was caring about someone whose existence was destined to be terminated early. I had stayed; and only then did I realize how big of a mistake that may have been, how smart the others possibly were from running with their tails between their legs. But I wouldn’t do that to him; I couldn’t.

The warmth of his hand on mine pulled me out of my daze, fingers squeezing his tightly. “But then again, I don’t want to regret missing out on you, either.”

I pushed a few soft strands of hair out of his face; he leaned into my palm and I gave him a small grin.

“Am I a better kisser than Ricky?” He asked playfully. And he did it again, diffused the tension with a simple smile and a few light words.

“Sure, if that helps you sleep at night.”

Val and I smiled and laughed, lounging in the pleasure of each other’s company as the hours ticked by. But I knew as well as he did that the added comfort could also mean added pain; that it was going to hurt much more when he was gone, that death would probably no longer be something so easy for him to cope with. He held me close that night until his father came up the stairs and saw the mostly empty wine bottle on the end table and politely asked me to leave.

Val kissed me again then as I tried to get off his bed and out his door, in front of his father. There was no begging for my returned presence the next day, no asking for forgiveness to allow me back over. He told him I would be there, whenever I pleased and as long as I pleased, because that’s what he wanted. So I left then, tearing out of his house and into my car with tears clinging to my lashes only once I was beyond his neighborhood. I wouldn’t let him see those; his grey eyes were always light, even in the current circumstances. I didn’t want to see them darken like storm clouds on a summer afternoon.

I touched my lips once more as I got out of my car, glancing up at the star filled sky.

Why did the dying boy have to kiss as though he had eternity in his hands?