The Kiss

The sound emitting from her parted lips immediately got his attention and he looked up to notice her eyes were open. One eye was completely lost to a thick sheen of blood and the red, high gloss tissue has once the skin has been removed. But he could see one eye clearly and it was focused and looked lucid. He let out a sigh of relief. Lucidity was a good sign.

His eyes met hers. As she gazed upon his face, his heartbroken and eager expression, her heart exploded in the feeling of love. This man she worked with, this loving father, dutiful husband, brilliant agent, was the most unyielding man she had ever met. He was completely unwilling to admit that he needed anyone, ever. She suspected it had something to do with his past. She new he had lost his mother as an young teen, and that his father had effectively abandoned him out of grief. After her death he immediately married a woman he was obviously incompatible with and joined the military. She suspected that he was so unwilling to admit he needed guidance and safety that he made those early poor decisions out of the need for the security and direction. She also knew that he lost a good friend in the military. Although he never really spoke in detail about it, there were the rare drunken moments after work, when it was just them that she got to see his hidden grief. This grief ashamed him, and he neatly and efficiently tucked it away whenever he was aware that it was showing, like some vulgar body part. She realized in this moment, in this series of moment, which ended up being the most meaningful in both of their lives, that she was waiting for what she saw in his eyes. She was, and had always been, a caregiver. That is how she expressed love, expressed passion, lust, all of it. She couldn't imagine letting herself love someone who wasn't willing to show her that he need her. She would give totally, utterly and completely, to someone who needed her. She imagined it was what let her be such a good civil servant. She got a great amount of personal satisfaction from the thought of giving herself to help people. And at this moment he was exploding with naked need. His eyes were telling her he was completely helpless. He felt completely out of control. He looked at her, implored her to do something. He needed her to do something, quite desperately. She had no idea what it was, she didn't care. Just seeing the need in his face was enough. She knew she could give to him now, love him, let him love her. She wasn't thinking of the consequences right that second. She just felt elated that he had finally found his need , and that he had given it to her.

In that moment of delirious panic, he thought he saw her smile. This completely perplexed him. He felt like his heart was going to burst out of his chest. His guts were so tight he thought they might brake. Panic and vestigial, preemptive grief were curling his stomach so tightly he thought he might vomit. He stopped whispering, stopped telling her it was going to be ok, and just looked at her. Silently he was saying FIGHT! DON'T GO! GET UP! PLEASE DON'T GO! FIGHT!

He would never be sure why, but he decided to kiss her then. With this decision the whole world had suddenly gone quiet. It was just him and her. The street, the taxi, the crowd, the blood just drifted away. He leaned down slowly, used his thumb to smear the blood off of her lips, closed his eyes and kissed her gently. She smelled him then, and with her very last breath, inhaled his scent. He felt her go as his lips left hers.

It didn't register at the time that he heard, along with all of the other sounds of emergency, camera shutters clicking. And when the major metropolitan newspapers published the tragic pictures of a man giving his lover one last kiss, it was completely unforgivable to his wife. She was mortified in ways she was too embarrassed to admit, even to herself. The whole city had seen her husband in a moment of tenderness with another woman. And the worse offence, the unforgivable thing, was that his wife had never seen the expression the camera captured on his face before. The expression conveyed a feeling a delicate tenderness and incapacitating need that made her heart ache with jealousy. It was the expression every woman dreams of seeing. It was the expression of the men on the cover of romance novels. An expression that each woman has convinced herself didn't exist, was purely fiction, to justify that she has never experienced it before.

His wife didn't leave immediately, thinking that she would look cruel to the people who were now painfully paying attention to the subject of such a touching photograph. She had even heard somewhere that one of the photographs had won a prestigious journalism award. She stayed with him while he began to grieve, but was disgusted by his sullen moods and enraged by his random bouts of tears. She was gone within the year. And when he left the court house after signing the divorce papers, trying not to notice the similarities of his surrounds to the tragic day a year before, he was unexpectedly flocked by reporters on the court house steps who accosted him with questions about his secret love and cruel wife. They wanted to know if he was ever going to go back to police work again. The pummeled him with questions about "the affair" and how long it had been going on. Those questions surprised him with shameful regret. He regretted that he had nothing to report, nothing to say, nothing to cling too. He had nothing of her left, nothing of that last stolen moment except a series of tragic, yet touching photographs and a very large and empty house in the suburbs, that he really couldn't afford. And in a steely moment of self-disgust and unbearable heartache, he consigned to never, ever make the mistake of needing anyone ever again.