Benjamin

*Note: this story contains mentions of physical violence and suicide.*

I can’t stop thinking about our last kiss.

It hasn’t happened yet. But it will. I’m quite certain I’ll kiss him at least one more time, and every kiss so far has been incredible.

Sometimes I lie in my bed, thinking about it. Where will we be? When will it be? It’s not like it’s something I can predict.

I can’t predict anything. But Grandmother can, and has. For decades, she has been able to predict the exacy day someone will die. A few months ago, after years of avoiding this particular topic with her, I asked her the question I’d never wanted to ask, and she gave me her answer.

*****

I met Benjamin at a work event six months ago. He is incredibly handsome - dark eyes, smooth skin, wavy dark hair that he pulls back into a ponytail. But that wasn’t what he drew me to him.

It was his smile. His smile lights up his whole face. The first time he smiled at me, I felt like I was the only person in the room.

Of course, I wasn’t naive enough to think that I could be the only person he smiled at like that. I’d grown up surrounded by boys like that. We called them players. They could make you feel like the most beautiful girl in the world, and then the next day, they’d disappear into a crowd of other handsome boys as if you never existed. The first time it happened to me, I was sixteen years old and devastated. Now I was twenty-five, and knew better.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he said. He had a hint of a Southern accent in his voice. “You’re Allison, right? It sounds like we’re going to be working together.”

I nodded. I was the head of PR for the non-profit I worked for, and Benjamin worked for an event planning company that would be organizing our next fundraiser. “Sounds like it,” I said, keeping my voice cool.

“Daddy!”

A small child, probably about five years old, ran up to us and wrapped his arms around Benjamin’s legs. Benjamin laughed, leaning down and lifting the child up effortlessly, holding him up high in the air for a moment before settling him into a hold on his hip. “And this,” he said, “is Bennie Junior. You’ll be working with him, too, right, buddy?”

The child was a carbon copy of his father and he grinned at me, too. The two of them - two handsome men, thirty years apart in age, equally charming in their own way - that was what got me, looking back now. I watched that little boy gazing adoringly at Benjamin, saw a man that was not only handsome but loving and caring, and I fell.

*****

I was six years old when I learned about my grandmother’s gift.

We had an extraordinarily special day that summer. It was my uncle’s birthday; he was my dad’s brother, and he was turning fifty-five. Everyone in the family gathered at a park nearby our house, and my grandparents had rented out three pavillions to hold everyone. I met distant cousins I’d never met before. Most of the children were delighted at the main event, when my uncle unloaded dozens of remote control cars and trucks and announced that we’d be having an RC demoliton derby on a nearby tennis court.

I was a quiet child, more comfortable with books than with crowds and trucks, and I stayed beneath the pavillion with my grandmother while most of the family trooped over to the tennis court.

“Why is he doing that?” I asked my grandmother.

“It’s been his dream for a long time,” she said, smiling at me. I called her Nan, and I adored her. My family was big and loud, and I sometimes felt out of place in it, but never with Nan, whose quiet spirit seemed to match mine. “Ever since he was a little boy.”

“Why didn’t he ever do it when he was a little boy?”

“He did, once,” she said. “We did something similar for his seventh birthday. But we didn’t have a lot of money back then, so we only had four or five cars for Uncle Larry and his friends to use. Now, as you can see -” - she gestured toward the tennis court, where, I swear, Uncle Larry had nearly a hundred RC cars ramming into each other - “- he’s been able to dream a little bigger.”

“But why this year?” I persisted. “Why now?”

Nan looked at me carefully. My parents were over by the tennis court as well. Later, they’d be furious that she told me.

“It’s because it’s his last birthday, darling,” my grandmother told me, her eyes filling with tears. “Uncle Larry is going to be dead in a couple of months.”

*****

It was clear to me from the start that Benjamin was not available. We’d meet at the office to chat about the upcoming event, and he was always showing people pictures of his three kids - Bennie Junior, Delilah, and Jamison - who were adorable.

He showed me the photos, too.

“They’re so sweet,” I said.

“They’re rascals,” he replied, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “Now, let’s talk about entertainment for the fundraiser. What kind of music do you like, Allison?”

I considered this. I was nervous everytime we interacted, keenly aware of how attracted I was to him. That day, he was wearing a suit - often he was dressed more casually, but he was on his way to an event that evening - and had taken off his jacket. He looked handsome, dashing, yet also attainable. “Nothing you’ve heard of, probably,” I said.

Benjamin leaned toward me, his eyes sparkling with amusement. “Try me.”

For years, I’d spent any expendable income I had going to concerts. It was a habit from my childhood - my father was always dragging me along to shows. I named a few bands I liked - one local, two bigger names, but nothing mainstream - and Benjamin grinned at me.

“I’ve seen all of them,” he said, a satisfied smirk on his face. “In fact, that first one is performing at our fundraiser tonight.”

I was trying so hard to play it cool with Benjamin. I was a professional, after all, and I was at work. Plus, he was married. But I found myself grinning back at him.

“The first time I saw them was ten years ago - I was about your age,” he said. “In D.C.”

“Me too,” I replied.

He raised his eyebrows. “You must have been - what, fifteen?”

I nodded. “Have you ever seen Firehawk perform?”

We talked for the next hour about bands we’d seen, music venues. It got late. The office began to empty, and Benjamin checked his phone.

“I’ve got to leave for that event,” he said, smiling at me and standing.

He put on his suit jacket.

I hated that he was leaving. I wanted to keep talking to him. The thought of going home to my apartment alone was painful. Then, just as Benjamin was turning to leave, he stopped and looked at me.

“Do you want to come with me?” he asked. He seemed almost surprised to hear himself ask the question.

But both of us were smiling when I said yes.

*****

I’ve always felt more comfortable with death than the average person, primarily because of my father’s work as an undertaker. My mother’s job in finance was demanding, and occasionally I’d have to accompany my father to the funeral home where he worked.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I’d say solemnly to everyone I met.

Sometimes I’d accidentally say it to one of my father’s co-workers, and everyone would laugh.

“We have to laugh,” my father would tell me. “It’s a serious business, but you have to find ways to laugh and have joy.”

On the evening of my uncle’s RC car birthday party, my parents were furious when they found out my grandmother had told me about her gift. They said I was too young, and that Nan had overstepped. I didn’t care much about their anger.

“Do you know what day you’re going to die?” I’d asked them. They wouldn’t answer me, and I couldn’t tell anything from the looks on their faces.

My mother tucked me into bed that night. “I don’t want you to think about this anymore, Allison,” she told me, kissing my forehead.

My head was full of questions I knew she wouldn’t answer. Then I thought of one that she might.

“When did you find out?” I asked her. “That Nan could predict when someone would die?”

My mother looked sad. “The day before your grandpa died,” she said. “They made a big deal of it, and Nan wanted me to know so that I could say good-bye. I was ten.”

“Mom, why don’t you want to know when you’ll die?”

She thought for a minute before she answered me.

“It changes things, Allison,” she said slowly. “It makes you crazy. It makes you think differently about the things you do. I saw it happen - to my cousins, to my older sister.” My aunt Rebecca had died before I was born. When I was an adult, I learned it was by suicide. “It’s better not to know, Allison.”

“Does Dad know his date?”

“He wants to,” she said. “But he won’t. I won’t let him.”

*****

It was three weeks and three events later when Benjamin kissed me for the first time.

I hadn’t dared to hope for it. I looked for signs, of course. I noticed that he rarely mentioned his wife in my presence. I noticed that he’d started texting me instead of sending me work e-mails, and that his texts tended to stop at around seven o’clock every evening, when I assumed he was with his wife and kids.

I noticed the way he looked at me when I wore an outfit that flattered my figure.

I’d seen a couple of photos of his wife. She was pretty, but not the knockout I’d been expecting. Maybe he was tired of her. Maybe they’d stopped having sex. Maybe he was thinking of leaving her.

He walked me to my car that evening and then caught my hand and pulled me back to him when I started to get into my car.

I melted.

I’d never had a kiss like that before. I’d been kissed before, of course, hundreds of times, and I’d had sex; I didn’t keep a list or anything, but my number was in the double digits. I certainly wasn’t new to intimacy, romance, or sex.

But that first kiss with Benjamin was different. All we did that night was kiss, but it was clear from the first time we touched that there would be more - that we both desperately wanted more. He held my face in his hands, so tenderly, and then slid his hand down my back, pressing me closer to him. I loved the feel of our bodies pressed together.

“Should we - do you want to come back to my place?” I whispered in his ear.

“I can’t,” he said immediately. “I have to get home.”

We kissed a little more, and then we left, with a plan to see each other the next night for a business meeting. Even though I knew I’d see him again in less than twenty-four hours, his words - I can’t - echoed in my ears, filling me with a sense of abandonment and rage I’d only known once before.

*****

My relationship with my father now is the best it’s been in years. He’s getting older and won’t admit it, so sometimes I go along with him yet again to work, offering much more assistance than I did back when I was a child. He handles most of the paperwork and the communication with families, but I sometimes will help him at the cemetery, walking with him to evaluate and prep a grave site, making sure everything is ready for the arrival of the hearse.

We only started talking again a year ago. For seven years, I didn’t speak to him - ever since the day he failed to show up to see me off to my senior prom.

“Why isn’t he here?” I asked my mother, who was stony-faced and quiet.

“He’s gone off to live his best life,” she said shortly, moving a strand of my hair out of my face and inspecting my make-up. I was wearing a floor-length yellow strapless gown and should have felt like a princess that day.

“Why?” I asked.

“He found out from your Nan when he was going to die,” my mother said, her voice angry, though I knew it wasn’t with me. “I guess sometimes when you find out you only have a decade left, you stop caring about your responsibilities.”

My father tried to come back into my life several years later, and I iced him out repeatedly, ignoring phone calls, pretending he didn’t exist. It was my mother, ironically, who convinced me to give him a second chance, though she cautioned me at the same time.

“Forgive,” she said, “but don’t forget.”

They became the words I lived by.

*****

When I found out from my Nan that I only had a year left to live, I went to Benjamin almost immediately. I didn’t tell him - I couldn’t - but I begged him to leave his wife.

I was madly in love with him - wildly and completely head over heels. I wanted to be with him for every moment I had left on this Earth. He was, I believed, the perfect man for me.

He wouldn’t leave her - them.

“I can’t,” he said, the words echoing in my ear yet again. We were laying together in a beautiful hotel room, his arm curled around me, snuggling me into his chest. He kissed the top of my head. “I can’t leave my kids, Allison. Not yet.”

He said more things after that, but I didn’t hear them.

*****

When Nan told me the day I would die, she cried. I didn’t. I’ve always felt more comfortable with death than most, probably due to my father’s work as an undertaker. I knew death to be a part of life.

But the thing about facing your own death is that it sends everything in your life into technicolor. Every single thing felt more important. It even helped me to understand why my father had left us. Life was too short, and we had to follow our impulses, to live in our bodies and in this world while we still could.

*****

We’d take a walk together - that was what I decided. I’d invite Benjamin to go for a walk with me, and we’d hold hands and we’d have our last kiss.

He was surprised when I suggested it - it had been nine months since we started sleeping together, and we usually met somewhere with a bed and a shower - but he wasn’t unhappy about it. When he arrived, he got out of his car, looked around carefully to make sure we were alone, and then took my face into his hands, kissing me gently - a long, slow kiss.

I melted.

Benjamin held my hand as we walked. “Why did you want to meet here?” he asked me.

“I wanted to show you something,” I explained. We walked a little further, and then we were there.

It was an empty grave - freshly dug, ready for a hearse to arrive the next morning, ready for a grieving family to mourn, just as mine would in less than a year.

“You’re into some weird stuff,” Benjamin said, grinning at me in a way that let me know he was intrigued. He pulled me close to him.

It was time.

He kissed me, this man I’d loved for months, this man I wanted to spend the rest of my living days with. I felt that kiss throughout every inch of my body. I knew he wanted to lay with me right there in the grass, to be together. But I lingered in that kiss, relishing the tingly, wonderful feeling, sliding my hands up his chest.

It was our last kiss, and I wanted to remember it.

I pulled back from Benjamin, just a little, and smiled at him. “Did you see whose grave it is?”

He shook his head, and he turned away from me to look at the tombstone a few feet away.

That was when I picked up the shovel on the ground and slammed it into the back of his head.

*****

I can’t.

Maybe Benjamin couldn’t leave his family.

There were things I couldn’t do either. Like tolerate living the last few months of my life with the knowledge that the man I loved didn’t want to be with me.

*****

I checked his pulse. When I was sure he was dead, I shoved Benjamin’s body into the open grave. There was a pile of dirt nearby. I began to shovel it on top of his body - not to fill the grave, but just enough to conceal what lay beneath.

My mother was right. To find out about when you’ll die makes you think differently about the things you do.

When I could no longer see Benjamin’s body, I looked down into the grave and felt a twinge of something. Longing? Guilt? Love?

Maybe it was forgiveness.

I could forgive his abandonment.

But I couldn’t forget.