He looks at me with tears in his eyes, but they weren’t sad. He was happy. “I wasn’t supposed to find peace.
“But you did.”
Eddy’s lip quivers. “Because of you.”
I don’t know what to say. So, I say nothing. I just lean forward, breathing him in, holding on to every second I have left with him.
“Thank you for seeing my truth,” he breathes.
And then he kisses me.
Not with hunger, or haunt.
Not to enter my mind or stir buried memories.
Just to kiss me. Person to person. Man to Spirit.
And I kiss him back.
The shimmer brightens. He’s blinding, beautiful—and then the surrounding light dims.
He’s still here. Stillhim.
Just… real now. Solid. Warm. Human.
And then I understand. The curse broke.
Hisandmine.
He holds up his hands and twists them. “I am solid!” he lets out a laugh.
And I pull him closer to me, helping his stand and holding him in my arms, jumping ecstatically on the spot. “You’re alive again!” We both laughed and looked like saturated fools dancing behind a bin in the rain.
Eddy pulls back and looks at me. “Oscar, there is something I have wanted to do with you since we met.”
“Anything. Name it.”
“Sleep with me.”
My stomach flips. We’re hidden, out of sight, so it’s not exactly out of the question. And right now, all I want is to hold every inch of him, anyway. But… “We can go back inside and—”
“No!” His voice is urgent, and it catches me off guard. “Let’s do it here.” He turns and looks at the pallet on the ground and the cardboard poking out of the nearby bin.
Our eyes meet, and we both have the same idea.
Beneath the moon and now completely calm sky, with trembling hands and hearts too full to speak, we undress one another, not with urgency, but admiration. Skin against skin. One man’s trash is now my treasure.
His skin no longer flickers with bin-static or clings to shadows. His eyes are wide and alive, a kaleidoscope of memory and hope. I cup his cheek. It’s the first time I’ve touched him without slime, without grime, without the stench of death between us. And he leans into it like he’s been waiting his whole afterlife for something that simple.
“I think your curse is broken,” I breathe.
Eddy nod. “Yours too.”
He looks down at our hands, our interlaced fingers. “Do you still want me?”
I don’t answer in words. I kiss him again. Slower this time to get to know the shape of him. The taste of what had once been grief that had now been rewritten as grace.
He gasps against my mouth in what I figure is a surprise. From what I know about him, I don’t think anyone has ever kissed him like that.
