A Promise (2)

He was lying on the gurney, waiting for me. I’d lied to the undertaker, I’d said I wanted a viewing, open casket. I wanted him to look nice. I’d never seen him in a suit before. The truth was I just wanted to see him one last time.

It wasn’t as if I was planning this all along. All I wanted was a few more hours with him, a few more hours to only deepen the pain that filled me. I didn’t mean it to end up happening the way it did, but he’d been in my dreams and nightmares since that day I walked into the mortuary and saw him lying there, and made love to him. He was so beautiful, so young and innocent, still scarred from the violence of his life, though he’d never talked about it to me.

I’d laid him, dressed, on my bed, the curtains drawn, the door locked. I restrained myself for a couple of hours. But I loved him and I didn’t want to let him go.

I tried to explain myself to him as I undressed him, gently unfastening each button, forcing myself to go slowly, ignoring the urgency of my own frustrated desires. I slowly slid the shirt off over his cold shoulders and stood back to admire him. Now he was half-naked, I could see the wounds the coroner had left, the incision where he’d cut into the dead flesh, looking for something I could never understand. Thank god for the abbreviated autopsy.

They’d found him – the police – slumped on a bed in a cheap flat on the bad side of town, dead. Overdose, they’d said, and the coroner had agreed. Heroin. Suicide. There had been a broken syringe lying beside the bed, but they didn’t know where he’d got the drugs from. There had been no note, but the door and windows were closed and it was impossible that it had been murder.

Kevin had a vaguely crescent-shaped scar on his shoulder from an old love-bite. I don’t know what kind of things he’d been forced to do when he was alive.