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It’s his grin, maybe, that draws you to him. It’s lightning in the night, it breaks everything up, makes everything he does into a game and it draws you near.
When you’re with him, you’re on fire. You’re free and full of life, you’re happy -- no, you’re not happy, not really, you’re too much in the moment to feel an emotion like happiness. You’re consumed by the possibilities he opens up to you.
Your moments are stolen and golden. You drive off in a fast car, faster than any car you’ve driven before, the speedometer straining all the way to the right. You streak together in the halls of Riverdale High, arms around each other, hair flopping in his face. He jerks you off in your childhood bedroom, his shit-eating grin never changing, and you have no idea what this means to him, or to you.
You want to ask him what this means, if this will end you or extend you, but you know that soon the same hand that’s wrapped around your cock will be on some girl’s breast, digging below her sweater, and you’re somehow inflamed with jealousy over his attention being away from you and you alone.
But inevitably he burns you, as you’ve always known he will. The cigarettes he bums from you turns to money he owes but can’t pay back, to calls from jail asking you to bail him out, one last time I promise, one more time after that. You can’t do this forever, you know this in your bones, but he’s right there and you can’t deny him, not after everything. Your marriage breaks down because you can’t say no, not to him.
You’re afraid that someday your son will follow in your footsteps, fall hard for a honeyed tongue and a shit-eating grin and a fast car. You try, half-heartedly, to keep your sons apart from each other. It doesn’t work and you let your son keep his bedroom door closed and blast the Boss from your room so you don’t overhear.
You always thought he’d be the death of you, but he’s not. When your death happens, it’s random and quick and almost painless, and then you’re gone. You never see him sob and tear his shirt open, that he’d vow to be a better man, to fill the gap that you’ve left behind.
You don’t know what you believed until now, some half-remembered catechism of what happens after death. Maybe life repeats, maybe love will rhyme again. But all you know -- all you can remember -- is that your life on earth is not extinguished until he is here again with you. You will not move on again until his arm is again on your shoulders, his smile is giving you life.