Flash Fiction
She asks her partner if she can sleep with her ex.
Her partner replies, “Why?” like most partners would.
So she tells her some of the reasons: Well, he has cancer. We haven’t talked much in the intervening years between our relationship and now, but he reached out last week, and he’s in town, and he has cancer. He says he’s aching for that kind of connection before … y’know, the end. And I have a toothachey fondness for the memory of him. I want to help.
She doesn’t tell her some of the other reasons: We never had sex when we dated because we were just little college students, unsure how our parts worked individually, let alone together, impressing each other instead with witty remarks about the readings assigned by that one cool English professor. And, domestic bliss is unending and his request is the first time I’ve felt the twist of desire in the dormant parts of me in so, so long. And usually that’s okay and I’m happy—I’m kept quite sane by the mason jar canning and garden tending and quiet reading time and Sunday morning walks—but now the singular remaining iota of my youth is dying of cancer and it’s making me horny.
“Do you think he really has cancer?” the partner asks. She isn’t against it, necessarily—they used to swing with other couples when they were younger. Usually female couples, but she has always adored her partner’s sentimentality.
“Who lies about that?”
Men who want sex, they both think to themselves. But in the end, the partner agrees, barring the usual constraints of before-and-after testing and full communication.
The ex isn’t lying. He is dying of cancer. He’ll beat it for a while, and she will feel a swoon of anger and embarrassment that will subside with his death about a year later. She won’t attend the funeral.
They meet at a coffee shop near the hotel where he’s staying. He looks largely the same. He kept the twiggy elements of his youth tucked in tight beneath a thinning blanket of hair. The anticipation is sweaty and fills her with the pleasing shiver she first felt when they held hands and traded kisses all those years ago. She thinks to herself that she’s wanted this for a long time, for forever—she recalls that she was ready to sleep with him when they dated, but she didn’t know how to ask and he seemed a little scared.
They kiss outside his hotel room door before she leads him to the bed. He touches her with a precious sort of uncertainty.
He’s inside her for the first time in the whole twenty-five years, four months, two days, and ten hours that they’ve known each other.
Then, he starts crying.
He slumps over so his face is on her shoulder, and he cries and cries and cries and tries to apologize for something he said or did at the end of their relationship over a quarter-century ago, and she tries to keep her voice a bit sexy when she tells him it’s okay, but then he just cries some more, and she thinks about her partner and the meditation music that’s always playing in the study and how the fiddle leaf fig probably needs to be pruned, and she thinks about how when she and the ex broke up all those years ago, she felt very sad for a very long time, and her friends told her that he was probably going to stay a virgin forever and get a long greasy ponytail and work as a bookshop wage slave, condescending to each customer he deigned to answer questions for, and she had felt strange and awkward trying to defend him from her friends’ assertions based on his likes, dislikes, the way he treated her, the way they kept hanging out after they broke up and it made her sadder, and she thinks about how sweet and lovely and unique she found him, those things no one else ever seemed to see, and she wonders how his life has gone since then, which she doesn’t know because part of her being able to get better and move on and build a cozy, happy life for herself was never checking in on him, and she wonders why she didn’t think to ask about the rest of his life before this, whether he had a wife, children, pets, a job, ailments besides the cancer, whether he still reads as religiously as they had together as nubile coeds, and she thinks again about how she’d like to be home now sitting on the sunporch, remembering him differently, that this was maybe, perhaps, potentially, poorly considered on her part.
The total number of thrusts is somewhere between twelve and fifteen, as far as she can tell, which is plenty. He has at least stopped crying now. He says he’d like to call her sometime, so they can talk—about them, all those years ago, if she wants, but maybe also about the weather or whatever she’s reading now. She says okay, but he never calls.
She crawls into bed next to her partner that night and says, “I love you,” and her partner kisses her on the forehead and says it back, and she is very lucky.
Dana Jean Rider holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her fiction has also appeared in Revolute. She lives in Reno with her partner Zach and their two cats, Snorkel and Dante.