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He’d been writing to her since they were so young. They were still young now, but could at least claim to be adults.
Dulcinea didn’t know how much more adulthood she’d live to see.
She’d told herself she wouldn’t. That she didn’t want him to be a widower before he was twenty-five. She didn’t want to steal his youth as he watched her die, the way she’d been dying all her life.
And yet, here she was. Because a year and three months ago, a lab accident had nearly blown his skull apart, and since then… a clock had started ticking in her. The realisation that he wouldn’t be around forever, either. She had been incontrovertibly confronted with his fragility, his mortality, and it had led her to a conclusion she couldn’t deny.
She simply had to meet Palamedes Sextus. Even if it meant his seeing her like this.
They had corresponded through email alone. His second letter to her had included a request for her physical data.
She could have scanned in a photo and sent it over.
She hadn’t. At the time, she’d lost so much weight. A high calorie diet wasn’t doing anything to fix that. New medication had given her a rash. She’d felt depressed about her looks, so instead of a photo, her email in reply contained a silly (though arguably accurate) description, along with her measurements.
Which Palamedes had shared with Camilla, of course. Camilla had drawn a picture based off the description, and the next message Palamedes sent her had included a scan of the drawing as an attachment.
The girl in the drawing was beautiful. Dulcinea had written into her will that she wanted it used as her official memorial picture after she died. She’d hoped it would give Palamedes a laugh at the funeral, at the very least.
Yet soon, Palamedes would be seeing her. The real her, not lines on a page or his best friend’s sketch, but Dulcinea in all the perpetual death of her state of living.
They’d picked out an area of campus that ought to be wheelchair-accessible and fairly quiet.
The drama students were doing a play out on the green, so the performing arts rooms were entirely empty, though the interior was completely unfamiliar to scientists like Dulcinea and Palamedes.
They’d exchanged phone numbers in their last emails as they planned this meeting. They were on the phone now, as she wheeled herself through the automatic doors of the building.
Dulcinea heard him take a breath over the phone. “You said you were nervous. I’ve loved you all my life. I love you now. I’m going to work out how to love you better over time.”
The door to the stage was open – a section of floor for performances, and tiered seats rising up on one side. There was a background set up for the staging, for some play midway through performance. Golds and purples.
Palamedes was side-on to her, looking out at where the audience would have sat, and Duclinea realised he hadn’t heard her wheels, silent on the floor polished by hundreds of students every day. He didn’t know if she’d be coming from stage left or stage right. He didn’t know which way to look.
He was dressed up for the meeting, in a grey suit, well-tailored to his slim frame. There was a tie that matched the suit, and a fine-looking silver-grey pocket square. He almost looked fit to go down the aisle, and given the number of times he’d proposed, Dulcinea wouldn’t have put him past asking her to go straight to the nearest officiant after they met.
If she turned away now, he’d never see her. Never see the pale green dress which was meant to flow over curves but instead fell flat against the frangible wire frame of her skeleton. Never see her hollow cheeks or hollower eye sockets, or the grey bruises of illness under her eyes. Never see the cannula that kept her breathing, or the awkward rectangle shape of the pillbox in her dress pocket for the medication that kept her heart beating.
She’d done her hair as best she could for this meeting, not that it would have ever made her look more alive. She’d sprayed on perfume in the hope that she wouldn’t turn up smelling like a hospital.
But Dulcinea had always loved real, ugly, unfinished things. Perhaps Palamedes could love that about her too. Her reality, the ugliness that came with any illness with ‘terminal’ attached to it, every bad health day she’d ever had and all the ones that were coming. Dulcinea wasn’t finished. She wasn’t dead yet.
Watching him, Dulcinea saw Palamedes push his spectacles up his nose. She loved the gesture already.
“May I see you?” he spoke into the phone.
“Alright,” said Dulcinea, her voice bright and clear in the doorway, and hung up.
Palamedes put his phone into his pocket before he turned his head. Dulcinea got the sense that he didn’t want any distractions.
He looked at her, and looked like he couldn’t breathe any more than she could. Completely dazzled, his face almost blank as he took her in.
“And her body was like the chrysolite,” he recited, “And her face as the appearance of lightning, and her eyes as a burning lamp: and her arms, and all downward even to the feet, like in appearance again to glittering brass.”
Dulcinea found her breath and said, “So am I cute?”
He turned fully to face her and moved towards her. “You’re perfect.”
As if he felt he did not have the right, his slender fingers traced her jaw, the bone too pronounced by years of her body starving itself. His touch was light, the lightest, the brush of a moth’s wing.
He hesitated and hesitated again before he bent his head and kissed her as gently and attentively as she’d known he always would. He did not close his eyes; those clear grey eyes stayed fixed on her. Probably he could not look away.
“For what it’s worth,” said Dulcinea, “You’re the cutest, too.”