They lay together in the darkness. Ben felt a heartbeat and wondered if it was his or Hudson’s. He couldn’t tell, as if there was only one heart being shared between them. He closed his eyes and let the gentle, steady rhythm of it fill him. It slowed gradually, until after a few minutes he felt Hudson’s warm breath on his skin and heard the faint sound of his sleep.

He, however, was still very much awake. He felt in many ways reborn, as if he had just that morning awakened to real life. All that came before was like a dream, clouded and difficult to remember. When he caught glimpses of his old self in his flickering memories, he seemed to be looking at someone who was dead. He barely recognized that man who looked so thin and without substance. How had he survived? Upon what had he lived?

He felt Hudson’s fingers in his, ran the tip of his forefinger along the slender bones, over the blunt edges of the nails and the thin, raised arc of cuticles. Hudson’s skin was soft, without the dryness of age or the scars of time. Ben thought of his own hands, roughened from hundreds of hours immersed in seawater, with wide knuckles and the scattering of hair across the back. He was almost ashamed to be touching Hudson with such hands.

The difference in age occurred to him, then. What was it? Surely fifteen years at least, perhaps closer to twenty. An entire generation. Yet he was the one who felt like the child. Hudson was more experienced, had already survived the heartbreak of one love affair, and probably many more than that. Ben had survived nothing in comparison, only a marriage that had never, really, been a marriage at all.

He didn’t know if he could do it. That is, if Hudson even wanted him to try. That question still hung over them, despite the fact that they were sharing a bed. How was it that they could continue to talk around it so easily, as if it were ultimately unimportant or as if there would always be a tomorrow in which to do it?

What if tomorrow doesn’t come? he thought. What if they had already been given all the time allotted to them and were wasting the last few hours of it in sleep? He was suddenly filled with the desire to wake Hudson up, to spend as long as they had left loving one another wildly and without fear. Then, if the end came with the rising of the sun, he could at least know that he had tried, even if he never tried again.