Tomorrow, I know, you're going to die.

I know how it'll happen, even, every last minute from now until 9:07, when the snow is already flecked with red and police tape stripes the sidewalk. Until my phone drops to shatter against the tile, the phrase some sort of blast and need you to identify beat against my skull like a drum. At 9:04, I'll roll over in bed to paw at my ringing phone.

At 8:17, I hear a distant boom and chalk it up to demolition downtown.

At 8:01, you arrive at the mud-spattered kiosk of the Sixth Street corner stop, your last few breaths puffing out into the December stillness as the bus you were going to take pulls away. At 7:46, you'll pout and muss my hair while I grin up at you from the bed, the winter sun making both our eyes warm somehow. It'll be a day off for me. Not for you, and you'll be running late, too early to live.

I'll see the clock out of the corner of my eye, red digits blinking 7:30 as your hair tangles in my fist, my hips pressed firmly to you in the way that you like when you cum.

At 7:14, I'll roll over and drape my arm across your shoulders, sleepily nudging you awake before your alarm.

And at 9:10 precisely, the world will hang for-

for-

for-

for a moment, until it's 7:10 again.

Not for the first time- at 3:16 in the afternoon, four years ago to the day, I skidded into the dirt in an city too old to keep fighting, and saw the terrified eyes of a- a boy, a gun from fifty years ago wavering in his grip.

Brown, like mine.

At 3:17, I shook my head, begging him not to make me.

At 3:18, I saw the flash, even as my glove slid home against the trigger, and the world hung, a bullet that would slam into my cheek one half-second later still, like a gnat, against a silent tableaux.

Something inside my head slid sideways, then, and the flash furled back into his gun. At 3:17, he was dead, and I had taken my first last breath.

It's 7:10 today, and I'm laying in the dark, feeling your chest rise and fall against me.

At 7:14, I'll tell you that we're staying in bed all morning. That you're not even calling your boss. And for hours, hours, you'll wonder why I have the fever of the damned when I make love to you.

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