Bulletproof Kink #3

Theme: heartbreak hotel. Minus the hotel.

It goes like this: leading lady is a teenage girl whose grandmother is dying, so she hangs around the hospital after school every day for three months, keeping her grandmother company. While there she meets a boy and, while they’re both abrasive and abrupt at first, they become friends. They talk and play cards, bring each other food and jokes and make up ways to entertain her grandmother. He, too, is there every day, but the girl doesn’t know why, and she doesn’t talk about it, until she finds out, near the end, that the boy has a twin brother who is dying, and the boy, who suffers from a terminal illness of his own, is going to give up one of his lungs to save his brother, and then likely die shortly thereafter as a result. During this three months, of course, girl and boy fall in love, and the boy insists that the girl stay away after the operation, because he doesn’t want her to see him dying. The day before the operation, the girl’s grandmother dies, so she never does see the boy, and she never finds out who his brother is (because they are fraternal, not identical twins - I like to think they will be chiaroscuro twins, one blond and one dark), and she misses the boy fiercely because she knows she will never see him again. Then one day at school, across the cafeteria, she sees a new boy who has a familiar smile, and they get to talking and become friends, and one day, when she goes over to her new friend’s house for a study date, she sees a picture in the foyer, and she knows that the boy she loved is dead and the boy standing before her is breathing with his brother’s lungs. Living boy falls in love with girl, but she knows she will always love his brother and cannot give him what he wants, and there is a walking away at the end. I would want this to feel the way the novel Plum Wine made me feel at the end.

(358 words)