Stranger. Megan Hart

I told him.

      “Like…?”

      “Like it’s a job,” I said. “Which it is. You have to find a way to be able to put it away at the end of the day.”

      “Even if you get a death call two hours after the end of the day?” Jared grinned.

      “Even then.” I finished my soda and tossed the can into the recycling bin.

      “So, what do you do?” he asked on the way back to the embalming room.

      What did I do? I went out and paid men to fulfill my fantasies. “I read a lot.”

      Jared snorted under his breath. “Maybe I should take up knitting.”

      “You could do that.” We worked together for a bit longer. He didn’t need a lot of instruction. “You’re going to make a really good funeral director, Jared. Did I tell you that?”

      He looked up from what he was doing. “Thanks.”

      We finished without any more philosophical discussion, but when he left that night, I thought more about what I’d said. My tumultuous relationship with Ben had ended with spectacular horrendousness. He wanted to get married. I didn’t, and not because I didn’t love him. Ben had been very easy to love. In fact, I’d assumed, as he had, that someday we’d get married and have some kids. Do the family thing.

      I believed in love. Believed marriages worked. My parents were still happily married after forty-three years, and in my work I saw many families bound together by the strength of their devotion to one another.

      I’d been around the dead my entire life, but it had never hit so close to home until I started my internship with my dad. I arranged memorials and talked with priests, ministers and rabbis in order to help the grieving families who came to us send off their loved ones in whatever way they deemed fit. Funerals weren’t for the dead, but the living, after all. I overheard arguments between warring family members who wanted different levels of religion in the service, and assisted with preparations for nondenominational services, too. I listened to the prayers of hundreds of mourners, and though the method in which they prayed might differ, or the specific deity they implored to care for the deceased, one thing was the same. People wanted to believe their loved one was heading off to someplace beyond this one.

      But they were wrong. The dirt fell on the coffins the same way, every time, no matter if it was a plain pine box or a casket costing thousands of dollars. The body inside eventually became dust and even the memories of the person to whom it had belonged faded and became dust, too. I’d overseen hundreds of funerals and never once seen angels taking a soul to heaven, nor devils dragging it to hell.

      You died, they put you in a box in the ground or burned you to bits to hasten the process, and that was it. Done. Fini. There was nothing after that.

      No ever after, happily or otherwise.

      Ben blamed me for breaking us up, but I pointed the finger at the summer I worked for my dad full-time for the first time. I blamed the women who came to us shattered by the loss of their spouses, women who’d spent their lives so enmeshed with their husbands they had no idea where their men left off and they began. I blamed the wives so battered by grief they couldn’t function, and the children who cried over losing their parents.

      With Ben I’d been so tied up in the beginning of things, I hadn’t thought so much about the end. Dead was dead, there was nothing else. I wouldn’t know I was dead, so why be afraid of it? Everyone died. Everyone went.

      I wasn’t afraid of going.

      I was afraid of being left behind.

      There was no question that the dates helped me put away my job. I could have a cop, a firefighter, a teacher. I could play naughty nurse, or secretary, or anything else I wanted, limited only by imagination and my budget.

      I told Jack to meet me at the hotel I’d been using for months, a recently renovated strip motel on Harrisburg’s city limits. It had cheap rates and clean sheets, and was a good forty minutes’ drive from my home, which pretty much guaranteed I’d never accidentally bump into someone from town. Or someone’s aunt or uncle or brother, or someone I went to high school with who was home for a holiday, or someone whose brother or sister I’d gone to school with.

      I never worried about bumping into someone for whom I’d done a funeral. Not just because most families I serviced were also from the local area, and in my town the local area meant a radius of no more than ten miles. It was simpler even than that. People who met me for the first time at a service didn’t see me. They saw a funeral director, if they saw anyone at all through their own haze of emotions. Out of the very limited element in which they’d met me, I was unrecognizable.

      I’d been to that motel close to a dozen times in the past year, but the clerk behind the desk didn’t recognize me, either. It was the sort of place where the staff was paid to recognize anonymity.

      I secured the room and left the small office with the key dangling from my hand. Renovations aside, the Dukum Inn hadn’t switched over to key cards. I liked the weight of the heavy black plastic key ring with the room number inscribed on it in faded white. I liked the way the key fit into the lock and turned. It was tactile in a way sliding a card into a slot wasn’t.

      Jack, looking scrumptious in a battered black leather jacket, met me at the door as I opened it. Inside, the room was nothing spectacular. I couldn’t have said whether or not I’d ever been in that particular one, as a matter of fact, though after the visits I’d made you’d think I might have bothered to remember.

      Jack looked around as he shrugged out of his coat and tossed it onto the chair. “Looks like they’ve done some upgrades.”

      I closed the door and set the key on the dresser before I turned to him. “You’ve been here before?”

      He shot me a sideways grin. “Couple times. Not for a while.”

      “Is that so?” I stepped closer, reaching for the front of his shirt. “Don’t tell me. You’re used to classier accommodations?”

      His low laugh tickled me in hidden places. He let me tug him closer by the shirtfront. He had to tilt his head only a little to look down at me. The wind had blown his hair back, but even the tangles looked soft.

      “Nah.” He was smart enough not to elaborate, and I gave him credit for that.

      Jack fit his hands onto my hips. Our bodies nudged. I leaned closer to take a breath, half expecting the smell of cigarettes and motorcycle exhaust. He smelled like spring-night air, the sort that can’t decide if it wants to be cold or not.

      “Hey,” he murmured until I looked up at his face.

      “Hey,” I replied.

      Jack leaned in, slow to kiss me, giving me plenty of time to turn my face if I wanted. I didn’t. I wanted his mouth on me, all over, including mine. I like kissing. Sometimes that’s all I wanted to do. Kiss. Soft and slow, hard and fast. Long, lingering kisses or brief brushes of lip on lip.

      I’d given him unspoken permission to kiss my mouth, and Jack took it without a second pause. His mouth slanted over mine as he pulled me closer with one smooth motion. Our mouths opened. I tasted mint. He didn’t use his tongue right away, but when he did, the sensation of his warm and wet flesh sliding against mine made me draw in a short, sharp breath that wasn’t quite a gasp.

      He pulled away, just enough to ask, “Is this okay?”

      I pulled him back to my mouth. “Less talking.”

      Jack’s smile curved against my lips. “Yes, ma’am.”

      I slid my hands beneath the hem of his buttoned shirt and found the soft cotton of a T-shirt beneath. I pushed that up, too, to give my fingers room to play on his bare skin. I slid my palm flat along his stomach, just above the waistband of his jeans. He pushed against my touch and left my lips to slide his mouth to my ear.

      “Thanks for going out with