Documentary by A.J. Sand

his lips stamping her skin, causing the spot to flare up as if from the heat of his mouth. She was in danger of combusting just from the proximity.
    Kai suddenly touched the inside of her wrist. “McCartney A. Carroll. Your brother, right?” He rubbed his thumb over the small black cursive lettering. The tattoo artist had used Mac’s actual handwriting for the sketch.
    Dylan was surprised that he remembered as she looked up from his thumb to his face. “Yeah. And the number five is for the last five things he didn’t get to do before he died. We made this list of twenty-five things. It’s to remind me to live everyday to the fullest.”
    Mac was born after a few years of frustrating attempts at conception, her parents had told them. And then their parents had been in so much new parent bliss after his birth that Dylan had come along by accident barely two years later. They had wanted more children but had wanted a bigger age gap between them, but Dylan loved that they were so close in age, and they had grown up together as best friends. The year Mac turned ten, his health made a permanent shift for the worst. It was non-Hodgkin lymphoma followed by a too short reprieve from the cancer before it returned. Mac beat it the second time for many years, but it was as though that period was just conspiratorial time his cells took to devise a better way to try to kill him, and about seven months ago, the non-Hodgkin lymphoma had finally figured out how to do it on the third try.
    Kai stared at her without a hint of pity in his eyes, but she couldn’t actually read what it was, and it gave her a chill. “How’d you get into film? I don’t think I ever asked.” Kai moved from her wrist to her palm and drew big, i nvisible circles with his fingers. It felt good. Really good.
    Dylan slammed her hand shut. “You already had your chance to interview me,” she said with a hearty laugh. “No backsies.”
    “Tell me.” Kai pulled his hand out of hers but went back to tickling her palm.
    “It sort of found me.” She shrugged. “I got lucky that way. It just felt right.  Singing’s in your blood, right? Your dad sang?”
    Kai nodded. “For a guy who hit like a Mack truck, he had a really beautiful voice. When sobriety was a somewhat regular part of his life, we lived on the road for a while just outside of Nashville before we moved to Oahu. I must’ve been like six or seven…it was a couple years before he died. He would open for small acts and perform in really nasty bars. His name would be way at the bottom of the concert bills. I don’t think they paid well. I just remember being mesmerized when he would be up there with his guitar. My mom would have to beg for them to let me into the places because she loved the way he sang, and they didn’t have anyone to watch me.” Kai threaded a few of his fingers through hers when he got silent. Dylan’s cheeks pumped red, and he must’ve noticed because he immediately touched her face. “Really glad you came tonight, Bob Dylan Carroll.”
    “Me too,” she whispered as he palmed her cheek, but he pulled away suddenly and she watched his brow crease in thought.
    “I should tell you about the website,” he said, waking the laptop. Once the screensaver faded, a list of U.S. city names appeared down the length of a Word document. It looked like a tour itinerary.
    “Wow, is that your complete schedule?”
    Kai minimized the document quickly and cleared his throat. “No, just some stuff Nina was talking to me about. Anyway…”
    Before he could click on the Internet browser, she tapped the desktop background image. “Is that you?” she aske d, smiling. It was a photo of a dark-haired adolescent boy, maybe at age seven or eight, smiling wide and squinting in the day’s brightness as he stood on the dock of a lake holding hands with an adult woman.
    Kai nodded, pulsing out a brief smile. “Me and my mom.”
    “She’s beautiful. Where is that?”
    “North Carolina in