This is a one-off story set in the Quaranteam Universe created by CorruptingPower. My thanks to him and the QT writers room for their input and support.
This is a standalone story but you're going to want to be familiar with the rules of the QT-verse for it to make sense.
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Monica didn't like what she saw in the mirror. It wasn't her looks that bothered her, she thought she was pretty damn hot for a forty-year-old, it was more subtle than that. She didn't like the judgement in the eyes of the woman looking back at her.
She sat on the end of her bed in her large beachside home near Frenchman's Cay in the British Virgin Islands. The sun was high and the weather was as fantastic as the day Peter had first brought her out here to show her the resort of luxury holiday homes that he wanted to invest in. It was literally idyllic, they even used the word in their advertising. She could be outside sitting on the perfect white sand right now, but instead, she pulled her long blonde hair back into a ponytail and stared at the stranger in the full-length mirror who defiantly held her gaze and challenged her to justify what she was doing.
Running her hands over her strappy, one-piece bodysuit smoothed out the web of thin black silky strips. They stretched from the choker at her throat down to her shapely hips, crisscrossing her tanned, toned belly and gathering around her full breasts along the way. It had a single, wider strap that covered both nipples, and managed to combine being tantalising with barely covering anything. It had taken a lot of work to get it untangled enough to put it on and she was pleasantly surprised to find that it still fit, she hadn't worn it in years after all. These days she had bikinis that technically had less fabric, but this was very definitely not for beachwear. Anyone seeing her in this would know that she intended to fuck them to within an inch of their lives.
She'd bought it for him on their twelfth anniversary, their silk anniversary. The memory brought out a dirty grin; that had been one hell of a night. She closed her eyes and her hands unconsciously explored her own body as she thought about it. They'd fucked that night, all night, and they'd made gentle love as well when they needed time to recover. She pinched at her nipple through the silk with one hand as the other slid between the straps to reach her clit. Her legs spread, she indulged herself for a minute and groaned in pleasure.
Opening her eyes momentarily, she caught sight of the woman in the mirror looking at her. She met her gaze again and the fire in her crotch dwindled suddenly. They'd told her when she'd got the jab that she'd experience a strong need for sex, hence the impulse to dig out her best lingerie, but somehow she was still sitting here just talking to herself.
"You have to make a decision, Neeks. Which is it going to be?" The woman in the mirror demanded.
"There's no decision to make. It has to be him."
"You're really going to go through with it? Permanently and irrevocably tie yourself to him and only him?"
The town meeting the other day had been chaotic to say the least. Someone had actually thought that inviting people to attend separate meetings in small batches would let them put a stop to all the misinformation and rumour that was going around by handling everyone's direct questions. Predictably, it had seemed like half the island had shown up to the first session; more than two thousand people at an event intended for two hundred. They'd been forced to relocate from the town hall to the football pitch next door just to maintain any semblance of social distancing, there hadn't been enough leaflets to go around, and hours of answers shouted over the crowd's noise had left a lot of people feeling unenlightened to say the least. It hadn't been enough to stop her from getting the jab as soon as she could though; side-effects and conspiracy-theory tracking chips be damned.
"I love him, what else am I supposed to do?"
"You're supposed to be realistic! You have to think about the future." Her own lack of conviction was irritating her. She felt like this should be a simple call, one way or the other.
"I am! His future."
"He doesn't have one. What he has is an expiration date. Like bloody fruit."
"That's not fair. He loves me, and I love him."
All things considered, they'd had a pretty great life together. She remembered the first time they'd met; each at a different workplace xmas party in the same London karaoke bar. He'd been on stage singing "I'm a believer" and, halfway through, he'd met her eyes in the crowd and stumbled over the words. For years afterwards he'd called her a jinx on his fictional singing career, and his work friends told her that he would often whistle that same tune at his desk whenever he was distracted and thinking about her. They were both born and raised in the city, but his parents had originally moved there from the islands and then moved back in their old age. When he had wanted to follow them she'd been more than happy to swap rainy England for perfect beaches and soft breezes.
It hadn't all been sunshine of course; her breast cancer had been rough but she'd got through it and he'd supported her every step of the way. She had insisted on the double mastectomy and implants and he'd supported her then too. She couldn't be happier with how natural they looked or how much feeling she'd retained in her nipples. She toyed with them idly as she inspected how the scars were covered by the lingerie. Her breath caught in her throat and she lost another minute to gently caressing her body.
The intrusive thoughts didn't allow that to last long.
"If you'd been less self-absorbed at the time you might have noticed his decline earlier."
"Maybe so, but it wouldn't have made any difference. There was nothing that could have been done." She paced a little, avoiding looking at herself as she muttered.
"You could have been spending more time focused on him while you still had him at his best. Some time off work that wasn't spent in a chemo ward would have been nice."
"He would never have relaxed as long as I was still sick."
"No. He's always been all about you too. He would certainly tell you to look after yourself first and foremost... if he could."
"Because he loves me! Because he's so damn loyal he couldn't even enjoy a threesome for fuck's sake!"
She couldn't help but smile again as she thought about the panic on his face the one and only time that she'd brought a friend to their bed. He'd been so desperately afraid of making her feel jealous or overlooked that she'd practically had to force him to fuck the other woman too. He'd been a great lover in their time together. He knew every inch of her body and what made her tick, or at least, he had done.
"I can hardly leave him to die from the virus, can I?. It's only a matter of time before he gets infected."
"Yes, and then what? The vaccine people were pretty clear on that; one partner won't be enough. Who else is going to choose him?"
"It's a small island and there are only so many men left, there will be someone." That sounded unconvincing, even to herself.
"Bollocks! No one but you is going to board that sinking ship, and then he'll die anyway."
"I love him."
"And you're going to die for him are you?"
"It's not that simple," she sat down heavily and held her head in her hands.
"It's exactly that simple. There won't be anyone else, not when they see his condition."
Alzheimer's disease is a despicable thing, and early-onset Alzheimers was, to her mind, the ultimate proof that there could be no God. It's a soul-destroying disease that had stolen away the man she married well before his time and yet somehow left him walking around as if to taunt her with what she'd lost. He'd once been an intelligent and driven young man, CFO of a successful stockbrokers firm that he'd started with his childhood friends. Cashed out for the easy life at thirty five, he'd bought this entire resort intending to sit in the sun and let the income keep them for the rest of their days. To let it keep them and the family they'd planned together. Now he was forty four and couldn't even handle their personal finances alone. He had better days and worse days of course, that was the nature of the condition. Sometimes it allowed her to see cruel glimpses of her husband beneath his confused frown, but that came less and less often as the years dragged on.
At the time she'd believed that the day of Peter's diagnosis had been the worst day of her life. That belief had lasted until the first time he'd had a panic attack while out shopping. From there it had been a never-ending series of painful milestones. When he had to give up driving. When they'd had to hire someone else to run the resort for him. The first time he had forgotten her name, she'd cried for hours. The first time he hadn't recognised her face she'd thought she might never recover.
"A week after he dies, you'll follow him. Howling and screaming for sex with a man you can't ever have again!"
"I don't know that for certain." She shook her head violently, trying to dispel her doubts by sheer force of will.
