The Dead Romantics (48)

“Anything I can help with?” I asked, poking at my waffle.

Alice said quickly, “No.”

“Are you sure? You don’t have to do everything alone—”

She looked up from her plate, and I instantly realized I’d said the wrong thing. “Oh? Are we going to talk about this now?”

“Alice,” Mom warned.

My entire body went rigid. “No—what does she mean? What do you mean, talk about this now? What’s your problem, Al?”

“My problem? It’s not my problem I have a problem with,” she snapped. “The second things get difficult, you leave. No matter what. We can always rely on you for that.”

“That’s not fair. You know that’s not fair.”

“Then why didn’t you ever come home?”

“Everyone visited me in New York!” I batted back. “Every year. You came up for the lights and the Christmas tree and—”

“Because Dad wanted to see you. And he knew you wouldn’t come home no matter how much he asked. You can ask Mom. We would’ve loved to stay home for Christmas just once.”

That wasn’t true. I knew it wasn’t true. They loved coming to visit me during the holidays—they’d said as much! And Dad never once asked me to come home, not once—

“Mom?” I asked, turning my attention to her. “Is that true?”

She turned her eyes to the ceiling tiles, then closed them and took a deep breath. “Your father never wanted you to come back when you weren’t ready.”

A sinking feeling burrowed into the pit of my stomach.

“No, we always catered to you,” Alice added and shoved herself to her feet. “We all’ve got ghosts, Florence. You just happen to be the only one who can’t handle yours.” Then she shoved her arms into her black jacket, and stalked out of the diner.

I didn’t feel hungry anymore.

Mom said patiently, “Florence, you know she didn’t mean that—”

“I’ve got to go write something,” I said, lying, obviously lying, as I excused myself from the table. Carver gave me a pained look, as if to say, Sorry, but he had nothing to be sorry for. Mom asked if I wanted to take a to-go coffee mug with me, but there was coffee at the bed-and-breakfast, and god knows I’d forget the to-go container in some unspecified location and never find it again.

The thing was, Alice wasn’t wrong.

It was another argument we had been avoiding—for years. And now all of them were bubbling up to the surface.

Not only that, but I had my dead editor to contend with, Dad’s funeral preparations, and Ann’s manuscript. Everything all at once.

I hated complicated.

When I got back to the bed-and-breakfast, John waved at me without looking up from his Spider-Man comic. I climbed the stairs back to my room, and decided that a long and relaxing shower was exactly what I needed. Head empty, water hot, nothing but the white noise of the shower echoing in my brain. I didn’t want to think right now. Not about anything.

So I pulled out my NYU sweatshirt again and picked up my jeans from the floor, and laid them out on the bed before I went for the claw-foot tub with a shower. As it turned out, thankfully, the inn didn’t skimp on water temperature. I let it get as hot as I could—hot enough to boil me alive, exactly how I liked it—and stood under the spray for a long time. Until the steam was thick and the constant shower of water over my head quieted all the buzzing thoughts in my head and my skin was flushed and my fingers began to shrivel.

Too long, probably.

The soap smelled like butterscotch, and I tried not to think. It reminded me of the way Ben smelled in his office, and I tried to stop thinking. How his eyes looked when he had bent toward me and thanked me, warm and soft and ocher. His shirtsleeves rolled up to expose muscular forearms. How he was so big, and his hands were big, and how they would feel against my body, cupping my breasts, his lips pressed against mine, tasting like spearmint and—

No.

I flung my eyes open. Shampoo suds leaked into my eyes, and I cursed and put my face into the hot water to rinse them out.

No, no, no, Florence. He was dead.

He was very, very dead.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I muttered to myself. What was wrong with me? I was home for the first time in ten years for my father’s funeral and I was fantasizing about a dead guy. I hadn’t even thought about anyone else since Lee Marlow ripped my heart out and fed it to the pizza rats.

So why now of all times?

Why him?

Because he was someone very safely dead. Someone so very out of reach. And I was that fucked up.

When the water started to finally get cold, I finished washing the suds out of my hair and got out of the shower. The entire bathroom was still so foggy, I had to use my towel to wipe off the mirror.

Something materialized out of the corner of my eye. In front of the bathtub.

I looked—and let out a scream.

Ben spun around to face me—and yelped, covering his eyes. I clambered to cover my . . . bits, but I must’ve grabbed the world’s smallest towel because I kept having to shift between covering my nips and my bush, and after a few rotations I realized there wasn’t a good answer here. So I grabbed the shower curtain and wrapped that around me instead.

“Oh god, my eyes!” Ben cried.