The Dead Romantics (60)
He shrugged. “I was eleven maybe?”
“You must’ve been a popular kid.”
“I mean, I read Tolkien and played Dungeons & Dragons, if that’s any indication.”
“Wow, yeah, really popular.”
“I feel like you’re roasting me,” he commented dryly, turning his face toward me, and there was a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth.
I gave a half laugh that might’ve also been the remnant of a sniffle. “Admiring you, really. Do you know how healthy it is for a kid to read something other than ‘boy books’ aimed at boys?”
“So I’ve heard. I just like love stories, I guess. I like the way they paint the world in this Technicolor dreamland, where the only rule you have to follow is a happily ever after. And I’ve spent most of my adult life chasing after that high.”
“And then I came into your life and declared that romance was dead. No wonder you hated me.”
“I didn’t hate you,” he clarified. “I was caught off guard. Here was a beautiful young woman declaring that romance was dead.”
I shook my head. “I’m not that pretty, Ben.”
He gave me a strange look. His eyelashes were long, and the ocher flecks in his brown eyes glimmered in the dim evening light. “But you are.”
My breath caught in my throat. Because here, sitting in the dark with both my mascara and my nose running, he thought I was beautiful? At my worst, selfish and needy and cold?
I quickly looked away.
Suddenly, a gust of wind whistled through the house. The beams creaked; the windows rattled. Ben gave a start.
“It’s just the dead singing,” I replied. Maybe it was Dad, somewhere caught on the wind.
“The dead singing?” He had a peculiar look in his eyes. “Like Lee’s book title?”
I didn’t answer. He didn’t really need it.
“Florence . . .”
“Surprise.” I picked at my cuticles, something that Rose had tried to get me to stop doing for years, but she wasn’t here and I was nervous. “I thought Lee was it, you know? I thought he was the one. My whole family is made of these impossible love stories—and I thought this was mine. I mean he was Lee Marlow. Executive editor at Faux. And he liked me. For the first time, a guy I dated looked at me like I mattered, and wanted to know every weird little thing about me.” I shrugged, chewing on the side of my lip. I didn’t like admitting how stupid I was. Even a year later, it was all still so raw. “He was the closest person I ever told about my . . . gift. About the ghosts I helped. I chickened out, though. I told him they were stories I wanted to write one day. I put up a barrier because I couldn’t face how he’d look at me if I told him it was real. I should’ve known better. I just became a story to him, too.”
And when the story was written, I wasn’t any use to him anymore.
A crow cawed somewhere outside. They were perched in the dead oak, unsurprisingly. There was a certain kind of silence that permeated places of death. The sound was closed and private, as if the spaces where the dead were honored were separate from the rest of the world. When I was younger and my brain was full of anxious spirals, I would lie down on the floor between funerals, and press my cheek against the cool hardwood, and listen to the house’s silence. It always gave me space to think.
Now, I feared the sadness in my soul was sopping up the silence like a sponge. I felt heavier with each breath. It was no longer a soft silence, but a still one.
He lifted his head from the armrest. A muscle feathered in his jaw. “That bastard.”
I gave him a surprised look. “Come again?”
“That bastard,” he repeated a little louder. “Of all the fucking shitty things to do to you, he ruined your memories. Things you told him in private—in trust. That fucking dead-eyed narcissistic asshole.” Behind him, a vase full of orchids began to rattle. I didn’t think Ben knew he was doing it. “The next time I see him I’m going to—”
“Whoa, tiger, you’re dead.”
The vase stopped rattling almost instantly.
He folded his arms across his chest tightly, and harrumphed. “Minor inconvenience.”
His anger took me so off guard, so far out of my range of emotions about what happened to me, I dunno—I just lost it. I began to laugh. And cry. But mostly laugh as I slid off the chair and onto the ground beside him. It was one of those spiraling sorts of laughs, because I didn’t realize how I was supposed to feel about this story until just now—
“Am I that funny to you?” he lamented tragically.
“No—yes,” I added, but my voice was tinged with nothing but adoration. For a guy I barely knew. “Do you know how long I’ve wanted someone to get angry for me? I thought I was going crazy, that maybe I wasn’t allowed to get angry because I told Lee they were just stories. I thought maybe . . .” And I hesitated, because had I said too much? I usually didn’t talk about these things—with anyone, not even Rose. They were my problems, and not anyone else’s. But he leaned in a little closer, as if gently asking me to go on, and I felt safe admitting, “I thought it was what I deserved. I thought that’s what I got for . . .”
“For having the audacity to trust someone you loved unconditionally?” he asked, and the anger was gone from his voice. It was softer now, warm like amber.