The Dead Romantics (64)

“You want to scream,” I filled in.

He looked at me in surprise. “Yeah. I do.”

“Then do it.”

He paused. “Do it?” he repeated. And suddenly—Ben screamed. Just a loud, vicious yell that echoed off the storefront windows and the town hall.

I stared at him, startled.

He said, “Like that?”

A smile curved my mouth. I didn’t think he’d actually do it, but . . . “Do you feel any better?”

“Not yet,” he replied.

And he screamed again. In his voice there was aggravation, and heartache, and sadness, because he was a ghost, and he had left his life behind, and he had died in the prime of it—and I hadn’t even thought about what he must’ve been feeling. To be dead. To be ignored. Invisible.

I was the only one who could hear him screaming.

But he didn’t do it for other people. He didn’t do it to be heard.

So I took a deep breath, and I screamed with him. I screamed into the howling storm, and my voice was carried off in the wind, it was struck down by thunder, it was dampened by the rain. I screamed again. And again.

And it did make both of us feel a little better.





25





Deadweight


BY THE TIME I made it back to the bed-and-breakfast, I looked like a drowned rat and my teeth were chattering, but I didn’t really care. I felt okay again—better than I had since I landed at the airport. Like a weight had been . . . not lifted, no, it was still there, but it had gotten a little lighter. Dad was gone, and I was grieving, and it was going to be okay.

It wasn’t yet—but it would be. I didn’t know you could feel like that. I didn’t know I could feel like that again—okay.

Not good, but better.

“Thank you,” I told Ben once I latched closed the wrought iron gate to the inn, and started up the stone path to the front porch. There was a light burning in the foyer; Dana sitting at the desk reading. I paused inside the porch, so I was no longer getting rained on, and turned on my heels back to the ghost of my dead editor. I was almost eye level with him standing on the third step, though he was still a little taller.

“I should probably be saying that,” he replied, his hands in his pockets, sleeves rolled up to his elbows to expose the tattoo on his forearm again. It was numbers. A date, I realized. From about five years ago. And half of a signature that looked familiar, but it was half-hidden by his sleeve. He looked less put together than he had a few hours before. The top three buttons on his shirt were undone, his tie lost somewhere in the netherworld between here and there.

He asked, “You always take ghosts to scream in the rain?”

I tore my eyes away from his forearm. “No, I only take people I like.”

“Then you like me?”

“I haven’t exorcised you yet.”

He barked a laugh. “Another talent of yours?”

“You should’ve seen the last ghost. Had to shoo him away with holy water.”

He laughed again, and shifted on his feet. We stood awkwardly. My heart hammered in my throat, and I curled my fingers tightly into my palms because all I wanted to do was reach out, brush his floppy hair out of his face. He needed a haircut. Then again, I liked his hair when it wasn’t gelled to perfection. It curled at his ears and at the nape of his neck, the kind of curls I’d wrap around my fingers and toy with.

This felt like one of those moments when I should’ve said something. Anything. How much I appreciated his help, and how much I liked him near, and how sorry I was that he was dead—

We were on a boat passing under a bridge, for a second in the shadow, a moment—the moment—like the moment I felt with Lee in that private library, when I accepted his hand and let him pull me toward places unknown, like the moment with Stacey in the college bar in SoHo, when he asked my favorite ice cream flavor, and Quinn when he offered me a stick of gum in civics, and John in high school, inviting me out to pizza with his friends after prom. Small moments you catch, and keep in glass jars like fireflies, or you let go.

I couldn’t catch this moment; I couldn’t keep it—I couldn’t keep him. Better than anyone else, I knew what happened when I got too close to someone already dead, when I opened my heart and let someone in. It had happened before, and I found his murdered corpse on the Ridge three days later. A stupid, small part of me had thought he was still alive. But he wasn’t. He was a ghost.

Ben, too, was a ghost. Not alive.

Not real.

If I wasn’t careful, I’d make that mistake again.

And he knew it was a mistake, too, because we both let the moment pass, and found ourselves on the other side. He was meticulous. He thought things through. Of course he wouldn’t do anything, he wouldn’t say anything, he’d keep me at arm’s length for both of our sakes.

But then why was I so frustrated that he did?

He cleared his throat and nodded toward the door. “You should probably go inside before you catch your own death.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I replied, and quickly turned away from him and went inside.

Dana was sitting at the front desk, reading another book. An N. K. Jemisin fantasy this time. They looked up when they heard the bell above the door chime, and jumped off their stool. “You’re soaking wet!” they cried, grabbing a towel from underneath the desk, and coming around the side to hand it to me.