The Dead Romantics (88)

“It’s just me! And I so need to piss—oh my god, is that a secret stash?” Rose asked when she saw us sitting on the parlor floor with my box of secrets, but then she quickly hurried to the bathroom. Alice and I were still drinking on the ground when she came back out. “Wow, look at all this smut. Maybe your editor’ll take one of these for your next book,” Rose joked, glancing over an X-Files fanfic. “Ben doesn’t seem the Mulder-Scully type, though.”

I gave her a strange look. “Who?”

Rose said, “Your editor—I mean,” she said, and glanced at Alice, “Ann’s editor.”

Alice waved her hand. “I already know.”

“Rose, that isn’t funny.” Ben being gone hit me again, right in the stomach, and it made me want to puke.

My best friend took her phone out of her bra. “Erin texted me when I was coming back from the cemetery. He just woke up.”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“What? No—I could’ve sworn I told you he got hit by a car.”

“Yeah and that he died!”

Rose shook her head slowly, about three types of confusion crossing her face. “I . . . did not say that.”

Didn’t she? I mean—it didn’t matter, Ben was right there. He haunted me. He was dead, he had to be. But the more I thought back to our conversation the less I became sure about it because . . . I wasn’t sure if she had said he died, or if I inferred it. She said that he was hit by oncoming traffic, and I inferred the rest.

I mean, he was a fucking ghost.

And now he was gone. I watched him fade into the wind, but— What if . . .

What if that wasn’t because he moved on?

“And—and he woke up?” I asked, my voice brittle. I got to my feet and faced Rose, my chest tight with anxiety and disbelief and—and hope.

It was hope.

Rose showed me the text message from Erin.


HOTTIE MCHOTCAKES HAS RISEN! He’s awake!!



“Hottie McHotcakes?” I echoed, reading the text over and over. It was so outlandishly funny. Because I’d just said goodbye to him. I’d watched him pass on and here someone was talking about him as if he was— As if he was—

“He’s alive.”

The times he disappeared without warning. The voices he heard. The sounds. The pain—I’d ignored most of it because it didn’t matter. He was dead because my stubborn ass said he was. But he wasn’t, and while he existed here, some part of him was still being pulled back to his body, wrenched back, even though he kept trying to stay here, thinking that wherever he was going was worse.

If I’d been more perceptive. If I hadn’t written off his weird experiences. If I’d just thought a little, that things weren’t always the same, not always certain.

I pressed my hand over my mouth to muffle a sob.

Rose took me by the shoulders. “Florence? Babe? Are you okay?”

I shook my head. The world blurred with my tears. “H-He’s alive,” I said between sobs. “B-Ben is alive.”

Alice looked up from her spot on the ground. “Your ghost boyfriend, Ben?”

To that, Rose asked, “A ghost?”

And that made me cry even harder, and Rose pulled me close to her and wrapped her arms around me, even though she didn’t understand. He could feed his cat again, and he could go to bookstores, and read his favorite novels, and he could take all of those vacations he never did before, and meet new people, and find a new family and— And me. He could find me.

I wanted to have memories with Ben. I wanted to see him on the front porch and sit with him and make up silly stories about the people that passed on the sidewalk. I wanted to share a beer with him down at Bar None, and I wanted to dance with him—really dance with him, our hands intertwined, my unruly heart beating so loud it gave me away.

I wanted to kiss him, obviously, but it was so much fucking more than that.

When I was with Lee, I could see my entire life unfold around him. I knew where I fit in, I knew what part to play and how to play it. I had a place in his life, and I boxed myself into it as best I could, and I tried to be the perfect girlfriend for someone who was looking for a saint.

But when I thought about Ben, about his disheveled hair, his timid smile and soft voice, a heartstring pulled so taut in my chest it almost broke, and it hurt. Because I thought I could— I thought I could love him.

Cautious and organized and stoic as he was. Just as he was. He didn’t need to fit into a perfect place in my life. He just . . . needed to be.

He existed. And the rest of my world made room.

He was right in the end. Romance wasn’t dead, after all.





35





Unruly Hearts


USUALLY WHEN YOU flew into LaGuardia, you kissed your ass and hoped for the best. I hated flying into LGA—the turbulent air, how you’re going right over the water, how you think you’re going to land in that water when at the last minute the tarmac comes up and your plane juts down and—

I didn’t like flying.

At all. But I braved it. In fact, I didn’t quite mind it at all. Because I was going to see Ben.

After the funeral, I had thought to stay a few days longer, but as soon as my family heard about what had happened—from Alice, because she was about as good at keeping secrets as my dad was—they all told me to go. Catch a flight back with Rose, come home in the morning, go to his hospital—to find him.