The Dead Romantics (90)

Ben? Right. I’m sure he told himself that because no one came to see him when he had his appendix out on our two-year anniversary.

“It’s nice to see you made some connections at all those publishing parties I took you to,” he added.

He really couldn’t think about a world beyond himself, could he? Charming and suave, of course he was, and the world he knew danced around him like planets around the sun.

I forced my lips to smile as my hands balled into fists. Just one punch. Just one—

No, Florence.

You’re better than that.

“I just asked the nurses,” he went on, and pointed down the hall. “He’s right down this way. We can walk together.”

I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to do this alone, either. My chest was beginning to feel tight. This wasn’t how I pictured seeing Ben again, with Lee Marlow to witness, but I began to care less and less about how we met again and just that we were going to. Because Ben was here, and the panic in my veins was slowly, with each step, transforming into excitement.

He was here. In this building. Alive.

Ben was alive. Ben was alive.

Ben was alive.

Hospitals didn’t look so different from publishing houses—at least not Falcon House. Glass walls separated patients from everyone else, sometimes frosted but never private. The cacophony of beeps coalesced into this jagged sort of rhythm that had no rhyme or reason, and my heart was louder than all of them, beating in my ears like a funeral march.

Lee never knew how to do anything in silence. He didn’t like quiet. He had to be either talking, or listening, or doing something. So, as we went together down the hall, he talked. “It’s good to see you—are you going somewhere?” he added, once he noticed the suitcase I was rolling with me.

“I just came back from visiting home.”

“Home? No shit. You always hated home.”

“My dad died,” I replied, and his eyebrows jerked up.

“Oh. Florence, I’m s—”

“Is that his room?” I interrupted, looking straight ahead. Toward the end of the hall, to room 538. I could see the number on the plaque. And through the frosted glass, there was a shadow—a shape—sitting up in bed.

I knew that shape. I knew him.

“Oh, what a surprise. Laura’s still here,” Lee observed. I didn’t notice the woman sitting in the chair beside Ben’s bedside until he said something. Soft red hair and a heart-shaped face, snuggled in a blanket. The same red hair from the social media photo. The same soft face.

“Laura?” I echoed.

“She hasn’t left his side since the accident,” he went on, and I didn’t think he told me that in malice because—he couldn’t know why I was here. Or what I felt. “I keep telling her to go home but you know how it is.”

I came to a stop.

Fifteen feet away, in room 538, Ben laughed at something she said. It was loud and bright and—and happy. He was happy. I didn’t need to see him to know that.

“I think she still misses him,” he said. “Maybe he’ll give her a second chance now.”

A second chance. What Laura had begged of Ben, after she cheated, and Ben had wanted that. A second chance—but he didn’t think he deserved it, because what guy drove his girlfriend to cheat? But it was her fault. She made the choice.

And he made his.

But . . . she had been at his bedside this whole time. Waiting for him to wake up. She loved him. Really loved him—and they had the kind of shared history that Ben and I couldn’t have in the seven days we knew each other.

I . . . knew very little about Ben. What was his favorite food? His favorite music? What was he afraid of—what did he do on the weekends? Did he own one of those squatty potties? Questions I hadn’t thought to ask in the last week.

Then again, I’d been grieving. I was still grieving. It was hard to make space with a sorrow that full.

“Why didn’t you come after me?” I asked Lee abruptly. “When I left?”

He gave me a strange look, and oh, I wished he could’ve said that he missed me. And I wished he could’ve apologized. And I could’ve told him that my stories were real, and that they were precious, and that I wanted to tell them someday. Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.

And this was not mine.

Lee Marlow said, of all the things he could’ve, “I don’t think we would’ve worked out, bunny. I don’t like dating rivals, though you got a while to go. I didn’t want to see you jealous—”

My hand was already in a tight fist.

It would’ve been a shame to waste it.

So I turned and I slammed it straight into his motherfucking nose.

He gave a howl of pain, backpedaling in surprise. His nose wasn’t broken. I didn’t know how to throw a punch that hard. But it did hurt my knuckles. He whirled back to me with wild, angry eyes. “The hell, Florence?!”

“I’m not your rival, Lee Marlow,” I told him, shaking my hand because it hurt. “You’re not even in my league. But you better watch me,” I added, and grabbed my suitcase handle again, “because I’ll be the writer you will never be.”