“This and that,” he replied, rubbing his father’s wedding ring on the chain around his neck. “Told him to give Annie a hello. And a thank-you. If she hadn’t asked you to ghostwrite for her...”
“A ghost asking an author to ghostwrite, thathasto be a first.” I sighed, and leaned my head against his shoulder.
“What’re you going to do next?” he asked, folding his fingersthrough mine. He began to rub circles on my thumb knuckle thoughtfully. “You turned in Annie’s last book. Her contract’s up.”
“Well...” I debated my answer. I still had to get through line edits of Annie’s book, and copyedits, and pass pages, but those were all things Ben already knew. I also still had to accept Molly’s offer of representation, but I’d do that on Monday. “I think... I’m going to write another book.”
“What’ll it be about?”
“Oh, the usual—meet-cutes and high jinks and grave misunderstandings and conciliatory kisses.”
“Will there be a happily ever after?”
“Maybe,” I teased, “if you play your cards right.”
“I’ll be sure not to cheat.”
“Unless it’s to help me win, of course.”
“Always. I’m yours, Florence Day,” he said, and kissed my knuckles.
Those words made my heart soar. “Ardently?”
“Fervently. Zealously. Keenly. Passionately yours.”
“And I’m yours,” I whispered, and kissed him in a cemetery of immaculate tombstones and old oak trees, and it was a good beginning. We were an author of love stories and an editor of romances, weaving a story about a boy who was once a little ghostly and a girl who lived with ghosts.
And maybe, if we were lucky, we’d find a happily ever after, too.
Eccentric Circles
IN THE DAYSGone Funeral Home, in the back corner of the largest parlor, there was a loose floorboard where I once kept my dreams. I kept them locked tight in a box, storing them like treasure, until the day I could take them out and brush them off, like old friends coming to greet each other.
I didn’t store my dreams in a small box underneath the floorboards anymore. I didn’t need to.
But there was a girl who was a little bit tall and lanky for her age, dark hair and wide eyes, who wrote her dreams on spare pieces of paper and put them in a jar like fireflies, and when she found her mother’s old metal box and its smutty, smuttyX-Filesfanfic, she decided to store her dreams there, too.
And the wind that whistled through the old funeral parlor sang sweet and soft and sure.
Like love ought tobe.