He laughed, and I really loved the way he laughed. Soft and deep and sincere, and it made my uptight muscles and my rigid bones relax. It was endearing. I mean, for a dead guy. He leaned against my chair, his head resting on the armrest, eyes closed. I clenched my hands because I wanted to run my fingers through his thick black hair. And I couldn’t.
“So, did the great Benji Andor always want to be an editor?” I asked.
He tilted his head to the side, thoughtful. “I never wanted to create words, I always wanted to bury myself in someone else’s. But to be honest, I became an editor because I’m chasing this feeling I felt when I read my—” He quickly stopped himself and cleared his throat. “When I read my first romance.”
“Which one?”
Ben shifted. He didn’t say anything for a long moment, as if he was debating whether to tell me the truth or tell me at all. I doubted he would lie to me at this point—I didn’t think he could lie his way out of a paper bag if he had to. “The Forest of Dreams.”
That... wasnotwhat I was expecting. “Seriously? AnAnn Nicholsnovel?”
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,reallypopular.”
“I feel like you’re roasting me,” he commented dryly, turninghis 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 youare.”
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 Iwas 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 wasLee Marlow. Executive editor at Faux. And he likedme. 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. “Thatbastard.”
I gave him a surprised look. “Come again?”