He nodded at the unspoken name, his hand absently going to the ring around his neck. He rubbed at it thoughtfully. “You were in the library and I can’t remember how many times I told myself to just go over there. To talk to you. This stranger whose name I didn’t even know.”
“A novel idea.”
“Forme, it was. But I’d just met Laura, too, and I’m nothing if not torturously monogamous. And then... the moment was gone. Lee walked up to you, and that was it.”
To think, he had been there since the beginning. We had passed each other like ships at sea and I never knew. All of my heartache could have been circumvented—all of his pain could have been mended. What kind of people would we have been if he had found me in that library? Or if I had mingled with Rose and found him instead?
“I wish we had met instead,” I whispered.
“I would’ve been terrible for you,” he replied, shaking his head. His voice was softer, closer. He’d gotten out of bed and came around toward me. I watched him in the mirror, and his eyes were trained on the carpet. He couldn’t meet mine. “I would’ve been terrible for everyone. I was terrible for myself.”
“Laura cheating on you wasn’t your fault.”
He didn’t respond.
“It wasn’t. It was hers. You told me that after that you felt like she deserved better. Someone who would keep her from cheating but—you’re wrong.” I took a deep breath because this was something I had to come to understand, too. That worth wasn’t dependent on someone else’s love for you, or your usefulness, or what you could do for them. “It’s not her who deserves better. It’syou, Ben.”
He swallowed thickly. “How come when I told myself the same thing a thousand times I didn’t believe me, but when you say it, it feels true?”
“Because I’m rarely wrong.”
“You did say romance was dead.”
I tilted my head, looking at his reflection in the mirror. “Aren’t you?”
He chuckled, and finally looked up again, and his eyes were a warm, melted ocher. Like in the dandelion field. “I don’t think this is what you meant,” he replied, his voice soft and gravelly, and I realized how badly I was burning up on the inside. I wanted him to touch me, to run his fingers across my skin. I wanted his face in the crook of my neck, his lips pressed against the freckled skin there. I wanted to fold myself into his sharp angles and stay there. Exist there. Because there—thereI was sure I wouldn’t fall apart, I wouldn’t disassemble, I wouldn’t feel broken.
Not because I couldn’t exist on my own, but sometimes I just didn’t want to.
Sometimes I just wanted to let my guard down, let the pieces of me fall to the ground, and know that I had someone there who could put me back together without minding the sharp bits.
“Though dead is what you make of it,” he mumbled, his dark gaze almost feverish, if he weren’t so polite. “There are so manythings we can do. We can talk books, we can wax about the romantics—Lord Byron and Keats and Shelley—”
“Mary or Percy?”
“Mary, obviously.”
“The only choice,” I agreed.
He laughed. “And I want to complain about all the youths and their TikToks and sit on park benches together making up stories and go for walks in graveyards at midnight.”
“I feel like we’ve done a few of these...”
“But I could never touch you.”
“I’d be okay with that.”
“No one else will ever see me.”
“That means you’d be all mine.”
He sighed and sat back on the edge of the bed. Morning sunlight slanted in such a way, it carved a stark golden shine across him. “That sounds awfully similar to the plot ofThe Forever House.”
“One of Ann’s best.”
“And it’s the only one without a happily ever after.”
I gave him a strange look. “What do you mean?” I asked as I gathered up my clothes and went into the bathroom to change. I left the door cracked. “They got together in the end!”