Page 122 of The Dead Romantics

I pressed my hands against his hard chest—and paused. Came back to myself for a very,verybrief moment. “Wait. Wait-wait-wait,” I muttered to myself, and started to unbutton his pristine white work shirt. He didn’t have an undershirt on, and I most definitely had felt— “Oh sweet chiseled Jesus.” I traced my fingers across his hard chest to his abs and verydistinctiveV cut into his trousers. “What are you—anunderwear model? Are these suckers airbrushed?”

His ears went red with embarrassment. “I’m an anxious person. I swim when I’m anxious. Which means I swim a lot.”

“Lucky for me.”

“You’re ridiculous,” he said, not unhappily, and planted a kiss at my jaw. “But I like that about you.”

“Oh, I am going to be evenmoreridiculous when I demand to put googly eyes on allsixof those abs—”

He pressed his mouth against mine, still ravenous, and made me shut up. And you know? It was sexy and I was super okay with it because whatever I’d been about to say succumbed to the part of my brain that seemed to always go offline whenever he kissed me that hard. And quite frankly, my brain had been on for way, way too long. It needed a hard reboot.

“Do you...?” he asked, breathless. “Want to?”

“Please,” I whispered, and we melted into each other, exploring each other’s soft hidden corners.

At some point he undid my bra, and at some point, I slid off his belt, and at some point he was kissing me—everywhere. He pressed a kiss between my breasts, then just below them, then against my soft stomach. He went lower and lower, muttering in a love language of tongues.

As an English major, I had studied rising actions, I had charted climaxes. Making love and making stories were close to the same thing. You were intimate and vulnerable and wandering, traveling across the landscape of each other, learning. You told a story with each gesture, each sound—every kiss a period, every gasp a comma.

And the way Ben touched me, the way he played his tongue across my skin and burrowed his fingers into me, made a story with my body—the way I bit my lip to hush a moan, and curled my fingers around the duvet—I wanted him to read every word aloud until the very last page, when our lips were swollen and our bodiesintertwined into each other’s spaces, and he threaded his fingers between mine and raised them to kiss my knuckles.

After a moment, he asked, “I have a question,” in a soft and thoughtful voice.

I shifted a little to look at him better, flattening out the fluffy feather pillow. “I might just have an answer.”

“What are we?”

My eyebrows shot up. “You ask thatnow?”

“Well—yes,” he replied, a bit embarrassed, and his ears began to turn red again and travel down the length of his cheekbones. “I mean—how are you going to introduce me to your family? I want to start with a good impression. They mean a lot to you, and that means a lot to me. So... what do you want me to be for you?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Well, this—us—we’re a bit strange. Technically we’ve only known each other for a week and some change but...”

“It feels longer than that,” he admitted, rubbing circles on my thumb knuckle again. “Ever since the accident, I’ve thought about you even though I was sure it was a dream. I scoured forums, talked with other coma patients, but nothing helped. I couldn’t get you out of my head. I thought I was going crazy.”

“No crazier than a girl who can see ghosts.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy, Florence.” And he said it so seriously, I pursed my lips together to keep them from wobbling, and rested my cheek into his shoulder.

“Well, then what do you want to be?” I asked.

He closed his eyes, and there was a moment of pause when he was searching for the right words. “I like you a lot, bordering on the bigger word, but...”

I tilted my head. “But?”

He admitted, “It’s a bit cliché this soon, and if we’re going to tell our children this story in ten years...”

I laughed, because ofcoursehe would flag that in this story. “Then I’ll say it first,” I said as I sat up and leaned close to him, my hair falling in a curtain around us as I pressed my forehead to his. “I love you, Benji Andor.”

He smiled so wide it reached his brown eyes, and turned them ocher, as if that were the happiest thing he’d ever heard. “I love you, too, Florence Day.”

“Then I think we should most definitely be platonic friends who swap video streaming service passwords and only see each other once a year at holiday parties.”

He gave a long sigh and sank farther into his pillow. “Okay, we can do that—”

“I was kidding!” I exclaimed, sitting back again. “I didn’t mean it!”

“Too late, I’ve already lost my will to live.”

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