Page 60 of The Dead Romantics

The soap smelled like butterscotch, and I tried not to think. It reminded me of the way Ben smelled in his office, and I tried to stop thinking. How his eyes looked when he had bent toward me and thanked me, warm and soft and ocher. His shirtsleeves rolled up to expose muscular forearms. How he was so big, and his hands were big, and how they would feel against my body, cupping my breasts, his lips pressed against mine, tasting like spearmint and—

No.

I flung my eyes open. Shampoo suds leaked into my eyes, and I cursed and put my face into the hot water to rinse them out.

No, no, no, Florence. He wasdead.

He was very, very dead.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I muttered to myself. What waswrongwith me? I was home for the first time in ten years for my father’s funeral and I was fantasizing about adead guy. I hadn’t even thought about anyone else since Lee Marlow ripped my heart out and fed it to the pizza rats.

So whynowof all times?

Why him?

Because he was someone very safely dead. Someone so very out of reach. And I was that fucked up.

When the water started to finally get cold, I finished washing the suds out of my hair and got out of the shower. The entire bathroom was still so foggy, I had to use my towel to wipe off the mirror.

Something materialized out of the corner of my eye. In front of the bathtub.

I looked—and let out a scream.

Ben spun around to face me—and yelped, covering his eyes. I clambered to cover my...bits, but I must’ve grabbed the world’ssmallesttowel because I kept having to shift between covering my nips and my bush, and after a few rotations I realized there wasn’t a good answer here. So I grabbed the shower curtain and wrapped that around me instead.

“Oh god, my eyes!” Ben cried.

“Thehell, Ben?” I snapped.

“I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry! I just kind of... I didn’t see a thing—I promise.” Then, after a beat, he added, “Though I hear there is a shortage of perfect breasts in the world and yours—”

“Get out!”

“I’m going! I’m going!” he cried as I grabbed the complimentary toothpaste and conditioner, and lobbed them at him. They sailedright through him, clattering against the closed door as he dipped through it—and was gone.

I gave another frustrated cry, wanting to drown myself in the tub instead. “I just wanted two seconds of quiet,” I moaned forlornly to myself, and finally unraveled from the shower curtain. The tiny towel had failed me.

It had failed me so deeply.

I wrapped my arms around my breasts, feeling my ears turn red with embarrassment. I can’t believe hesawmenaked.After I’d—

Oh god.

No one had ever called my breasts perfect before.A handful, sure, but perfect?

I reckoned they weren’t terrible.

Complimenting my boobs didn’t excuse him from looking, though. The perv. He didn’t just look, hestared, like he’d been thirsty for years and hadn’t seen a watering hole. Well, my—Iwas not a watering hole. He was very dead; he did not get thirsty.

I wasn’t evenentertainingthis.

When I finally changed into my waist-high mom jeans and oversized NYU sweatshirt, looking like the pinnacle of unfuckability, there was a text waiting from my sister.

It said three simple words, but I felt like I was being asked to move a mountain:

Write Dad’s obituary.

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