But I thought—I thought I wanted to find out.
I said, “Come home with me.”
He didn’t even think. He didn’t weigh any odds. He didn’t pause to find his words. They were there, as sure and certain as his smile. “Can we swing by my apartment first on the way to the airport?” he asked.
“Only if I can meet Dolly Purrton.”
“She’d love that,” he assured, and kissed me again.
38
Body of Work
“FLORENCE! NICE TO see you again,” Dana greeted with a smile, and put down their current read.
The North Carolinian afternoon was sweltering hot, so all the windows were opened to let the golden sunshine spill in. Mairmont’s only bed-and-breakfast looked so much different in the summertime, with the wind catching on the sheer curtains, and the sound of insects humming through the old house. All of the flowers and bushes outside in the garden had flowered into blooms of reds and purples and blues, and ivy and jasmine crawled up the terraces on either side of the house. It was oddly picturesque.
I hugged Dana as they came around the desk. “It’s nice to see you! How’s John?”
“Insufferable as always,” they replied endearingly. “He’s trying to convince me that we need a goat—a goat!—for the backyard. I want chickens instead.”
“Tiny dinosaurs or a lawn mower, that’s a tough choice,” Ben commented, his hand finding mine again, so naturally that it made my heart flutter. I never thought I was the heart-fluttering kind of person, but it wasn’t so bad.
At the airport, he used the miles he had accrued from years of traveling to writing conferences and book expos to buy a ticket, and he’d traded seats with a nice older lady who had never flown first class before, and she was delighted. Ben squeezed himself into the aisle seat beside me, and curled his fingers through mine, and it was as simple as that, as if he had always been a part of my life, and I had been a part of his.
He did this thing where he rubbed small circles around my thumb joint with his own thumb, and it made the skin there tingle. We talked about our favorite places we’d been, and he was a lot more traveled than I was thanks to Ann’s book tours, and he hated flying almost as much as I did, but we both wanted to take a cross-country drive. He hated skiing, but we both liked snow tubing and burnt marshmallows. His comfort food was ranch dressing on Hot Pockets, while mine was box mac and cheese, and neither of us cared about that new hipster deconstructed meatball joint in SoHo. We were indifferent about the beach, but we loved beach reads, and the two-hour flight felt like two minutes.
Then we’d rented a car from Charlotte, and he’d rolled up his sleeves and said that he could most definitely drive an SUV, but after accidentally knocking the car in neutral and almost running into the airport bus, we swapped places and I drove the distance to Mairmont. He was much better at picking the driving music, anyway.
I squeezed his hand tightly, too. It was a reassurance to myself, standing in this small bed-and-breakfast, that he was actually here. Real. The girl who saw ghosts standing beside a man who had once been a little bit ghostly. Mairmont’s gossip ring could eat their hearts out.
Dana’s eyes flicked to Ben. “And who’s this?”
“Ben,” he greeted, and outstretched his other hand. “Nice to see you again, Dana.”
They accepted it. “We’ve met before?”
“Um—no,” Ben quickly corrected. “You just—I was—”
“I’d talked about you a lot is what he’s trying to say,” I covered for him quickly. “You make a mean rum and Coke, so I had to brag.”
They grinned. “I do, don’t I?” They checked us in and took a key off the hook behind them and dangled it from their finger. “Enjoy.”