“I’ve got to go write something,” I said, lying, obviously lying, as I excused myself from the table. Carver gave me a pained look, as if to say, Sorry, but he had nothing to be sorry for. Mom asked if I wanted to take a to-go coffee mug with me, but there was coffee at the bed-and-breakfast, and god knows I’d forget the to-go container in some unspecified location and never find it again.
The thing was, Alice wasn’t wrong.
It was another argument we had been avoiding—for years. And now all of them were bubbling up to the surface.
Not only that, but I had my dead editor to contend with, Dad’s funeral preparations, and Ann’s manuscript. Everything all at once.
I hated complicated.
When I got back to the bed-and-breakfast, John waved at me without looking up from his Spider-Man comic. I climbed the stairs back to my room, and decided that a long and relaxing shower was exactly what I needed. Head empty, water hot, nothing but the white noise of the shower echoing in my brain. I didn’t want to think right now. Not about anything.
So I pulled out my NYU sweatshirt again and picked up my jeans from the floor, and laid them out on the bed before I went for the claw-foot tub with a shower. As it turned out, thankfully, the inn didn’t skimp on water temperature. I let it get as hot as I could—hot enough to boil me alive, exactly how I liked it—and stood under the spray for a long time. Until the steam was thick and the constant shower of water over my head quieted all the buzzing thoughts in my head and my skin was flushed and my fingers began to shrivel.
Too long, probably.
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 was dead.
He was very, very dead.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I muttered to myself. What was wrong with me? I was home for the first time in ten years for my father’s funeral and I was fantasizing about a dead guy. I hadn’t even thought about anyone else since Lee Marlow ripped my heart out and fed it to the pizza rats.
So why now of 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’s smallest towel 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.
“The hell, 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 sailed right through him, clattering against the closed door as he dipped through it—and was gone.