He pursed his lips together, not knowing what to say.
But the worst part?
Dana slid me a shot of something clear with a sad sort of nod and said, “I feel you, sister.”
And I realized that they thought I was talking to myself. Commiserating with myself. Throwing my own solo pity party. And what was a party without a shot or two?
“Thanks.” I threw back the shot of—oh god, vodka. Straight vodka. I set the glass down with a cringe and swooped my laptop into my satchel.
I needed to go for a walk. Get out of here. Do something—anything—else, because clearly writing wasn’t happening today. No kind of writing. At all. I used to write my way out of utter despair, but now I couldn’t even write myself out of a sex scene.
It was embarrassing.
But as I turned to leave, Ben was there.
I jumped.
“I didn’t even startle you!”
“It’s been a long day,” I said, fumbling for my phone. I gave Dana another pleasant nod on my way back up to my room, and Ben followed me like a vulture waiting to pick my carcass clean.
“I have an idea, if you’re willing,” he proposed when we were out of Dana’s earshot.
“Oh, this should be good.”
“It will be.”
I looked him up and down. He was such a conundrum. Too tall and too broad and too neatly organized, he didn’t fit into any of the boxes in my head reserved for leading man material. He was doggedly smart, and insistent, and somehow he always ended up being so very polite to me even when he was angry （and I began to tell when he was because a muscle in his jaw would twitch）。
I unlocked the door to my room and motioned for him to go inside, and I closed the door after him, and pulled off my NYU pullover. While the night had gotten chilly, the heater in my room definitely worked well.
“Okay, shoot,” I said, turning to him. “Let’s throw all the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.”
He smiled, and there was a glint in his brown eyes that turned them almost ocher. “Meet me in the town square. Tomorrow at noon. Don’t be late.” Then he turned on his heels, and departed right through the closed door, and I was left in the quiet room, baffled and a little bit—okay, a lot—intrigued.
What the hell could Benji Andor be up to?
21
The Crime Scene
I YAWNED AND poured myself coffee into a paper to-go cup and dumped half the jar of sugar into it. Without Starbucks right around the corner to give me my triple shot soy chai lattes in the mornings, I had to make do with what I had. Which meant terrible-tasting coffee so sweet the grains of sugar crunched between my molars every time I took a sip.
Last night I couldn’t get to sleep, trying to balance myself somewhere between the sadness that still felt like a rock in my gut, and wondering what the hell Ben had planned. My mind liked to wander at night and shut up in the mornings, at the exact opposite times I needed.
Rose always told me that I was a goblin. I did my best work between ten at night and five in the morning, when most normal people were either asleep or getting down to business （to defeat the Huns）。 （Sex, I mean sex.） Meanwhile, I was writing about couples banging it out to Fall Out Boy. I missed those days. When I could write. When I didn’t just sleep all day, and stare at my ceiling all night, and scroll through Twitter to see who else in the writing community got book deals and went on tour and hit bestseller lists. It was a certain kind of soul-sucking year I’d had, and I didn’t realize how empty I was until I needed to write.
And by then, I couldn’t.
Last night felt a little different, though, as I stared up at the ceiling of the bed-and-breakfast. What if Ben could help me? What if it was as simple as turning on a switch, and I’d just lost it?