The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston

Author:Ashley Poston
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780593336489
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2022-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

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?

And a deeper part of me asked, How can you think about Ben and writing and books when your dad is dead?

I thought about them because if I thought too much about Dad, that stone in my stomach would weigh me down to the center of the earth, and I’d never crawl out again.

So I sipped on my battery fuel and trained my mind on the thing in front of me—namely, Ben.

The main thoroughfare of the town was already filled with people walking to work, and moms pushing their strollers, and high schoolers playing hooky from school. There was a couple sitting in the gazebo, setting up two cellos, and a man in a business suit reading a newspaper on one of the benches in the green. On the other bench sat a man no one else could see. He was leaning back, his arms folded tightly over his chest, his face turned up toward the sun. Every time I saw him, he looked a little less put together. A button was undone on his shirt, or his shirtsleeves were rolled up, or his hair had fallen out of its gel. This morning it was a little of all three.

I tried not to linger too much on his forearms. He had a tattoo on the underside

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