38. Body of Work
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.”
I took the key. “Thanks,” I replied, and grabbed his hand again, and we disappeared up the stairs with our suitcases in tow. I liked how he felt beside me. I liked the company we kept. And whenever he brushed his thumb against my knuckles, there was a shiver that went from my toes all the way to my scalp, and I couldn’t stand it. Not in a bad way.
But in a way that drove me crazy.
At the end of the hall was the hotel room with the wolfsbane on the door. I’d booked it again for old times’ sake, before I’d ever asked Ben to come with me. I thought I would be spending it alone. Funny how a few hours could change everything.
I unlocked the door, and he rolled our suitcases inside. Sunlight spilled through the sheer curtains, catching the dust motes that floated in the air. I remembered a lot about this room—from the fake wolfsbane in the vase on the dresser to the knot in the hardwood I kept toeing the night I wrote my dad’s obituary because I couldn’t stop pacing to the side of the bed where Ben slept the night things started to spiral, the night before Dad’s funeral.
The hotel room hadn’t changed at all. Still could use more purple, but I was far from caring what color the room was. All I could see was Ben drawing a shadow against the window, sunlight shining golden on his dark hair, and I’d read about aching before.
I
had ached before.
But this was—I was—
I remembered the morning we woke up together, and the things he said he’d do to me, for me, and it all came back in such vivid detail I had to tell my brain to slow down. Breathe. I wasn’t some weirdly horny teenager anymore—I was absolutely a refined woman with exquisite taste in rum and Cokes,
thank you very much
, and—
Oh, who was I kidding.
“Well, it’s nice to be alone finally,” he said, turning back to me, pocketing and unpocketing his hands, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them.
“I feel like we need a chaperone,” I tried to joke, coming up next to him. My skin felt like it was on fire.
Don’t climb the man mountain
, I told myself.
Don’t climb the man mountain. Don’t climb—
“Florence, I think—”
“Don’t.”
Then I took hold of the front of his jacket and pulled him close, and to my surprise he met me halfway. Our lips crushed together, and then he pulled away, whispering, “Sorry, sorry, you’re just so beautiful and I finally get to touch you and—”
“I feel the same way,” I replied, our lips lingering together for a moment longer, before he decided to follow with another kiss, rougher this time, biting. He was so hot—like, furnace hot—and when his thumb brushed against my cheek, it was warm.
He
was warm, and a knot formed in my throat because how much had I wanted this months ago, when we were in this very room together? How much did I want him to kiss me—on my neck, behind my ear, trace my collarbone with the edge of his teeth, murmuring devotions into my hair?
A lot, it turned out.
In a scattered mess we tipped back toward the bed, stepping out of our shoes, dropping my purse to the carpet, his tie abandoned somewhere on the bench at the foot of the bed. He lifted me up and sat me on the bed, and kissed me like he wanted to devour me, teeth scraping against my skin, nibbling my lip, and I couldn’t get enough of him, either.
I wanted to explore the curve of his neck as my fingers slid down it, and I wanted to ask about the scar just above his collarbone, where his father’s wedding ring always seemed to catch. He kissed the birthmark under my left ear that I always kept hidden because it was shaped a little like a ghost and that was
too
on the nose for me. It was electric, our contact skin to skin, as if little sparks ignited between our cells every time we touched. If our pasts sang in the wind, our present was in the touch of his hands on my waist, the way his fingers trailed across my body, the breathless kisses he planted against my mouth, as if he wanted to write me into his memory—burn it there.
My fingers tentatively found their way underneath his charcoal-gray jacket as I began to slip it off his broad shoulders, and he shrugged it off the rest of the way. It puddled on the floor. He leaned into me, deepening his kisses, and I just wanted to sink into him, and bury myself into the crook of his body, and stay there forever.
I pressed my hands against his hard chest—and paused. Came back to myself for a very,
very
brief moment. “
Wait
. Wait-wait-
wait
,” I muttered to myself, and started to unbutton his pristine white work shirt. He didn’t have an undershirt on, and I most definitely had felt— “Oh sweet chiseled Jesus.” I traced my fingers across his hard chest to his abs and very
distinctive
V cut into his trousers. “What are you—an
underwear model
? Are these suckers airbrushed?”
His ears went red with embarrassment. “I’m an anxious person. I swim when I’m anxious. Which means I swim a lot.”
“Lucky for me.”
“You’re ridiculous,” he said, not unhappily, and planted a kiss at my jaw. “But I like that about you.”
“Oh, I am going to be even
more
ridiculous when I demand to put googly eyes on all
six
of those abs—”
He pressed his mouth against mine, still ravenous, and made me shut up. And you know? It was sexy and I was super okay with it because whatever I’d been about to say succumbed to the part of my brain that seemed to always go offline whenever he kissed me that hard. And quite frankly, my brain had been on for way, way too long. It needed a hard reboot.
“Do you . . . ?” he asked, breathless. “Want to?”
“
Please
,” I whispered, and we melted into each other, exploring each other’s soft hidden corners.
At some point he undid my bra, and at some point, I slid off his belt, and at some point he was kissing me—everywhere. He pressed a kiss between my breasts, then just below them, then against my soft stomach. He went lower and lower, muttering in a love language of tongues.
As an English major, I had studied rising actions, I had charted climaxes. Making love and making stories were close to the same thing. You were intimate and vulnerable and wandering, traveling across the landscape of each other, learning. You told a story with each gesture, each sound—every kiss a period, every gasp a comma.
And the way Ben touched me, the way he played his tongue across my skin and burrowed his fingers into me, made a story with my body—the way I bit my lip to hush a moan, and curled my fingers around the duvet—I wanted him to read every word aloud until the very last page, when our lips were swollen and our bodies
intertwined into each other’s spaces, and he threaded his fingers between mine and raised them to kiss my knuckles.
After a moment, he asked, “I have a question,” in a soft and thoughtful voice.
I shifted a little to look at him better, flattening out the fluffy feather pillow. “I might just have an answer.”
“What are we?”
My eyebrows shot up. “You ask that
now
?”
“Well—yes,” he replied, a bit embarrassed, and his ears began to turn red again and travel down the length of his cheekbones. “I mean—how are you going to introduce me to your family? I want to start with a good impression. They mean a lot to you, and that means a lot to me. So . . . what do you want me to be for you?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Well, this—us—we’re a bit strange. Technically we’ve only known each other for a week and some change but . . .”
“It feels longer than that,” he admitted, rubbing circles on my thumb knuckle again. “Ever since the accident, I’ve thought about you even though I was sure it was a dream. I scoured forums, talked with other coma patients, but nothing helped. I couldn’t get you out of my head. I thought I was going crazy.”
“No crazier than a girl who can see ghosts.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy, Florence.” And he said it so seriously, I pursed my lips together to keep them from wobbling, and rested my cheek into his shoulder.
“Well, then what do you want to be?” I asked.
He closed his eyes, and there was a moment of pause when he was searching for the right words. “I like you a lot, bordering on the bigger word, but . . .”
I tilted my head. “But?”
He admitted, “It’s a bit cliché this soon, and if we’re going to tell our children this story in ten years . . .”
I laughed, because of
course
he would flag that in this story. “Then I’ll say it first,” I said as I sat up and leaned close to him, my hair falling in a curtain around us as I pressed my forehead to his. “I love you, Benji Andor.”
He smiled so wide it reached his brown eyes, and turned them ocher, as if that were the happiest thing he’d ever heard. “I love you, too, Florence Day.”
“Then I think we should most definitely be platonic friends who swap video streaming service passwords and only see each other once a year at holiday parties.”
He gave a long sigh and sank farther into his pillow. “Okay, we can do that—”
“I was kidding!” I exclaimed, sitting back again. “I didn’t mean it!”
“Too late, I’ve already lost my will to live.”
I playfully shoved him in the shoulder. “
Fine
. Let’s be bunkmates, then.”
“Only?”
“Gym buddies?”
The light began to leave his eyes.
“Pocket pals!”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“And maybe partners. In the romantic sense,” I added, our hands still intertwined, and I squeezed his tightly. “A suitor. A paramour. My courter. My second-best friend.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “
Second?
”
“Rose will always be number one.”
“
Fuck yeah I am!
” came a voice from the doorway as I realized a
split second before my sister and Rose burst into the room that I had forgotten to lock it. Alice screamed and covered her eyes while Rose took a long drink from a champagne bottle. Clearly, they’d started the party early.
“Wow,” Rose noted, giving a thumbs-up. “We sure have good timing. Great sesh, bestie.”
“
We’re leaving!
” Alice added, grabbing Rose by the arm, and pulling her back out the door. “
Put a sock on the door next time!
”
I thought Ben was going to die—again. When the door was closed, he pulled the covers over his head and disappeared beneath them. “Please kill me,” his muffled voice moaned. “End my misery.”
Grinning, I pulled the covers off him again, and he looked dejected and mortified in the deathbed of pillows. “Absolutely not, sir. If
I
have to live with them, so do you.”
“It’ll be a quick death. Just suffocate me in your perfect breasts.”
“They aren’t that big.”
“But they
are
perfect.”
“So you keep saying.” I combed my fingers through his hair a few more times because, poor guy, he really didn’t know how to handle mortification, and then I kissed him on the lips. “Let’s get dressed and go help Mom keep those heathens in line.”
I began to crawl out of bed, when he grabbed me by the arm and swallowed me up underneath the covers with him. “Just a few more minutes,” he said, his breath hot against my neck as he held me tightly.
“Only a few,” I agreed, though in my heart I knew I would’ve been happier with forever, but just this moment would do for now.