Tropi Girl’s Reviews > The Dead Romantics > Status Update

“For having the audacity to trust someone you loved unconditionally?” he asked, and the anger was gone from his voice. It was softer now, warm like amber.

Awww BEN!!! 🥺🫶🏻😭

“That bastard,” he repeated a little louder. “Of all the fucking shitty things to do to you, he ruined your memories. Things you told him in private—in trust. That fucking dead-eyed narcissistic asshole.” Behind him, a vase full of orchids began to rattle. I didn’t think Ben knew he was doing it. “The next time I see him I’m going to—”
“Whoa, tiger, you’re dead.”
“Minor inconvenience.”

“And then I came into your life and declared that romance was dead. No wonder you hated me.”
“I didn’t hate you,” he clarified. “I was caught off guard. Here was a beautiful young woman declaring that romance was dead.”
“I’m not that pretty, Ben.”
He gave me a strange look. His eyelashes were long, and the ocher flecks in his brown eyes glimmered in the dim evening light. “But you are.”

“So—what—you believe in love but just not for you? You believe in romance and grand romantic gestures and happily ever afters but you think there is something so fundamentally wrong with you that you don’t deserve it?”
“It’s better than not believing in it at all, isn’t it?” he snapped back.”

Touchè.

“Because loneliness was the kind of ghost that haunted you long after you were dead. It stood over your plot in the cemetery where a lone name sat carved in marble. It sat with your urn. It was the wind that carried your ashes when no one claimed your body.”

“You said you read mine—was it one of those you never hear about?” I asked quietly. “One of the good ones?”
He didn’t answer at first. I glanced up to see if he’d even heard me, and to my surprise he wasn’t even looking at the book. He was looking at—at me, with this soft, quiet sadness that made my stomach twist.
“Yes,” he replied, as sure and certain as a sunrise. “It was.”

🥺🤧

“It doesn’t—this doesn’t mean—I’m not going to fall in love with you.”
“Because romance is dead?” he asked, tongue in cheek.
“Six feet under.”
“So you say . . .”
And his mouth found mine again. He pressed me up against the side of the wall, and kissed me like I hadn’t been kissed in—well, at least a year. The night was cold, but he felt like a furnace.“

YESSSSSS!