Page 45 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

“It isn't a trick,” I say quietly. “It isn't an act. You don't have to stay because you feel sorry for me.”

“I know.”

“You don't have to stay at all.”

She smiles.

“You kissed me.”

“I did.”

“You came back.”

“I did.”

“I think that's considerably more interesting than the whole Death thing.”

Despite everything, I laugh again.

She points a finger at me.

“Besides... maybe you're just terrible at your job.”

“I was,” I admit, truth and irony folding together so perfectly they become the same thing.

She slips her fingers through mine.

“You don't scare me, Grim.”

I look down at our hands, at life holding on to Death as though neither one finds it particularly strange.

Then I look back at the woman who somehow made the impossible seem ordinary.

“Good,” I say with a shaky smile.

“Because I'm absolutely terrified.”

CHAPTER 9

LAVINIA

Grim’s confession, such as it is, sifts down through my chest like pollen, small and stubbornly everywhere. I keep waiting for the other shoe—the supernatural punchline, the reveal that he’s an elaborate crank—but what settles instead is the image of him standing at my kitchen counter, hands too big for the mug, shoulders folded in, looking for all the world like a kid waiting outside the principal’s office. Terrified, like he said, but with a kind of wonder grafted on top, as though he still can’t quite believe I haven’t called in a priest or thrown a bucket of holy water over his head.

I have spent my whole life being told, in ways large and small, that I ask too many of the wrong questions. Friends, teachers, even the men I dated before they gave up and called meunsettling, or said I looked at people like I was waiting for them to expire. But if Grim is the capital-letter man he claims to be, maybe it took me this long to find someone with even worse bedside manners than me.

I clear my throat.

“So, what does Death do for fun, Grim? Mini-golf? Amateur bird-watching?”

He smiles, a ghost at the edge of it.

“Mostly I walk. Sometimes I cook. I like to see things that haven’t ended yet.”

“Such as?”

He looks up, lashes thick and shockingly dark.

“Such as you.”