The cultivated sadness inside of her lifted so quickly, leaving lightness behind, she almost felt hysterical. Like she’d been slingshotted through a tank of helium. “A better question is, where have you been?”
Ginny’s hand flew to her mouth trying to trap the question far too late. Where had it come from? Maybe she was hysterical. After all, a corpse had just come back to life in front of her very eyes. She’d earned the right to be tongue-tied.
“I’m sorry. What I meant was, you’re at the P. Lynn Funeral Home in Coney Island.” She sounded winded, yet official, like a weather girl reporting live in front of a tornado. On cue, a rumbling started overhead and she pointed at the ceiling. “See? There’s the Q train. Do you want to talk about this?”
“About the Q train?”
His accent was hard to place, but it was spun through with hints of the south. “No. No, I mean…” She separated herself from the wall and stood shifting in her ballet flats. “The fact that you just came back from the dead.”
“Yes,” he responded slowly, regarding her in way that made her skin feel hot and sensitive. “First, I’d like to talk about why you’re not screaming.”
Honestly, Ginny didn’t have a good answer for his reasonable and very direct question. So she rambled, as she often did in situations where her normalcy was called into question. “If I scream, I could scare you back to death and I think that might make me a murderer.” Thus making it obvious that she was quite abnormal and making the conversation even worse for herself. “Anyway, it’s a happy occasion. You’re alive! You’ll get right back in the saddle.” Her pep talk died on her lips when something terrible occurred. “You didn’t happen to hear anything I said before. Did you?”
A spark of humor lit his gorgeous eyes. “You were talking to a dead man?”
“Oh good, you didn’t hear anything.” She swallowed. “But now you think I’m nuts, anyway, so what’s the difference?” He watched her curiously as she crossed the room and picked up the receiver of the landline phone. “We should probably call an ambulance. Or at the very least the medical examiner to inform her she needs to keep her day job—”
“Hang it up.”
The receiver was back in the cradle before he finished speaking. Ginny stared down at her hand that had moved on its own, goosebumps prickling her arms. “I, um…I can check your vitals, but I can’t treat you,” she said, just above a whisper. “You should be examined.”
He rubbed at the cleft in his chin. “What is your name?”
“Ginny,” she breathed, loving the act of passing that knowledge to him. Even if he forgot her name in five minutes, he knew it right now.
“Ginny.” He said her name like a sinner whispering his darkest secrets to a priest in a confessional. “You don’t look suited to working in a funeral parlor.”
“Oh.” A rush of pleasure stole through her, until she realized he could very well follow that statement up with, you have a future with the circus. “To what line of work do I seem better suited?”
“Given your ability to keep your sense of humor under stress, either a war general or a comedian.”
She laughed. His lips parted at the sound and for some reason, he looked devastated by the sound. Devastated and fascinated.
“And your name, sir?”
He didn’t raise an eyebrow at the way she spoke, which was nice. Before she learned how to string a sentence together, she was watching black and white movies beside her father on the couch. Combining that with the formal way her father spoke—and her idolization of film star/goddess Lauren Bacall—she’d been accused more times than she could remember of sounding like a blast from the past.
“Jonas,” he said, almost too quietly to make out.
Jonas. Jonas.
It was perfect for him. Strong, out of the ordinary, lovely.
She must have sighed out loud, because his head turned sharply.
“Where are my clothes, Ginny? I need to leave.”
“I…yes. Yes, of course you do.” Her fingers fidgeted with each other. “You must have a family who will be overjoyed at this turn of events.”
“No family,” he muttered. “Just two idiot roommates with an ass-kicking in their future.”
“I’m sorry?”
He glanced away, his humorless laugh hanging in the air. “What the hell. You’re not going to remember anything that happened tonight, anyway, are you?”
“Oh. I promise you, I will remember.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t allow that.” Again, his curious gaze swept her, as if trying to take her measure and unable to come up with a straightforward conclusion. “It would seem we’re both the victim of a prank. My roommates left me here while I was sleeping.” He shook his head. “Every year on my birthday, they insist on doing something dangerous and stupid, although I really thought they’d outgrown it. I’m sorry for any distress this caused you. They’ll pay for it, I promise.”
Ginny was in disbelief. “How could you sleep through being transported to a funeral home? Did they drug you?”
He seemed to choose his words carefully. “I don’t sleep often, but when I do, it’s rather deep.”
“Oh.” She pointed at her embalming machine. “Those bozos. What if I’d pumped you full of chemicals?”
“Bozos,” he mouthed with a half smile. “My clothes, Ginny. If you please.”
“I must talk to my stepmother about our security system. They probably snuck you in during Survivor—she doesn’t blink while it’s on.” Still baffled over the fact that a live body had been smuggled into the funeral home without being seen, Ginny nonetheless decided there wasn’t much she could do about it now. He had to be freezing on the cold metal table, not to mention traumatized. She couldn’t very well make him sit there while she shook her fist over the actions of his reckless friends. “Clothes. You need clothes,” she said, centering herself. “Coming right up, Dreamboat.”
“What was that?”
Floor, please open up and eat me alive. Sincerely, Ginny. “Nothing. Let me see if they left you anything.” She inched toward the table, her intention to open the metal storage drawer beneath where her stepmother normally placed the burial clothing. She had no reason to believe his friends would follow procedure, but she was operating out of habit. The closer she drew to Jonas, the more his fist curled in the sheet. Was it possible she was now repelling the half-dead, as well as the living?
Fabulous.
Trying not to stare at the gorgeous male specimen up close, she stooped down with purpose and slid open the drawer, slightly surprised to find a balled up pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Across the front of the shirt, the words Birthday Boy had been written in Sharpie.
Ginny held it up for him to inspect.
He sighed. “Morons.”
She rose and handed him the clothes. “Happy birthday. How old?”
Jonas paused in the act of pulling the shirt over his head. “Twenty-five.”
“Oh!” Fidget, fidget. She was watching him get dressed. “My birthday is coming up, too. We’ll be the same age soon.”