Leah/Ronan
Ronan says, “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Nope,” Leah says, with a slightly impish grin.
“Like, ballroom dancing?”
Leah shrugs. “Kind of. Social dance. All sorts.”
“Wait, dude, does this mean you can waltz?”
“Among other things.”
Ronan snorts into her beer bottle. “I bet Gansey does too. You two should waltz together.”
“I could teach you.”
“Or I could kill you again.”
“Rude,” Leah says. They’re sitting on the floor of the main room of Monmouth Manufacturing and Leah is telling Ronan about what’s changed since her days at Aglionby, including the fact that there used to be required dancing lessons. Gansey and Eve are still at the library doing their homework, and Leah had had little trouble luring Ronan away from the study party. Leah doesn’t feel too guilty about it because it’s not like Ronan ever gets anything done in the library anyway, and she’d been lonely. It’s fun to get drunk with Ronan – well, they can’t exactly get drunk together but she likes watching Ronan get drunk, and she doesn’t work as hard to control her impulses after Ronan’s had a few drinks.
She’s glad because tonight Ronan isn’t drinking to get drunk. It’s not the way she is sometimes, stumbling into the kitchen for the bottle of vodka to obliterate her thoughts. Nights like that, she just lies splayed in bed with loud music on and Leah goes into her room despite the noise and sits next to her on the bed to make sure she’s okay. Usually, Ronan is only marginally aware of her. Tonight isn’t like that, though. Ronan is drinking her beer slowly, spending a lot of time fiddling with bottle, like she got it from the fridge more for the comfort of having something in her hands than for the sake of drinking it. “So,” she says, stretching her legs out and watching Leah. “What else can you do? Foxtrot? Charleston? Lindy fucking hop?”
“Yeah.”
“You still remember?”
“Muscle memory, I guess.”
“I guess.”
“You don’t even want to learn for the sake of surprising Gansey one of these days? I think it’d be pretty funny.”
“Okay, fair,” Ronan says, setting down her bottle. She stands and holds her hand out to Leah, who takes it. Ronan pulls her to her feet with more force than Leah had been expecting – more force than is really needed to move a ghost – and she crashes into Ronan’s chest. “Ouch,” Ronan says, but without much feeling. “I seriously don’t understand how you can leave bruises.”
“You don’t know nearly enough about physics or metaphysics to understand,” Leah says, and Ronan lets out a bark of a laugh. Leah likes touching Ronan. Gansey and Eve are strong too, Gansey from being on the rowing team and Eve from her physically demanding jobs, but neither of them have Ronan’s athletic grace. She’s all smooth lines and liquid motion, the kind of elegance that comes from hours of practicing the precise movements of a boxer. Elegance is a word most people would associate with Eve out of the three of them, but Ronan has it too.
“Okay, follow my lead,” Leah says, and smiles as Ronan looks down at their feet, her brow furrowed in concentration as she moves with Leah. “One, two, three, one, two, three,” she counts as they begin to move around the room. Ronan gets the hang of it pretty quickly, which doesn’t surprise Leah. When it comes to physical things, Ronan is always a fast learner. It’s more her language than English is. “You’re pretty good at this.”
“Shut up, Leah,” Ronan says, with no sting.
“Now you can sweep Gansey off her feet,” Leah says with a grin.
“I dunno,” Ronan says, watching their feet again though a moment ago she hadn’t been having any trouble. “I’m pretty happy sweeping you off your feet.” A sharp grin spreads across her face when she looks up. “Who knew ghosts could blush.”
This only makes Leah blush more. “Ronan?” She asks tentatively. “Are you flirting with me?”
“With very limited success, apparently.”
Leah stumbles away from Ronan and reaches up to touch her throat. Ronan looks hurt for only a moment before her face closes off, her arms hanging uselessly by her sides. “Shit. That was a stupid thing to say.”
Standing very still, Leah tries to speak. She feels the way she used to when she was alive, when she couldn’t breath, only she doesn’t actually need to breath, so it doesn’t make sense. Squeezing her eyes shut, she inhales slowly, as though that’s going to help. Nothing about the way she exists really makes sense. “It’s not that I don’t want you to flirt with me,” she says. “That would be nice. That would feel – normal.” Leah thinks about the nights she climbs into Ronan’s bed, the way Ronan will cling to her after a nightmare, pulling Leah’s arms tight around her chest and making herself as small as possible so that Leah can curl around her. She thinks about the two of them sitting on the roof of Monmouth, avoiding Gansey after using all the eggs in the fridge in a competition to see who could throw them farthest. She thinks of the times Ronan lets her hold Chainsaw, the gentle way she settles him into Leah’s outstretched hands, how she watches Leah’s face for a smile. “The best kind of normal,” she says. “It’s just that I don’t know if I get to have that normal anymore.”
Ronan has her arms crossed in front of her chest, her posture defensive. “Why not?”
Leah lets out a breath in frustration. “Because I’m not real enough.”
In one stride, Ronan closes the space between them and, taking Leah’s face in both her hands to tilt her head up, kisses her. It hasn’t been that long since Leah’s been kissed. She’d kissed Blue, and that had been nice, but it had been different because she’d known then that Blue had been thinking of Gansey and it had been strange and sad and complicated. She knows just as clearly now that Ronan is only thinking about her, and that makes her feel better, if not completely okay, and the longer Ronan kisses her, the closer she gets to okay. Even when Ronan stops kissing her, she still holds Leah’s face in her hands, their foreheads pressed together, her mouth still close enough that Leah can feel her warm breath. “Leah,” she says, “shut up.”
Leah smiles, wide and unrestrained, and says, “Okay.”