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He shrugs. “I told you, this place is rotten to the core.”
“Then why do you stay here?”
Dane sighs. “Because it feels like home even when I don’t want it to. I’ve always lived here, I’ve always been a part of it, rooted to the bone. I told myself I stay here as a punishment, but there’s no lock on my chains. I’m here because I choose to be.”
In a strange way, I understand.
I think about staying in Grimstone more often than I think of leaving.
But maybe that’s only because of Dane.
He grows here, and only here, like one of his phosphorescent mushrooms, eerie and rare.
And maybe he’s poisonous…but he lights up my night.
“How bad a thing would you forgive?” I ask him.
“I don’t know.” He looks at me, stroking his fingers through my hair. “Pretty bad.”
“Me too. Probably too bad. Way over the line.”
“What line?” Dane says. “Who’s drawing it? All I know is how I feel.”
He puts his arm around me and draws me close. We’re swinging lazily in his hammock, with a blanket over us because the nights are getting colder.
Dane’s hammock swings in a rare space without tree cover so he can use it for stargazing. Tonight, the stars are thick as sand on the beach.
He’s been helping me finish the gazebo. I brought it over to complete at his house before it gets too big to fit in the back of my Bronco.
Even when I was the most frustrated with Dane and didn’t expect to speak to him again, I never could picture the gazebo anywhere but inside his garden, draped in gently glowing lichen.
It was a little tricky to finish without my sketch. My notebook went missing, and I haven’t been able to find it anywhere, which really bums me out—it had the designs for all the furniture I built before, as well as sketches for a dozen different projects I haven’t even started yet.
I’d really like to stop losing my shit. Get organized and stay that way.
But that really would be a different Remi—someone I’d barely recognize.
I yawn and ask Dane, “How do you know if someone’s past changing?”
He considers.
At last, he says, “Everybody fucks up. And everyone can change. But real change is painful, and for some, it might just kill ‘em.”
“Killthem?”
“Yes,” he says seriously. “Because you have to kill the part of yourself you don’t like. And for some people…that’s almost all of them.”
He bushes his lips lightly against mine, smiling. “Why—are you talking about me?”
I laugh. “No. I’m thinking about myself. Wondering what flaws I really could change.”
“Anything,” Dane says at once.
“You really believe that?”
“I do. The mind creates itself. And sometimes must tear itself down again.”
I kiss him on all the parts of his face: his forehead, his cheekbones, the side of his mouth, the edge of his jaw.
