“We can do a trial run for a month or so, and if it’s awful, we’ll think of something else.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“I know you’ve done harder things than move. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. There are other places.” I pause, waiting. I’m starting to get nervous. “This is where you sayYes, I’ll do it.”
He’s still quiet, and suddenly I can really feel the cold like a weight, like this was too much, too fast. I close my eyes and make myself wait.
“You could have anyone you want,” he finally says. “You could have something easier, with someone who isn’t so much work. You know there’s nothing afterin recovery, right? There’s norecovered. This is it.”
I turn my head toward his and nuzzle his cheek with my nose. “Javi,” I say as quietly as I can, the ocean shushing beneath us. “Why would I want easy when I could have you?”
He turns me so our temples are pressing together, and I’m still in his jacket in this weird tangle of limbs, and it’s cold out but warm everywhere that we’re touching. I have the brief certainty that no one else has felt this way in the history of the world. How could they? If everyone felt like this, the earth would explode.
“I love you,” he says, and that’s all.
“So you’ll let me try moving?”
“Please. You knew I’d say yes,” Javi says. “All I’ve wanted for three years is to say yes to you.”
“All I’ve wanted is to ask,” I say. “I love you, too.”
We kiss out there, in the cold, on the cusp of the ocean. There’s salt in the air and ships on the horizon, a slow song playing inside, and waves breaking on the shore, one after another, forever.
EPILOGUE
JAVIER
October
“I’m a firm believer in nonviolence,”Madeline says, frowning at the chainsaw. “I just want to state that up front.”
“You’re not supposed to do actual violence. Just menace the children.”
“I’m not sure I love menacing children.”
“That’s only because you haven’t tried it yet,” I say, and she snorts.
We’re currently standing in the former Sprucevale Middle School, which got a new building two years ago, but the county hasn’t done anything with the old one yet.
Besides rent it out to various organizations, like the Sprucevale Town Council Events Committee, so they can use the space for haunted houses and whatnot. Lainey’s parents are very involved, so she’s involved, so now I’m talking Madeline into wielding a chainsaw and chasing children through a room decorated like a haunted sawmill. Adam, our usual chainsaw-wielding maniac, got food poisoning.
Also, it’s a plastic chainsaw. Obviously.
“I just have to hold it up and shout?” she asks. “Do I shout anything specific?”
“RAARRRRGHshould do just fine.”
She nods very seriously, thinking. She looks down at the chainsaw, then to her feet on the old tile floor, then back at the corner she’s supposed to pop out of.
“Okay, let me try it again.” She gets back into position. I head back to the door and watch as she ducks behind a blood-spattered pile of logs. With the lights on, in the daytime, you can really tell it’s red paint, but it looks great at night.
“Wow, this haunted house is so scary,” I call from the door. “Guess I’ll go into this next room and—what’s this? An impeccably rendered old saw?—”
“AAAUUUGHHHH!”
Madeline runs out from her hiding spot, chainsaw wielded overhead.
“I’M A ZOMBIE LUMBERJACK! GRRRRAAAAAAH! Stopsmiling—that was scary.”
