Was I actually flirting with her cousin? Fuck.

Brandt walked us to the door. He made Ellis promise to visit again soon, and wheedled me to join her, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him. He really was lonely. As Ellis trotted down the front steps, Brandt brushed my coat sleeve. I stopped.

“I’d never hurt her,” he said. “She’s all I’ve got left.”

“Good. She’s all I’ve got left, too.”

When I was halfway across the porch he called, “That’s not true.”

I glanced back.

“You’ve still got a great ass,” he said.

On the last day before Boston, the air crackled with static.

I rowed out with Ellis beneath the gray sky. We shared a joint, lay on our backs in the skiff and stared up at rain clouds, watching our smoke rise and twist above us like nebulas, and I thought, Tomorrow, everything changes. Reality splits. In one universe, I choose Blue. In the other, Red.

“What are you thinking?” Ellis said.

“I feel like Neo picking a pill. Hashtag weed thoughts.”

We both sat up, hugging our knees, sneaker toes touching. The boat rocked, a stray wave slopping over the gunwale and dousing my calf. I shivered.

“You?” I said.

“I was thinking about this Japanese art called kintsugi.”

“Did you see this in an anime?”

“No. Shut up.” She pushed my toes away, but I pushed back. “Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it’s been through. And I was just . . .”

I pushed her toes again. “Just what?”

“Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks.”

I stared. “That’s beautiful, Ellis. Where’d you hear about it?”

She smiled sheepishly. “Death Cab for Cutie.”

Ellis said she wanted to show me something at the cabin. We rowed back and trekked through the woods, through a sea of dry leaves fluttering around our shoes like golden paper cranes. Up in the tree house she had a log fire burning in the wood stove, and in the last good light she’d set up an easel, a primed canvas, and a tray of paint. I stood in the doorway, dumbstruck.

She uncapped a tube of green acrylic, raised it to my face.

I hadn’t smelled anything like this in almost a year. It hit like a drug. My eyes watered from the faint plasticky scent, the gesso on the canvas. I edged away, dizzy, tumbled onto the sofa.

“Vada?”

When she touched me I grabbed her waist, crying.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” She pulled my coat off, wrapped her arms around me. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to do this.”

“Is this another experiment?”

“No. It’s just something I always wanted to do.”

“You wanted to paint with me?”

“Yeah.”

I let go. Scrubbed hot saline from my cheeks and stood.

At first I didn’t dare touch the canvas. I showed Ellis what to do: mix colors on the palette, keep the paint wet, apply and blend. She rolled her sleeves up, fastidiously avoided spattering her clothes. Unacceptable. I dipped a finger in red and dragged it down the front of her shirt.

“Now that you’re dirty,” I said, dabbing paint on her cheek and chin for good measure, “you can fucking relax.”

Her eyes went wide. I laughed.

Ellis didn’t have a subject—she just put colors down, gleefully watching them interact, like a kid playing with a chemistry set. Yellow and red turning into mandarin orange, blue and green becoming Atlantic teal. My throat burned at the scratch of bristles on canvas and the muddy rainbow swirling in the water cup. But I made myself take it. I can do this, I thought. I can feel this even though I can’t really be part of it anymore. Through you.

Ellis tried to paint a line across the canvas with cautious, self-conscious strokes, but it kept going wonky.

“Why do I suck at straight lines?”

“Because you’re not straight?”

“Neither are you.”

“Those damn bisexuals, always getting the best of both worlds. Who do they think they are?”

She rolled her eyes. I laid my weak hand on her wrist.

“You’re trying to control it from here. It’s too close to the brush.” I ran my hand up her arm, slowly, over fair skin sprinkled with freckles and paint. Up to her shoulder, her collarbone. “Do it from here.”

I kept my hand there. When her arm moved I felt the smooth pull of threads beneath the surface. My palm slid over her neck, her back, feeling the delicate loom of muscle moving against my fingertips.

“If I could give this to you,” she said, “I would. I’d give anything to make you happy.”

I hugged her from behind, burying my face against her shoulder. “You make me happy.”

For a moment Ellis was still. Then she turned and cupped my jaw and I thought, Kiss me.

“You’re totally clean,” she said, sounding puzzled.

She smeared turquoise on my cheek.

“Hey.”

Royal purple next.

“Very funny.”

Jade green.

“Ellis—”

We both grabbed the palette.

Then she flipped it onto my shirt and it was all-out paint war.

Ellis had the advantage of surprise and squeezed a handful of red paint into her palm before I caught her. It splattered all over both of us, bright as blood. My hand slipped and hit the canvas and left a dripping scarlet print. We both stared at it, impressed, then lunged for more. I fought her for the blue tube and it burst in our hands, shooting everywhere as we screamed. Yellow spilled on the sofa. Green slathered the window. In the middle of absolutely wrecking Ellis with paint I got more on the canvas, too, and suddenly there was an unspoken cease-fire as we both attacked it, Pollock style, flinging paint with our bare hands. Exhilarated, I popped tube after tube and hurled it half-blind, hitting the wall and floor as much as anything. Who fucking cared? This glorious mess was me. This was the color and energy and motion that had been locked in me for a year, finally breaking loose.

I fumbled in the tray, finding only empty tubes. My fingers and toes tingled. Crazed, breathless. We both looked like we’d faced a paintball firing squad.

“Holy fuck,” I said.

Ellis closed the small space between us and kissed me, so hard I rocked back on my heels. I tasted paint, spearmint, salt water. Our arms wrapped around each other, and the numbness at the edges of me spread until all I was sure was real was the bell toll of my heart, a vague sense of blood ringing through my veins. I kissed that sweet pink mouth again and again and pulled back to look at her.

“It’s on your glasses.”

She tossed them onto the coffee table.

Down to the couch, her beneath me. Dabs and dashes of paint everywhere, on skin and clothes and upholstery, as if this were a van Gogh close-up and if you stepped back far enough, it would condense into a clear image. My hair fell around her face in a cup of shadow and she tucked it behind my ear.

“This is how I remember you,” she said. “Just like this.”

“Covered in paint?”

“That, but also the light in your eyes. The fire.”

I laced my fingers through hers. “I think we’re lying in Process Yellow.”

“Want to move?”

“I’m not letting you go anywhere.”

Ellis gave me that aw-shucks tomboy smile, ever so slightly crooked, and I couldn’t help myself. The words were out before they hit me.

“I love you,” I said.

We both stared, a little shocked.

“I love you, too.”

We’d said these words a thousand times. But right now it felt like the first.

It was too intense for a kiss, for the way I wanted to touch her. Too pure to let some ephemeral thrill dilute it. Too perfect just like this. I guess she felt the same because she simply held me, so tight each breath we took made it hard for the other to breathe. Skin colliding, bones smashing, twisting together, crashing into each other. As close as we could get. This could be the last night I hold you like this, I thought. And I don’t ever want to let go.