Before he left, Dane kissed my cheek and murmured, “Now I get why you turned me down. You and her were meant to be.”

“You big sap,” I said, but something bright brimmed inside me, uncontainable.

Ellis and I stayed to watch the sunset. In its own way Boston is haunted—not with silence and loneliness like Maine, but with history. Blood soaked deep into the soil, cannonballs sunk low in the muck. We’d fought here bitterly for independence. I could still sense the bared teeth, tattered sails, the fiery arcs of flung torches. That fight was still in us, in our roots. And I wondered if it was still in me.

If you’re really an artist, I thought, you’ll find a way to make art however you can, like Bukowski said. With half your body gone. With soot and a cave wall. With your own blood.

Something settled heavily in my chest, like a book closing.

I thought of Blue somewhere out there in the lights twinkling across the harbor. Alone in a hotel room, watching the tiny people below. So far away from it, the warmth of skin and breath. From everything real.

Then Ellis took my hand, our fingers dovetailing, and all I thought of was her.

We watched the light fade behind the city and drove back through the black night, home.

—WINTER—

—12—

Snow fell on the beach, coating shells and the stony shore in fine white felt. All the colors softened as if too much water had mixed in. In winter Chebeague Island seemed even more isolated, a snowflake adrift in the great green-black abyss of the Atlantic.

I slid the box up the boat ramp with my toe, carving a trail through the snow. Ellis had told me she could carry them all. I wouldn’t allow it. As if I’d let her show me up.

But as soon as I’d left her line of sight, I’d bitched out.

Most of her stuff was already on the yacht. Frankie let us borrow it to move Ellis back to Portland. Too cold in winter to stay in the cabin. Plus, there was us. Me and her.

Some of my stuff was on the yacht, too.

I hadn’t told Frankie yet that I planned to retire from camming. Didn’t want to leave her in the lurch. I wanted to come to her with a new business plan, and seed money.

And I was almost ready.

Back at the cabin I found Ellis sitting on the bare floor with her laptop, typing rapidly, frowning.

“Are you raging at someone who just pwned you?”

“It’s Frankie,” she muttered.

“Frankie pwned you?”

“Stop saying ‘pwned,’ dork. She’s worried about the site.”

Last month they’d discovered a bug in the cam site code. Ellis had worked round-the-clock to patch it, but repercussions kept echoing. A change here meant a cascading series of changes there, there, and there. She stayed up late, tapping away in the blue screenglow, code flying across the void. Sometimes I curled up and watched her work, wondering if my creative process was as cryptic and arcane to her. An entire universe unfolding inside her head, invisible to me.

Sometimes it reminded me too much of him, and I had to leave the house and walk along the shore, clear my mind. Ellis would find me there and fall in step, silent. She’d take my hand. And everything would be okay.

For a while.

I asked once if she could analyze Blue’s IP logs. Maybe he’d been careless. All it took was one time, one rash log-in attempt from an insecure location, and I’d know. Peaks meant Max, Boston meant Dane. I even skulked at my old coffee shop, swathed in a scarf and beanie, watching Curtis. If I could just look him in the eyes, look at his hands. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to his hands?

Blue never contacted me after Boston. I’d emailed him, messaged him on various sites. The emails bounced. The messages didn’t deliver.

User does not exist.

As if he’d never been real.

“No,” Ellis had said to my request. “That’s a breach of privacy. Frankie could fire me for it.” Her voice wavered. “I thought you let him go, Vada. I thought it was us now.”

“It is, baby.” I put my arms around her, my lips to her ear. “It’s just closure. I hate not knowing why it happened.”

“We don’t always get closure. Sometimes we have to make our own.”

So I tried. Very hard.

And I was almost there.

“We’re pretty much done,” I said, kicking Ellis’s boot. “Couple more boxes and the mattress. No thanks to you.”

“You’re the reason there are so many boxes to begin with.”

“Can’t help it. I enjoy humiliating you with gifts.”

“I don’t think that’s the spirit behind gift-giving.”

“Let me give you the gift of silence,” I said, setting her laptop aside and tackling her to the floor.

I kissed her, my whole body lighting up when we touched, my skin glowing like a paper lantern. Crazy, how wild she still drove me. As if we’d started all over again with limerence and lust. As if she were someone new. I cupped her face and gave her my patented Cheshire grin.

Ellis laughed. “Will you—”

I kissed her again, slower, running my tongue between her lips till she opened her mouth. Pulled back to make a flicker of eye contact, heat filling my head, then wrapped my tongue around hers. We were still in our coats. No fire in the hearth, the cold breathing through the wood. Her mouth scalded me. I kept kissing her deeper, trying to reach the point where we shared one breath, one set of lungs, one everything. She broke away.

“We have to—”

I kissed her again. She stopped trying to speak and used her mouth for more important things. Like me.

Somehow we managed to climb to the loft bed before all our clothes came off. By then Ellis was in control, kissing my breasts and throat and making me feel that weightless submission that came when I lay on my back in the water, palms upturned, mouth open to the sky. We burrowed under the bright white quilt and she put her face between my legs, painting me with her tongue. After, I reciprocated, our hands clasped, crumpling the quilt like crepe paper. It wasn’t always rough and intense. More often now it was this tenderness, touching each other as if something fragile hung between us and we both wanted to protect it, keep it from shattering. I thought of those broken bowls glued back together with gold, more beautiful once they’d been broken. When she came I kissed her softly, adoringly, amazed that this was mine, this beautiful person, that letting go of my fear could feel like this.

You can fall in love again with someone you’re already in love with. It’s like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.

We lay side by side, tangled in a spell of blankets and warm skin.

“Estoy tan feliz,” I murmured.

“Me too.” Ellis smiled, one side of her mouth higher than the other. Every time she did that a little bird zigzagged madly inside my rib cage. “I wish time would stop right here.”

“It does, you know.” I spun a finger in her hair. “When someone makes a sketch, a song, a poem, it stops. The moment repeats forever inside that piece of art.”

“Then draw us.”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a big old scaredy-cat.”

My hand fell. Ellis caught it, raised it to her cheek.

“You’ve already done the bravest thing. You told me what you’ve been holding back.”

But I hadn’t.

Then she kissed me, and for a while I forgot all my fears. There was only color and texture. White sheets folding around us like camellia petals, bare arms intertwined, red hair and near-black spread across the pillow. Like that Toulouse-Lautrec painting of the two girls in bed. A perfect moment.