Did I hit too close to home?” she pushed on.
“Nope,” Remi murmured quietly. “I was just wondering how someone could lay fourteen consecutive pieces of tile upside down without noticing.” Jules felt her cheeks flush red. Why did she always make the silliest mistakes when Remi was around? “Do you need some help?” Remi offered.
“No, thanks,” she replied tartly. “I’ve got it under control. I just need a little more space—you’re making me feel claustrophobic, and it’s hard for me to concen-trate like this.”
Remi pushed himself up from the floor and moved back about fifteen feet. “Okay, well that’s something. So 121
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now that you’ve given your brilliant analysis of my reasons for taking this job, care to share yours?” Julianne shrugged. She was hesitant to tell Remi anything even remotely personal. She’d been spying on him, trying to figure out what his motives were, for the past three weeks. Who was to say he wasn’t trying the same tactic on her?
“I’m just going to sit here until you talk to me,” Remi said. “So the sooner you spill, the sooner you can re-focus on your tiles. How’s that for motivation?” Begrudgingly, Jules started talking. “If you must know . . .” She took a deep breath and then continued.
“There are a few things that I really like. First, I get to spend my entire summer outside in the sunshine, instead of bagging groceries or folding jeans. Plus, for me, at least, a house is like a work of art. But on a grand scale. This bathroom is like a mosaic—only bigger. The whole frame of the house is one giant sculpture. It’s beautiful, functional, oversize art. It’s creative and it’s fun. And I can’t say I mind being the only girl on a crew of hot college guys, either.” She looked up to see Remi staring right at her, his mouth open slightly, as if there were something he was trying to bring himself to articulate but couldn’t. “Never mind.” Julianne looked down at the tile again. “I certainly don’t expect you to understand.”
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I understand? That’s exactly how I feel about it, too. I mean, except for the part about the college guys. I want to make beautiful things. That’s why I went into architecture.”
Julianne stared across the tiles, avoiding looking up and seeing Remi’s face. “You’ve got a strange way of doing it, you know?” She looked down at her hands.
“Just following your dad’s lead all the time . . .”
“There are a lot of different interpretations of beauty, Julianne,” Remi said quietly.
Julianne’s mind was tumbling over itself. Remi sounded sincere—more than that, he sounded like he got it. Like he knew about having a passion for something bigger than you. It wasn’t the first time that he seemed to totally get it, either. She could feel his eyes fixed on her, and the back of her neck began to prick and blush.
She shifted her weight so that she was sitting cross-legged on the half-tiled floor, and picked at stray threads poking out from the bottom of her shredding, knee-length cutoffs. She thought for a long minute before she spoke. “Okay, so tell me about it.”
“About what? About houses? About art?” His dark eyebrows were pressed together and his forehead was lined in thought.
“About making beautiful things.” She was challenging him. But she was also desperate to know. She leaned a little bit closer and tilted her long neck to look up at him.
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“Okay, welll. . .” Remi took a minute to get his foot-ing before the words just started shooting out of him. “I love the idea that I’m making something permanent. I like seeing something I’ve designed or built and knowing that my hands made it.” Julianne lifted her eyes just enough to see the earnest concentration on his face. “I like leaving a part of myself behind for people I may never even meet. Plus, I like using tools.” He shrugged.
“I guess that’s it. I don’t know.” Remi stared expectantly at Julianne, who raised her eyes until they met his. They sat on the tile floor, staring at each other, for probably two whole minutes in shocked, self-conscious silence.
Then Remi stood up quickly and walked out, leaving Julianne alone in the room with her upside-down tiles and a whole lot of messy thoughts.
! ! !
She floated through the rest of the day, replaying her interaction with Remi over and over in her head. Even if for just a split second, she’d felt a flash of whatever she had felt on the beach the night they first met—that kind of ease or understanding that had made her feel like she could talk to him forever. Julianne racked her brain while she set one tile down beside the next, over and over again. She swirled one finger around in the cement, 124
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watched the white goo harden on her skin. Remi had talked about architecture the same way she thought about art. But how could someone who felt something so pure about creating something new and exciting be so complacent about her naturally incredible beach—and the lives that people had built there? “Deep down, Remi gets it. I may have been right about him after all,” Julianne told herself, fixating on the flecks of light that had fil-tered in from the unsealed window frames in the bathroom.
! ! !
On her bike ride home, Julianne didn’t put on her iPod or even notice the familiar Palisades faces that waved hello as she rode by. She was still too preoccupied with Remi and their cryptic conversation. Why should it even matter to her what his intentions were? No matter how good his ideas about art were, no matter how insightful he was, he was still the enemy. But he seemed to understand something that she’d never been able to articulate to anyone else. Jules tapped her fingers on the handle-bars as she glided along, trying to puzzle it out. She wished her mom were here to help her make sense of the confusion. Her mother had always been so good at taking something and breaking it down into parts, turning it into something totally usable. Julianne had always 125
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assumed that was why she was such a good painter. She could isolate light, isolate space, isolate movement, polish them all, and then snap them back into place where they belonged. Jules had always been messier. She didn’t re-create the things she saw around her; she broke them up and twisted them into new angles. Was that what she was doing with Remi—trying to make him into something else entirely because she wanted him to be something good? Her brain spinning and her stomach twisting, Julianne rode up to the house. She sat for a long moment staring up at her front door and wondered if it would be possible for her to ever find the middle ground, instead of the horizon.
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Chapter Twelve
!
Julianne climbed the stairs and walked directly past her bedroom, right into Chloe’s. Flopping down on her sister’s red flowered Marimekko comforter, she announced, “I give up!”
Chloe, who had been sitting at her desk filling out her daily log for her internship at the Children’s Hospital, immediately snapped to attention. She popped out of her rolling chair and dove onto the bed, practically landing on top of Julianne.
“Tell me everything! What did he do? Oh, Jules, I knew he was bad news! So, what’s the deal? Are they selling the property and moving to Iceland? They’re not going to move out and sell it to some business, are they? That house is just ugly enough to have potential as a casino.” 127
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“No, it’s not like that,” Julianne hedged. “I had a lot of time to think about it at work today, and I feel like some pieces are starting to come together.”