Forbidden Boy (11 page)

“Progress? This isn’t progress! It’s … it’s … greedy and selfish. Your family is grabbing up every last morsel of space, every last grain of sand, so that you can have all of it to yourselves. It’s not about making something—it’s about proving that you’re the biggest kid in the sandbox.”

After weeks of lying low and “monitoring progress,” it felt so good to just yell and let her anger pour out.

“I don’t understand why you’re taking this so personally!” Remi bellowed back at her. “My dad is an amazing architect and this is his home. It’s all he’s ever wanted—

it’s his legacy. Why does that bother you so much?”

“You are defending
this
? What’s with the infinite faith in your dad? How can you be so sure that he doesn’t have it all wrong?” Julianne posed the question half as a challenge and half because she genuinely wanted to know.

“He’s a brilliant architect!” Remi exclaimed, stretching his arm toward Julianne as if to put his hand over her shaking hands.

“And that means he can’t be wrong? Why? He’s wrong about you! He doesn’t even think you can handle your own job site, but you trust him completely? That’s just weird!” Julianne pressed on, undeterred by the fact that she had just inadvertently spilled the beans about eavesdropping earlier in the week.

“He’s my dad, Jules. And he’s worked his entire life for this,” Remi said quietly, seeming to ignore Julianne’s slipup.

“Well, did it ever occur to you that other people have worked
their
entire lives to afford the tiny slices of space that they live on? To sit at their windows and take in the view that you guys just bulldozed? The beach you’re wiping out to make your gigantic glass jungle gym belongs to this entire neighborhood!” The words were tumbling out of Julianne’s mouth, rolling over and over each other like marbles. Her mouth was thick with emotion and she was choking back tears. “Some people barely have
any
thing left, Remi,” she wailed. “Do you really need to take the beach away from them for some house?” It was all Julianne could do to keep from sob-bing. Her throat was burning from the screaming and from swallowing angry tears. She knew she probably wasn’t making any sense, but she just needed him to hear her now.

“Maybe this is bigger than just ‘some house’!” Remi shouted back at her. “My dad has been working for this for so long. I can’t even tell you what it means to him—

this is his artistic vision …” As he babbled on about his father’s dream, his voice was so earnest that Julianne knew he meant every word. All he wanted was to make her understand.

But she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to cut him off. If anyone needed to understand the
real
importance of this beach, it was the Moores. “Name one life that’s being made more beautiful by what is happening here, Remi!” Her feet dug into the sand as she tore off down the beach to grab her easel. “Want to talk about artistic vision?” she cried, spinning back to Remi. “You know who had it? My mom! And her vision was all about this beach. The one your family is destroying! I can barely see her beach anymore. Soon it will be impossible to remember what she must have seen. But if you think I’m going to give up her beach without a fight, Remi Moore, you have another thing coming. This beach is more than just sand to my family—it’s all we have left of my mother. It’s the only place where she still feels alive. And I’m sorry if my family’s past is getting in the way of your dad’s bright, shiny future, but that’s too damn bad!”

Out of the corner of her eye, Julianne saw Remi’s mouth open to speak, his eyes wide. But there was nothing she wanted to hear from him right now. The sand flew up behind her as she raced to her easel.

Julianne’s afternoon of perfect blue was perfectly ruined.

“ Yo, Jules! Toss me those blueprints!” Beau called up to Julianne.

“No problem. Coming right down,” she called back, tossing the rolled-up specs down from her perch in the rafters.

“Hey, J-dog, have you seen my tape measure?” asked Mitch from a ladder ten feet away.

“Have you tried checking your toolbox?” Julianne offered teasingly, flashing him her brightest smile.

“Nine times out of ten, when you ask me for something, you already have it in there.”

“That’s our girl. Voice of practicality—what would we do without you?” asked Tom, covering for Mitch, who had turned crimson as he hurried down the ladder toward his toolbox. He’d been a little bit awkward all summer; ever since Julianne had appeared in her cute

“first day of work” outfit. The other guys seemed evenly divided between ribbing him for his possible crush and hoping Jules would let him down easy. Everyone murmured in agreement, and Julianne thought for the mil-lionth time how lucky she was to have this cool summer gig as den mother, little sister, and one of the guys. She felt like she was learning something new about the male mind every day.

Jules’s typical morning banter with the boys was in full swing when Remi walked by, clipboard in hand. He made it almost past the group before calling back over his shoulder, “Julianne, if you have a second later, can you drop by the trailer? I have a question for you.” The question was accompanied by low whistles from the other guys, but Remi never skipped a beat.

“Yeah, sure,” Julianne called back to him, trying to sound equally nonchalant. “I’ll come by as soon as I finish tiling upstairs.” With that, she swung down from the beams and ran off to lose herself in tiling. She planned to throw herself into work in a blatant attempt to forget about her one-on-one with Remi.

✦ ✦ ✦

Julianne was enjoying the silence. For the first time in weeks, she didn’t have a song, or a dashing spy scenario,

or the remnants of a painful spat with Remi in her head.

In what would be the master bathroom of Cullen Construction’s very first eco-friendly home, it was just Julianne and the tile. Tiling, Julianne conceded to herself, was sort of like the paint-by-numbers version of mosaic. Sure, she was sitting in the middle of a big empty space with lots and lots of ceramic and a big bucket of cement, but focusing on the tile patterns was calming her down. Anything that could keep her mind off of Remi was all right by her.

Whenever she was alone in a huge room, Julianne liked to imagine herself transforming the entire space into art, just like Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of her favorite artists. Julianne caught her mind wandering and giggled to herself as she got back into the groove of her tiling. Apparently she couldn’t turn her mind off after all.

Julianne was tiling diamond patterns into the floor, according to a diagram that Bill had based on Julianne’s own design, when she heard a knock on the door frame.

“C’mon in.” She laughed absently. “The door’s open!”

In fact, the entire room was open—the walls had been framed but not yet filled in. She turned toward the door and felt her serenity evaporate as Remi approached, decked out in one of his weekday shirt-and-tie combos.

Whatever
, she chided herself.
At the end of the day, an
attractive jerk is still a jerk
.

“Hey,” Remi started.

“Hey,” Julianne replied, utterly deadpan.

“Do you mind if I come in?” Remi hesitated before taking a step further into the doorway.

She wasn’t in the mood for any sort of discussion right now. She just wanted to get back to her tiling. She tried to wave him away. “What, are you a vampire or something? You can’t come in unless you’re explicitly invited?”

Remi smiled faintly. “
Buffy
fan?”

Julianne looked him square in the eye. “Is there something you need?” She refused to get into a discussion about brilliant-but-cancelled TV shows with her former crush/current nemesis/boss.

“Can I talk to you about the other day?” Remi asked earnestly.

Julianne looked down at the flecks of cement covering her hands. “If you don’t mind, I’d really rather not.

I’m sort of in the middle of something. I’m sure your firm isn’t contracting Bill to pay me fifteen dollars an hour to sit around and chat,” she shot back brightly.

“Okay, let’s try this again,” Remi said, employing the same brand of persistence Chloe had used to rope Julianne into going to that fateful party in Malibu. “How about we talk about this job? If I’m not mistaken, Bill
is
paying you fifteen dollars an hour to consult with the project manager about the status of the project.”

Julianne grimaced. “You know, Mr. Moore,” she said sweetly, “I’m not sure how constructive that chat would be. I think you and I have very different goals for this project.”

“Which are?” Remi’s brow furrowed.

“Well, as I see it, your goals are more bottom-line related.” Julianne continued to absentmindedly lay tile as she went on. “You ace this internship; you get a leg up on your architectural career. You get a leg up on your architectural career; you stand a chance of being the next big developer. You become the next big developer; you get to follow in your father’s footsteps and, one day, you can make a big glass house of your very own, just like him.” Julianne waited for Remi’s rebuttal, but he was silent. His big brown eyes were trained on her hands as she continued to plunk down tile. “What’s the matter?

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 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.”

After a few seconds, Remi answered. “Why wouldn’t 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.

“Okay, well …” 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,

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.