Forbidden Boy

by Hailey Abbott

  Chapter Eleven

  “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 millionth 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 concentrate 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 refocus 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 footing 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 filtered 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 handlebars 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 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.

  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.”

  “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.”

  “What, what, what?” Chloe wheedled. “Is all of their building money embezzled? Can we call the IRS and shut them down? It’s major, isn’t it? I can just feel that it’s major! Don’t leave a sister hanging here!”

  “I think we might be operating under slightly different definitions of ‘major,’ Chloe,” Julianne prefaced, before switching gears altogether. “Oh, I don’t even know. I had this really weird conversation with Remi at work today and now…” She paused, burying her head in a pillow. “I’m so confused!”

  “What a jerk! Jules, you can’t let him get to you.” Chloe poked Julianne in the side playfully, but Julianne didn’t even giggle. “C’mon, Debbie Downer—cheer up!” Chloe grabbed a throw pillow from the head of her bed and pressed it against her chest, like she was trying to squeeze answers out of the satin-covered down. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for Remi giving you a hard time. Maybe he’s an alien. No, wait; I’ve got it—they’re plowing down the beach to make a puppy farm where they’re actually going to kick all of the puppies. That’s got to be it. It’s evil—pure evil. And now P.E.T.A. is closing in on them!” Julianne knew that Chloe was mostly kidding, but she couldn’t handle the Moore-bashing any longer. It was exhausting. Chloe studied her sister’s face. “What’s wrong? Jules, are you okay? You don’t look—”

  “I’m just not sure he’s such a bad guy after all,” Julianne blurted out. “I think it’s all just kind of…messy.”

  “Oh, Jules.” Chloe sighed like a deflating beach ball. “Of course he’s a bad guy. Look what they’re doing next door.”

  “That’s the thing, though,” Julianne continued. “We had this talk at work today, and he was showing definite, concrete signs of having a soul. I think he may just be going along with his family because they’re his family. Plus, his family seems kind of rough. His dad showed up at the site last week, and you wouldn’t believe the things he was saying to Remi! He was awful. I have no doubt that his dad is a destroyer of all that is good, but I just don’t think Remi’s the same way. He said these things, Chloe, about making something meaningful and bigger than him that just felt really…true.”

  “Yeah, but philosophical differences and parental pressures aside here, Jules, he’s still going along. Whether he’s heart-and-soul on board or not, his loyalty is still with his family. What’s your deal, Jules? I mean, I know you guys, like, had a moment at the Malibu party, but that was ages ago! Besides, what prompted this heart-to-heart anyway? It sounds totally manipulative, if you ask me. If I were you, I’d watch your back. He absolutely, positively can’t be trusted.”

  “Watch my back? What do you think he’s going to do, impale me with a solar panel? Don’t you think you’re being a bit melodramatic?” As soon as the words were out of Julianne’s mouth, she realized how silly she’d been acting, sneaking around, spying on Remi. Julianne just didn’t know how to explain her mixed feelings to Chloe.

  “I’m not being melodramatic. I’m just being cautious,” Chloe explained, choosing her words very precisely. “Did Dad tell you that Remi’s parents were over here the other day while you were out painting?”

  “No!” Julianne’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline and she felt a cold sweat break out along her collarbone. “What did they want?”

  “This is what I’m trying to tell you!” Chloe exclaimed, as though she were talking to a confused child. “We really can’t trust these people. They offered to buy our house and the land from Dad. They were really, really pushy about it. Calling it an
‘offer’ is pretty generous.”

  “No way!” Julianne gasped again, the intake of breath sharper this time. “They didn’t threaten Dad or anything, did they?”

  “Nope, but they did basically everything but,” Chloe said in a conspiratorial whisper. “It was more of a strong-arm than an offer. I mean, obviously Dad didn’t cave, but they were really all over him.”

  “Oh God.” Julianne breathed out a long, slow whistle. She closed her eyes. “Still, I really don’t think Remi’s like that, though.”

  “I wouldn’t let my guard down if I were you,” Chloe insisted. “These are the people who raised him. Just keep that in the back of your mind, okay?”

  “I just don’t understand why everything has to be so us-versus-them all the time,” Julianne pressed, standing up and pacing across the room toward Chloe’s massive oak bookshelves. She trailed her fingers across the rows of alphabetized spines, comforting herself with their familiar texture.

  “Because that’s what it is, Jules. This is definitively an us-versus-them situation. They want to do something completely self-serving that will really hurt us. We want to stop them. That’s sort of what ‘us versus them’ means. There’s no way to be neutral here. You can’t compromise—you can’t be on both teams!” Chloe’s face was darkening.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Julianne agreed, flopping onto the mattress and sinking back into the cushy nest of pillows on Chloe’s bed. “You’re one hundred percent right.” Julianne knew she should actually feel as confident in her sister’s assessment of the situation as she was pretending to. Chloe had an annoying little habit of always being right about everything. Still, Julianne couldn’t get over the nagging feeling that there was much more to Remi Moore than his family. She cocked her head toward her sister before getting up and walking out of the room. It didn’t matter what she said about Remi; Chloe’s mind was made up, and there would be no convincing her. Julianne walked into her own room and clicked the door shut behind her.