Page 56 of On Dry Land

“What’re you up to, there, Dryden?” Travis Beck asks, scanning everything Spencer puts onto the counter. It’s a testament to the power of gossip in this town that he doesn’t need to ask who Spencer is or why he’s with me. He already knows.

“Well, Travis, we’re going to destroy my house,” I tell him, doing my best to inject a bit of fake cheer into my tone. The way Spencer pinches his lips together and Travis’ eyes widen makes me think I was at least partly successful. I probably sounded deranged.

When we get back to the house, Spencer moves Demon over to the guest cottage, worried that even upstairs in the master bedroom, the noise will scare her. I leave him to it and wander the lower section of the house, looking for things I want to keep. There’s nothing. Picking up a glass figurine of a whale, I turn it in my hands a few times, trying to feel something. I don’t care about any of this. Numbly, I tilt my palm and let the figure fall. It shatters impressively, glass scattering across my shoes and the marble floor.

Walking back to the main living area, I get there just as Spencer is returning from the cottage. I toss him a pair of safety glasses and reach for my own.

“Are we really doing this?” he asks, sounding half nervous, half excited. Gloves in place, I grip the handle of the sledgehammer.

“We are.”

Spencer hovers to the side, looking cute in his goggles, crowbar resting on his shoulder and somehow managing not to appear threatening at all. I glance around, zeroing in on the coffee table and deciding that will be a satisfying place to start. Without thinking about it, I swing the sledgehammer and bring it down on the center of the table. It shatters, the head of the hammer hitting the marble floor and jarring my shoulder with the impact. In the corner of my eye, I see Spencer jump. When I look at him, though, he smiles.

“Perhaps you should be filming,” I tell him, never sure what is or isn’t good content for a vlog. He shakes his head and adjusts his grip on the crowbar, eyeing the line of decorative vases sitting on the sideboard.

“Just for us,” he replies, the same way he did when I asked if he was going to film the snowmen.

I don’t mind when he films me or when he asks questions while doing so. I don’t mind showing him how to do things slowly enough for him to learn, and I don’t mind taking detours when I’m driving us home for him to film different areas of Siren’s Point. He’s a naturally curious individual, and that’s not something I believe should be repressed. I don’t even mind when he reads me the comments his viewers leave. He could film more of our time together, and I would not mind that either.

But he doesn’t. Mostly, he comes home from work at the clinic talking about the scintillating footage he got of Rudy checking a puppy’s rectal temperature. He talks about walking down to the wharf on his lunch breaks and filming the boats, chatting with the staff. He shows me images of the sun rising over my property and video he got of the winding roads he walked on the mornings I wasn’t home to drive him around.

Everything else—the evening swims and the hockey games and the ridiculous things I let him talk me into doing—are left off the vlog. He doesn’t pick up his phone or balance his tripod anywhere. He leaves the hundreds of viewers behind and spends the time with me alone. Weak and selfish as I am, I cannot pretend to be anything other than glad for it. The more time spent with Spencer’s eyes on me, the better.

I watch him, nodding when he looks my way with a question on his face. Biting his lip, he tees up like a major league baseball player and swings the crowbar. Spencer takes out all three vases in a satisfying explosion of porcelain, staggering a bit with the force of his swing. He lets out an incredulous, slightly hysterical laugh and turns to grin at me. I smile back, tallying up exactly how many things we’ll need to destroy in order to get him to look at me like that again and finding it worth the cost.

As though realizing there is no going back now, Spencer doesn’t hold back. He shatters the glass in the picture frames while I’m busy destroying the marble countertop of the kitchen island. He tips over the bookshelves in the office while I take measured, heavy swings at the desk. Spencer rips down the curtains and climbs on top of the bed in the spare bedroom to take a swing at the chandelier hanging from the ceiling. We flip the mattress off, and I revel in the burn in my shoulders as we completely demolish the wooden frame.

“How do we kill it?” Spencer asks, panting, glasses lifted up so he can rub sweat off his face. We look at the living room couch, the only piece of furniture still standing in the room.

“I have gasoline,” I say, wondering if the only way to exorcise this demon is by fire. Spencer laughs, tugging his glasses back into place and leaving his hair a spiky mess above.

“Nah,” he says. “We’ve got this.”

And we do. The cushions are tossed across the room, and swing by swing, we destroy the couch. Glass and pottery and wood crunches beneath our feet as we circle around, looking for any intact pieces that have yet to be annihilated. Neither of us is happy until the couch is little more than wood scraps and strips of leather. Showing off that chipped tooth as he smiles, Spencer sits down on one of the abandoned cushions, dropping the crowbar to the floor with a clang and resting his forearms on his raised knees.

“Holy shit,” he comments.

“Holy shit indeed,” I agree. Lifting my arm, biceps and shoulder protesting, I bring the sledgehammer to shoulder height and let it fall to the floor with a thump. Tugging off the glasses, I drop those, too. Spencer pats the cushion.

Sitting next to him, I stretch my legs out and sigh. My back twinges, thighs burning and shoulders a pincushion of pain. I feel, I realize, pretty damn good. Spencer leans into me. Without thinking, I lift my arm and let him tuck into my side. It doesn’t feel strange, the way casual affection like this so often does. It just feels like something that is. Something that’s meant to be.

We sit quietly on the couch cushion, surveying the wreckage that was once a serviceable living space. Through the glass, a truck rumbles up my drive, and Spencer hacks out a surprised laugh. I chuckle, too, unable to help myself. I feel out of control. Reckless in a way that’s different even than the kind of irresponsibility that spurred me to invite Spencer to live here that first day. I feel alive.

Tanner and Mia Reed leave their jaws on the front stoop when I open the door to let them inside. Spencer, still resting on his cushion, waves, and I barely refrain from laughing. I have a feeling I’m already close to being labeled the town crazy, if the Reeds’ expressions are any indication, and hysterical laughter from me, of all people, would only help that along.

“Well, as you can see, I’ve got some garbage that needs removing,” I tell them. Spencer chokes, apparently on air, coughing into his elbow.

He trails me as I walk upstairs to the bedroom, vague thoughts of taking a shower and spending the rest of the day prone formulating in my mind.

“Staying?” I ask Spencer, lifting my arms and stretching my back in an arch.

“Here?” He points to the floor.

“On Earth, yes,” I reply dryly. He snorts.

“No, I mean…you’re not going to stay here, right? Not after we just wrecked your house?”

I shrug, gazing around at the untouched master bedroom. “Why not?”