Page 89 of Never Stay Gone
Dakota laughed. He wrapped his arms around Shane and whispered in his ear, sharing with him all his dreams from back then, now, every day in between: the two of them, nothing but the sky and the stars and the wide, empty world. He hummed a few lines from “Cowboy Take Me Away”as Shane buried his face in his neck. “There’s ocotillo everywhere, and see?” He lifted Shane’s hand, pointed to the mesa. “That’s where we had our first kiss.”
He described the kitchen he was going to put in, the living room he’d build. The bedroom and bathroom on the other side of the breezeway. Rocking chairs on the porch, a grill, maybe a porch swing for two. “It’s got a well already dug and an old iron septic tank out back. Water in, water out. None of it works right now, but it will. Just gotta fix her up a bit.”
Dakota set up a beach lounger and the umbrella, laid out a half dozen pillows for Shane, and propped open the cooler of water at Shane’s side.
Shane lay back on the lounger as Dakota stripped off his shirt and buckled on a tool belt, then got to work. He spent the half the day hauling away all the bad wood. When he was done, he had more of a frame than a house, but she had good bones, and by the time the sun set, he’d shored up what was left and started laying plywood down for a new roof.
Dakota cooked hot dogs over coals as the sun set, and then they camped out, lying in sleeping bags on air mattresses under the stars. They lay in each other’s arms and spent hours talking, just like they had when they were seventeen, painting their future in whispers and promises and soft kisses.
Days passed, and the house came together beneath Dakota’s hands. Shane’s strength grew, and he went from spending most of his hours on the lounger to passing Dakota nails and screws and wrenches.
Heath swung by on his way back from the border. He’d brought half the county’s dust back either on him or on his truck, but he was smiling: happy to have gone, happy to be back. Happy to see his missing tools too, he teased Dakota. He brought a six-pack of cold beer, and they drank on the porch steps Dakota and Shane had just replaced—new wood, new dreams laid over the old. “I’ll come out and help when you want me to,” Heath promised.
Ten days into the rebuild, a shiny Ford F-250 rumbled down their track, the bright red paint and the cloud of dust visible almost a mile away. Dakota waited with Shane in their front yard, sipping water, shirtless, wondering who was making the drive all the way out to their speck of nowhere.
When the Ford parked and a man climbed slowly out of the driver’s seat, Shane stiffened at Dakota’s side, all tense as lightning-struck mesquite. He looked at Dakota, then said, “Hello, Burt. Dakota, this is Shelly’s dad.” He invited the man to come in, such as it was, and to join them on their porch.
Dakota helped Shane settle onto the steps before melting back, leaning along the railing as far away as he could get to give them some privacy. He could still hear every word. “Heard you were living out here with a friend,” Burt said, after a long silence. “Don’t blame you, getting away. After everything.”
“Burt…” Whatever Shane was going to say faded.
“I don’t know what to do with my daughter,” Burt blurted out. “I don’t know where to lay her down. She loved this place. She loved Big Bend. Before she moved here, every time she’d come back from visiting, she’d be bursting at the seams to tell me how beautiful the land was, how much fun she’d had out in the country. She was so happy to be down here with you, Shane.”
Shane’s head bowed. Only the wind in the ocotillo made any noise at all.
“We broke up,” Shane finally said. “I’m sorry, Burt. But it’s the truth. We broke up right before it happened. We weren’t going to get married.”
A frown dug deep into Burt’s forehead. “That’s what the police said. I just don’t understand why.”
“Because…” Shane took a long, slow breath. Dakota moved from the railing to his side, trying to give him strength. “Because I’m gay,” Shane said. “I wasn’t the right man for her. I wouldn’t have made her happy if I married her. She—and I—deserved to be happy with people who loved us, and who we loved. Really loved.”
Dakota braced himself, muscles coiling, body tensing. You never knew what kind of reaction you were going to get when someone found out the truth. More often than not, it was acceptance, or at least a banal kind of indifference, but this was Shelly’s father. What kind of rage could spark inside a man who thought his daughter had been done wrong?
Burt’s big handlebar mustache twitched. He blinked and looked out over their scrub brush and desolation. Stared at the mesa where Shane had kissed Dakota and their futures began. “She knew?”
“She… suspected. I was going to tell her the truth, once I could tell it to myself.”
Dakota rested his hand on Shane’s shoulder.
“You loved her enough to respect what she needed. Thought of her happiness, not just your own.” Burt nodded, as if coming to a decision. “My daughter had the biggest heart of anyone I ever knew.” He turned and looked Shane right in his eyes. “She would have wanted you to be happy.”
Shane needed a moment after that, and he tried to blink away the tears, turn his face up, fight back how his body was shaking and his Adam’s apple was bobbing, but Burt wrapped an arm around his shoulder and pulled him close, a one-armed hug, and Shane collapsed against the man who might have been his father-in-law.
“Bury her down here, Shane.” Burt pulled himself up to leave. “Find her a place she’d want to be. Please?”
“I will.”
They shook hands, and Burt said goodbye, and Dakota slipped an arm around Shane’s waist as Burt’s truck started the long, bumpy drive back to the highway.
“I got an idea,” Dakota said to Shane. “Come with me.”
It was about a ten-minute walk to the grove of honey mesquite and scrub oak and prickly pear dotted with shoulder-high sunflowers and wisps of wildflowers dancing along the red earth. There was an underground spring deep in the land, and it rose just close enough to the surface to create this little oasis before fading back into the desert.
“It’s beautiful,” Shane whispered. “I didn’t know this was here.”
“We haven’t done a lot of explorin’ together. But I walked the whole place ’fore I brought you out.” Dakota knew where the tinajas and the wildflowers were, where the rattlesnakes made their dens, and where, when the rains fell, the water raced for the draws and washes. He knew every place he wanted to take Shane, knew the backdrop of the hundreds of memories they were going to create.
This was the most beautiful spot of all.
