time I had to start back to the station so that I didn’t miss my train. The day had begun as a total disaster, but now I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to run through the city with Dean until dawn and then do it all over again.
“I don’t think witches are real.”
“Sure they are.”
Dean stopped by a headstone. The name and dates carved into it had been worn away so that I couldn’t read them. “Wait, do you mean women accused of witchcraft or actual witches?”
“Sure.”
“I assume any woman executed as a witch would not have been allowed a Christian burial, and I’m pretty certain magic isn’t real.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Cemeteries are weird anyway. They’re landfills for bodies, but people come to visit them. Would you visit the pizza box you tossed out last week?”
Dean frowned, almost looking embarrassed. “It’s not quite the same thing.”
“Sure it is.”
“No, it’s not.” Dean looked at the grave marker with a kind of awe. “These were people, and cemeteries give us a place to be with and remember the people whose souls have passed on.”
I waved my hands in the air. “Wait, so magic is bullshit, but souls are real?”
Dean shrugged.
“I expected more from a debate champion.”
“When it comes to religion, I’m willing to embrace the contradiction.”
“Even though a lot of churches are kind of intolerant?”
“Not all,” Dean said.
We took up walking through the cemetery again, pausing to check out some of the headstones. “My parents keep trying to get me to go to Mass with them, but I’m not into it. Too much hypocrisy.”
Dean tapped the center of my chest with the tip of his finger. “I think finding religion here is more important than finding it in a church, though I also understand that it isn’t for everyone.”
“But I’m definitely going to hell if I don’t believe in God?”
Dean laughed. “I’m pretty sure that you’re going whether you believe or not.” He playfully shoved me with his shoulder.
As much fun as I was having, there was a question on my mind I wanted to ask—no, that I needed to ask—and I’d put it off long enough. If I didn’t work up the nerve to do it now, I never would.
“I gotta ask you something,” I said.
Dean’s laughter faded, and his expression grew more guarded. “I’m listening.”
“When you were telling me about your mom maybe being disappointed, you said it’d been easy not to think about it until now.”
“Yes.”
“So, what’s different? Why could you avoid it before but not anymore?”
“You.” Dean said it so matter-of-factly that I thought I’d imagined it at first. I thought I’d heard what I wanted to hear instead of the actual words he’d said. But, no. He’d said I was the reason, and he’d blown my mind for like the third time in a day.
“Me?”
Dean leaned against an old, thick tree with most of its leaves still hanging on, though they were all yellow and red and orange. He folded his arms across his chest. He looked so calm, and I didn’t know how he could be calm when my heart was beating so fast I thought it was going to explode.
“You know how there are times when you’re reading a book and there are some things you like and things you don’t and some things that are extremely frustrating, but you’re kind of ambivalent about it and you’re considering setting it aside?”
I nodded, mostly because I had no clue where Dean was going, but I also didn’t want him to stop talking.
“And then you reach a point where something happens and everything clicks into place. You’re hooked. You want to stay up all night reading because you can’t put it down, and it ends up becoming one of your favorite books of all time?”
Even as I was hearing the words Dean was saying, I didn’t believe them. I resisted the urge to pinch myself to make absolutely sure this wasn’t a dream or that I wasn’t hallucinating. Maybe someone had slipped LSD into my latte and it’d just taken a few hours to kick in.
I caught a tremble running through Dean. He wasn’t calm at all. Once I knew what to look for, I could see the tremor in his hands and the way he kept biting the inside of his cheek. Hell, that tree was probably the only thing holding him up.
“What’re you saying, Dean?”
He looked away at first, but then changed his mind and caught my eye. “We still have a lot