They spent a lot of time in the attic of the Shack, lying in his bed or on the floor, tangled together with blankets, the TV providing background noise, playing a horror movie they had lost interest in or idle on a video game menu. Some Saturdays Dipper would roll over and reach up to the nightstand and check his phone and it was five P.M. already, he hadn't done anything productive all day, and usually that would stress him to the point of a headache but now he didn't mind, because Wendy was fast asleep beside him and he could wrap an arm around her waist and bury his face in her hair, and she would sigh, half-asleep, and reach her hand back to touch his cheek. They didn't spend nearly as much time in Wendy's bedroom – Wendy's two youngest brothers still lived at the cabin, and she said that the walls were thin and her brothers didn't understand the concept of privacy, but Dipper suspected the main reason she kept him away from her house was her dad.

Dan Corduroy had made it clear that he wasn't happy about Dipper dating his daughter, though Dipper couldn't understand why. He no longer nodded or raised his beer from his chair on the porch when Dipper came up the driveway, and any conversations Dipper tried to start with Dan were riddled with brisk responses and a general lack of interest. One morning Dipper saw Wendy in the grocery store and they got to flirting, leaning on the deli counter, and Dan came around the corner with his cart and interrupted them, said he was in a hurry to get home. It was as if the man came from a different era entirely, a time when women were not deemed smart enough to think for themselves or choose their own boyfriends, and fathers chased anybody who dared touch their daughters down the driveway firing a shotgun into the sky. Wendy assured Dipper that it wasn't personal. "I'm his only daughter," she said. "He's protective of me."

Their first real date was dinner and a movie in White City, the next town over from Gravity Falls, and at the end of the night when Dipper made the turn into the Corduroys' driveway, Dan was standing at the far end of it, to the side of the cabin. Dipper switched to his low beams, and the man was engulfed in darkness for a moment until Dipper came to the end of the drive and stopped the car, and Dan was still standing there, arms folded, as if he had decided in the last few hours that his calling in life was to become a tree. Dipper wanted to laugh but held back – Dan didn't have much of a sense of humor – and he looked over at Wendy for an idea of how to react, but she didn't seem fazed.

"How long has he been standing there?" Dipper murmured. He had told Dipper to have Wendy home by eleven, and it was ten-thirty.

Wendy merely rolled her eyes. "Like I said – overprotective." She leaned over the center console and kissed him, said "goodnight."

"'Night."

As soon as Wendy's feet touched the dirt, Dan turned and walked to his front door, Wendy trailing behind him. Dipper felt a surge of anger course through him. "Asshole," he muttered, and swung his pickup around, careful not to drive up on the edge of the immaculate front lawn.

He brought it up with her the next day, kneeling on the wooden floor of the gift shop, unpacking a box of Bigfoot bobbleheads and pricing them with the label gun. Wendy was sitting on the checkout counter, swinging her legs, her boots making a dull thud every time they hit the wood. "That was weird last night, wasn't it?" Dipper said. "The way your dad just stood there. He looked like he wanted to kill me."

"I think he just likes to know that I get home safely. Maybe he thinks you're a crappy driver."

"Seriously, though."

"I am serious. You know my mom died in an accident. I think every time he sees your truck leave the driveway he starts freaking out, like I'm never gonna come back." She put her phone down on the counter and came over to sit on the floor, rested her arms on his shoulder. "Look, I know it's dumb. He's always trying to talk my brothers into going out and finding girlfriends, but the moment I start dating a boy he spends all his time worrying that I'm gonna move out and never talk to him again. But at least he doesn't try to keep me away from you. And he never says anything bad about you, or anything. He'll warm up to you, just like he warmed up to me being away at college."

Dipper considered it for a moment. He hadn't lost anybody close to him since his grandma at the age of six, when he was far too young to feel the full impact of grief. He couldn't know what it felt like to lose a wife, and from the photos Dipper had seen, Wendy's mom looked a lot like her; maybe Dan really did stand by the window whenever Dipper picked Wendy up and maybe he did fear that she would never return, and another fragment of his life would be stolen away. "Okay," Dipper said, and Wendy kissed him, and he went back to pricing the bobbleheads, not quite satisfied, but he knew from his limited experience with relationships that they required compromise, and if dating the girl of his dreams meant dealing with a creepy, intimidating father, then so be it.

But Dan never did stop waiting at the end of his driveway. Dipper stopped bothering to switch off his high beams, hoping the threat of blindness would deter him, but the man was a monolith, arms folded, week after week after week, a brown bottle tucked in the nook of his elbow every once in a while, the headlights casting eerie shadows on his face. The blatant domineering didn't irritate Dipper as much as the fact that Wendy usually dressed up for their dates, in an off-shoulder top or a green dress that she liked, and although Wendy's natural, everyday looks were a part of her charm, the lipstick, mascara, and perfume were an alluring combination, and Dipper didn't always want to end the night with a chaste kiss when his body longed for more. But they couldn't do more – Dan was watching them like a child peering into a fish tank. And if Wendy ever invited Dipper inside he wouldn't step out of his truck; all it would take was one swing of Dan's fist and Dipper would sail over the trees and land on somebody's roof in the center of town.

"I can't pick you up from your house anymore," he told her one afternoon in spring. They were in his bed, staring at the ceiling, Stan's old stereo playing a Metallica CD Wendy had fished out of the bargain bin at a record shop in White City.

Wendy snickered, which annoyed him. He had spent several hours considering how to address the problem, and he was very serious. "Why's that?" she said.

"It's too weird. Your dad is clearly uncomfortable whenever I'm within a mile of the place."

She sighed and rolled over, faced the far wall. "This again?"

"Yes, this again. It's fucking weird. It creeps me out."

"So... you're gonna make me walk home?"

"No, we just won't drive. We can do stuff in town."

"Alright. I guess if we get tired of bowling we can always go over to the social club and play bingo."

"Wendy, I'm being dead serious." He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down, but she was scrolling through a news feed on her phone. It had been raining all afternoon but now the sun had come out, bathing the attic in a golden glow, and the tips of Wendy's hair rested in the light from the window, bright orange. "Will you look at me?"

She rolled over and looked up in his eyes, her expression softening.

"It's been four months," he said. "Was he like this with your other boyfriends?"

"I don't know. He never liked Robbie from the start, because he was... well, he was Robbie. And if I met guys in college Dad just asked me a bunch of questions, but he never met them. I told you about Dylan and Malachi. I wasn't with either of them for very long. I've never been with anyone for four months, except for Robbie. So I don't really have much to compare this to." She took Dipper's free hand and weaved their fingers together. "I think he has been getting worse, though."

"What do you mean?"

"Like... it's as if the grief affects him now more than ever. Last week I came home from work and he was passed out on the couch, and on the coffee table he had a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and he had all these photo albums open, photos of him and my mom, before any of us were born. I woke him up and I wanted to look at the photos, too. I had no idea he even had them. But he swept them all up and put them away in his bedroom, like I wasn't supposed to see them. God knows how often he gets those out when no-one else is home."

"Do you think he needs therapy or something?"

"Man, can you imagine my dad seeing a therapist? I mean, I'll suggest it to him, but he's only gonna get angry." She groaned and rubbed her eyes. "I hate thinking about this. Can you read me one of your stories?"

Dipper sighed and lay back down. "Yeah. Pass me the notebook. It's in the top drawer." He gazed up at the dusty rafters. It seemed like every time he mentioned Wendy's dad, the puzzle grew larger, more intricate. All he wanted was to be able to walk into her home without feeling as unwelcome as a chicken in a lion's den. Now, it was looking like he would have to fight through a jungle of deep-rooted psychological issues to get there.

"What are these?" Wendy said, and held up his yellow bottle of lithium tablets.

Dipper reached out and grabbed them, which, he soon realized, was pointless. They hadn't vanished and Wendy didn't suffer from short-term memory loss. "Multivitamins," he said.

Wendy sat up and glanced at his hands, clamped around the bottle. She frowned. "Dipper, what are they?"

It wasn't a secret he had planned on keeping forever. He wanted to tell her, he had come close to telling her, more than once – back in November, when they were only friends, up on the roof, but the words had died in his throat. He had always treasured the quiet moments they shared, staring into the sky, their bodies barely touching. He drew a great deal of comfort from those moments, and knew that Wendy did too, and he wouldn't want to taint any second of one by talking about the violent tendencies he was so ashamed of. Now that they were together, he knew that Wendy loved him – it was written on her face when she woke and she looked up at him and broke into a lazy smile, but a couple months longer was all Dipper had wanted. A couple months longer and he could have been sure that his disorder wouldn't drive the girl away.

He sighed and leaned back on the pillows, released his grip on the bottle. It rolled off his knee and landed on the sheets, but Wendy didn't reach for it, she simply waited for him to speak. "Lithium," he said. "It's a mood stabilizer. I'm bipolar."

His eyes were cast down at the bottle, as if the pills were at fault for revealing themselves. Wendy wasn't the type to rifle through other people's things, so he had never worried about keeping the bottle hidden, and now if she dumped him he would only have his own carelessness to blame – he had taken the medication that morning, threw the bottle in the drawer, closed the drawer with his knee, and then invited her to rummage around in it not four hours later. He might as well have peeled the label off the bottle and framed it.

Wendy shook her head, though out of confusion rather than abhorrence. "Since when?"

"I was diagnosed two years ago."

"That doesn't make any sense. You're not... I mean, you're you. You're sweet, and kind. And like, reliably sweet. You never get angry at anyone."

Dipper smiled, though his face felt heavier, and he was suddenly tired despite the daylight. The explanations ahead of him sprung up one by one in his mind, mountains he now had to climb. "When you started college and we fell out of touch... there are things that happened in the last three years that I haven't told you about."

She sat unmoving, hands between her legs, while Dipper described the events leading up to his diagnosis, the boy he had fought in the cafeteria during sophomore year, and then the month before finals, when Dipper had barely emerged from his room, and Mabel had brought him his dinner so he could eat it in bed, and every time she tried to talk to him he lay there, silent, facing the wall, until she left, quietly crying, and Dipper hated himself more than he had the day before. He told Wendy the real reason he had come to Gravity Falls, to escape a town that associated his name with a bad temper and a trigger-happy fist, and he told her about his fight with Doug Tanner and why he hadn't had a drop of alcohol since.

Wendy made a whimpering sound and threw her arms around him, nuzzled his neck. "My poor baby," she said, and it was the opposite reaction to what Dipper was expecting, so it took him a moment to sink into the embrace. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I didn't want to scare you away."

"Dipper, you could never scare me away. It's not like you were violent on purpose. You can't control it."

It was supposed to make him feel better, but it didn't. "I can control it, though, when I'm on the medication. If I'm taking them everyday, I can control everything, and I haven't missed a day since last summer, and I still... attacked this guy, out of nowhere. I was fine one minute, and the next, I just snapped. That's dangerous."

"You were drinking. Everyone does stupid things when they're drinking."

He rolled his eyes. "It isn't the same, Wendy."

"Hey." She stroked his cheek, up to the stubble beside his ear, and looked in his eyes. "I know you, dude. You're an over-thinker. I know that taking these pills makes you feel like you're evil, and you're not. That party was, what, almost a year ago? Eight months? And nothing has happened since then?"

He felt his muscles relax, still in her grip. "No," he said, and smiled. "I think you have something to do with that."

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. I moved up here to take my mind away from school. And Piedmont in general. I was going to do that by working in the Shack and writing about the countryside, but you're the one who's been my distraction. You and your beautiful face."

She snorted. "Okay, dork. No need to get all mushy." A grin crept up on her face and she kissed him. "I love you."

"I love you too." He rested his forehead against hers, and soon she was kissing him again, the kind of deep, forceful kiss that drove Dipper crazy, made him turbulent with energy, so that his hands roamed her body through her clothes, unsatisfied with every place they landed. His hands wanted more; they yearned for bare skin and her breasts, but Dipper would not grant himself the pleasure. Since New Years' Eve, there had only been one occasion that he had overstepped Wendy's hazy boundary between acceptable and unacceptable contact – he had lifted her shirt and kissed the skin under her belly button, and she had scooted up against the pillows, and he had apologized profusely, and she started kissing him and they never brought it up again, but Dipper remembered. Now, he let her set the pace all the time, and that pace was always slow but he didn't mind, even when his body ached for more. If they grew old together and their relationship became as platonic as sitting out on a front porch on rocking chairs, occasionally holding hands, and they hadn't had sex once, Dipper liked to think that he still wouldn't mind, because sex wasn't important to him, and Wendy was everything.

They lay down again and must have made out for the better part of an hour, and when Dipper opened his eyes the attic was gloomy again, the sun reclaimed by the clouds. It was getting to the time of day that Wendy took a nap, so she buried her head in Dipper's chest and he held her close to him, and he wanted to suggest that they get up and go out somewhere, lest this become another bed-bound day, but her sleepiness was contagious and he closed his eyes, fell asleep to the scent of apple shampoo.

Stan occasionally hosted poker games round his dining table, and although the noise of Stan's friends shouting and cackling had to pass two floors to reach Dipper, it was still obnoxious enough that he tended to leave the Shack for the evening, and either go see Wendy or sit on the beach by the lake, writing horror stories on his tablet, his eyes flitting up to the dark woodland surrounding the water.

One night in June, it was hot enough for the attic to be unbearable, and the couch to be sticky, and Stan moved the dining table out to the grass just between the front porch and the parking lot. Dipper came out on the porch in just his shorts and watched his uncle lighting candles in the center of the table. Stan looked up at him and said, "hey! Put a shirt on. My buddies are getting here any minute."

"Sorry, this is still poker, right? Or have you decided to wine and dine your male friends?"

"The lantern's busted and we need to be able to see the cards, wise-ass. This is my only choice." He put his hands on his hips and glanced at the table. "But you're right. I can see how this could be perceived as romantic."

"As long as you don't try to kiss anyone, I think you'll be fine."

"Hey, how about you join us tonight, huh? It's too hot in there to fester in your room all night."

It was an offer Stan made every time, and every time Dipper refused. He knew how to play – he had played a few games with his school friends, though he'd never won any money from it – but he didn't know how long he could endure the banter of a group of rowdy fifty- and sixty-year-olds. "I don't know, Stan."

"C'mon. What are you worried about? You're smart, and you don't drink. Chances are you could walk away with the whole pot, playing with a bunch of drunk old-timers like us."

Dipper sighed just as a pleasant breeze did. He was too sweaty to see his girlfriend, and it was too hot to think about writing, so he shrugged and said, "alright."

Stan slapped Dipper's bare back on his way into the house. "Attaboy. Now go put a fucking shirt on. I want the guys focusing on the cards, not your nipples."

The buy-in was thirty dollars and the players were Stan, Sheriff Blubbs, Dan Corduroy, and one of his logging crew, Ross Cartwright. The three guests all pulled up in Blubbs' car, came over to the table, and immediately started pouring glasses of Dan's whiskey, and Stan started doling out chips and shuffling the cards. They didn't even greet each other – they were in the middle of a conversation about a woman who had moved into town and Stan naturally joined in. None of them acknowledged that Dipper was there, but he took out his wallet and laid a twenty in the center of the table, and none of them raised any concerns about him playing, either.

His first few hands were weak, yielding nothing but a pair of sevens, but by the time he had lost half his chips, he was dealt a king and a jack, and another king came up in the flop. Stan and Ross folded, followed by Blubbs when a jack came up as the turn, and straight after, Dan threw ten dollars into the pot. He glared at Dipper over the top of the flickering candle flames, the orange light painting him more menacing than usual, but Dipper found that he was unperturbed. He matched the bet, depositing his chips in a neat stack, and Dan laughed and said, "you do not want to go down this road, kid."

Blubbs said, "let him go down whatever road he wants to go down," and nodded at Dipper. Blubbs turned over the final card, six of diamonds, and Dan raised again – five dollars. Dipper ran his eyes back and forth along the cards, tried not to chew the inside of his cheek. There were three diamonds face-up, so Dan might have had a flush, but Dipper didn't trust that Dan had waited until his friends were out to invest any real money in this hand, so Dipper matched the bet again.

Dan revealed his cards first – pair of aces, and Dipper exhaled quietly and sat back in his chair when he flipped his own cards. "Two pairs," he said, and the other gentlemen at the table laughed. Blubbs clapped him on the shoulder.

Ross said, "the hell were you thinking, going all-in on a pair of aces?"

Only then did Dipper realize he was raking Dan's last fifteen dollars towards him. "He didn't think I'd be able to call a bluff," Dipper said.

Dan looked up again, looked at Dipper like he might lunge across the table and strangle him, but he just chuckled again and said, "yeah, that's exactly it." He held out one gigantic hand and Dipper tried to match his firm shake. "Well played," he said.

Dipper couldn't stop grinning, satisfied at having shown Dan Corduroy up and satisfied at having won a little of the man's respect, though he soon remembered that he had surpassed the point of wanting it. He had long ago grown tired of Dan becoming colder as the seasons became warmer, and now all he wanted was for Dan to know that the standoff could last as long as he liked – it wasn't going to stop Dipper from dating his daughter.

Dan bought back in and the game went on for another couple of hours; Stan called it at midnight, and Blubbs had won about sixty dollars. Dipper stepped away with ten, and Dan with five.

Dan guzzled the rest of his whiskey and glowered at Blubbs. "Congratulations. Are you gonna buy something to pound your husband in the ass with?"

Blubbs laughed, the same carefree way he had been laughing all night, flicking through the cash in his hand even though he knew the amount already. "Why would I need to do that when I just pounded your ass at poker?"

Dan winced. "Don't say shit like that."

"Like what?"

"That faggot shit."

Stan stood and stretched his back. "Not this again."

"Makes me sick imagining what them two get up to," Dan said.

Blubbs finished his water and stood up, stuffed his wallet into his pocket. "Stop imagining it, then." He shook Stan's hand and then Dipper's. Ross gave them both a wave but Dan's exit was unceremonious; he coughed and spat in the dirt halfway to Blubbs' car.

The chatter was replaced with crickets, and the air was a lot cooler now that the sun had been absent for a few hours. Dipper had a sour taste in his mouth. "Why do you guys let him talk like that?" he said.

Stan extinguished the last candle on the table and picked up three glasses with one hand. "Who?"

"Dan. Why do you let him talk shit about Blubbs and his husband?"

"They're only messing around."

"Didn't sound like he was messing around."

"Well, they might have been messing around and they might not have been. Doesn't make any difference – they've been friends for twenty years, at least. You wait twenty years and see how you talk with your friends."

Stan pressed a hand to his back again and hobbled to the porch steps. Dipper was left unsatisfied with the answer. He put his hands in the pockets of his shorts and watched Blubbs' car pull out of the lot, onto the road, the red tail lights flashing between trees and eventually disappearing. As normal when something was bothering him, he reached for his phone to call Wendy, but stopped himself. Wendy had never appreciated Dipper's criticisms of her father. Dipper's dislike of the man and her familial instinct to defend him had been the only real strain on their relationship, and he knew that if he called Wendy now, they would fight, and she would hang up on him, and he wouldn't be able to shake the guilt from upsetting her until morning, when she woke up and he could call her again. He kicked the dirt at his feet and went inside.