I almost smiled. It sounded like a graffiti conspiracy theory.
“But you yourself said you actually have control over what you’re doing. So why do you care?”
He looked at me, his eyes wide. “Are you serious? You really think this is the shit I live to make? I mean, don’t get me wrong—it’s nice and all.” He leaned a little closer, like he was going to tell me a secret. “But I don’t give a fuck about creating work that gets the stamp of authority. It’s the other shit I’m more interested in.”
“The other shit?”
“Listen, Goldilocks, if a relatively well-known street artist like me got caught in the act of doing illegal art, he would be arrested, just like anyone else. But don’t let this facade fool you.” He gestured to his painting. “Most of us who’ve crossed over enough to keep the cops off our asses are night crawlers—the best kind. Our rap sheets are nothing to joke about.” He looked stern and proud.
I was not about to get started on Chase’s “illegal” art—I was afraid of what I’d find out. Besides, I didn’t want to end up being some kind of accessory to a crime. So I pretended I hadn’t heard him. “So, where do all the street artists hang out? Is this a popular place?”
“No way! This is a day job for most of us, but Manhattan ain’t shit when it comes to cultivating your creative chi.”
I frowned. “Wait a second—didn’t you grow up right here in Manhattan?”
He studied me for a moment. “Been snooping around, Goldilocks? Turn up anything interesting?”
I blushed and fiddled with my backpack zipper, embarrassed to admit I’d been doing my fair share of sleuthing—when Kendra wasn’t voluntarily pressing me for details, that is. “No . . . I’ve just . . . heard a few things is all.”
He stepped closer, causing me to inch back a little. Chase Adams was clearly not a guy who believed in the importance of personal space. Not that his presence was unpleasant, but a safe and respectful distance was necessary here, considering my brain got kind of foggy whenever our skin was close to touching. “Yeah? What kind of things?”
I met his gaze this time, not wanting to admit I felt a little intimidated. “Just . . . stuff. Something about a stepdad, a brother, drugs—I don’t remember the details.” Chase continued to stare at me; it was terribly destabilizing to my already fragile mind, which was brimming with questions about whether or not the stories were true.
“And you believe all the shit you hear via the rumor mill?” He tsk-tsked. “I had higher hopes for you, Goldilocks.”
“So, none of that stuff is true?”
“When people want to manufacture a celebrity, they manufacture a story. If it’s in any way associated with the streets, the harder and more dangerous the story, the better. The truth is . . .” He stepped back over to his work and continued to add a few touches with spray paint, addressing me somewhat distractedly. “I was smeared by a New York Post writer, some broad who was itching to get a piece of this, naturally.” He looked over at me and smiled. “But I wasn’t remotely interested—once you end up in the sack with a girl like that, she’ll be running her mouth from here to Long Island, giving up people’s tagging aliases, revealing their secret spots and whatnot. So I tried to let her down the easy way, but I guess she wasn’t the kind of girl who took too well to hearing no. So she started some fantastical rumor about me offing my stepdad and my brother dying of a heroin overdose. You really believed it, Goldilocks?” He shook his head in either amusement or disappointment. “I guess there’s gotta be at least one myth behind the legend, so no harm, no foul. Outta-control stories excite some people, you know?”
He glanced over at me again, and I felt goose bumps in unexpected places. I pulled my windbreaker tighter around me.
“The reality ain’t all that exciting, Goldilocks. I have a brother, but he’s not dead. Kyle’s just a few years younger than me. I guess there’s a kinda fairy-tale glaze to the story, though, ’cause we were orphaned pretty early. I was five, and he was one.” Chase wasn’t looking at me this time, so I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or not.
“What happened?” I asked, allowing my curiosity to get the better of me.
“Drugs and alcohol happened. Crack cocaine, mostly. My earliest memories are of finding food for me and my baby brother—graham crackers, milk, whatever we happened to have if my mom remembered to get groceries—while my parents got high and passed out to reruns of M*A*S*H.”
He said all of this nonchalantly, so I couldn’t tell how he felt, but my heart went out to him. As the sunlight made his dark lashes cast shadows on his face, he suddenly looked so vulnerable. I’d momentarily felt sorry for the completely horrible Elsie Donegan—but why hadn’t I imagined that Chase was the one who’d actually harbored a tragic family story? His annoying bravado and rebellious swagger suddenly made a world of sense. He was a survivor.
“Did you have any other family around?” I asked, my voice softer than before.
“Nah, just the New York state foster-care system. Real warm-and-fuzzy folks.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye as he splashed his girl with more green paint. “Look at you, all curious and shit. Doing some kind of fieldwork on the exotic garden varieties of the New York hoodlum?”
I sighed. Chase might not take my concern seriously, but I had to try to convince him that I was on his side—at least, long enough to get some information that would help me select the artist for my project. And given that most of our conversation so far had been surprisingly civil, I had some hope he would listen. “Chase, I actually came here because I need to ask you for something.”
His eyebrows rose, but at that moment, two large shadows darkened our path. I turned around, alarmed to see two tough-looking guys standing there. One of them was a boy with stringy blond hair and a staggering number of facial piercings; the other was a bald guy with a large dragon tattoo spanning his entire skull. Neither of them looked particularly interested in Chase’s mural.
“Yo, Adams, where you been? We been looking all over for you, man!” the blond guy said gruffly, taking a menacing step closer to both of us.
A sinking feeling took hold in the pit of my stomach as the bald guy looked me up and down. “This your girl, Adams?” he asked. “Me likey.”
“You got our money, man?” the blond said, completely ignoring me.
I looked over at Chase. “You know these guys?” I whispered, my heart making little palpitations in my chest.
Chase was as cool as a cucumber as he added silver curlicues to the peacock feathers and blooming roses. “Yup,” he said, seemingly unperturbed.
“If you don’t got our money, man, maybe we take your girl as collateral,” the bald guy said, eyeing me like I was a tasty ice-cream cone.
“Are you going to do something?” I whispered again, as I nudged closer to Chase. “These guys seem kind of . . . mean.”
Chase simply said, “I don’t have your money, so just back the fuck off. I’ll get it to you as soon as I can, but that definitely ain’t now.”
“What, too busy painting fairies and shit?” The blond guy sneered and kicked over one of Chase’s canisters of paint.
This was definitely not looking good. I glanced up the alley to see if any of the other artists were getting a good look at what was going on. They seemed entirely oblivious.
Surely they won’t do anything stupid in broad daylight, I tried to reassure myself. All the same, why isn’t Chase reacting?
“We gave you the package a month ago, and you said we’d be getting our cut last week, but we ain’t seen shit yet,” the blond guy hissed. “Now, we’ve been pretty fuckin’ patient with you up till now, so if you don’t start showing us some respect, things are gonna start to get real up in this bitch.”
Package? I looked over at Chase, who was still completely Zen about the whole thing. Was Chase some kind of . . . drug dealer?
The blond kicked over another canister of spray paint, which made me jump. Since Chase didn’t seem to
be all that invested in protecting either me or himself, I began racking my brain for a plan. The alley was pretty narrow, but maybe if I ran past the bald guy, I’d be able to get out of harm’s way before something awful happened.
He seemed to notice me searching for an escape plan, because he took another step toward me. “Hey, babe, ever done it with a Puerto Rican before?”
The blond guy chuckled in response. “Ain’t nobody gonna fuck a nasty-ass motherfucker like you unless they wanna end up with venereal disease.”
The bald guy began to swear in Spanish at his friend.
“L-listen, guys, I don’t want any trouble,” I said, my voice noticeably tremulous. “I was just leaving right now.”
“‘Listen, guys, I don’t want any trouble!’” the blond guy mocked me in a high voice, blocking my path as I tried to leave.
I balled up my fists to keep the tears that were blurring my vision from falling down my face. I turned back to look at Chase, but he was as unreadable as ever. The panic that had been coursing through my veins a couple minutes earlier flowed like lava through my entire body. Apparently, Chase had duped me again. Not only was he potentially some kind of drug dealer or smuggler, but he was also the kind of guy who was probably going to let something terrible happen to me.
“Where you going, Blondie? We was just about to show you something,” the bald guy said, and moved as if to pull something out of his jacket pocket. I froze and placed my hands over my mouth, too stricken with fear to even scream.
“Oh my God, he’s . . . he’s got a gun!” I said out loud to no one in particular, although it came out more like an inaudible rasp than as a statement.
I suddenly felt a warm hand on my shoulder, and that was when I screamed, barely drawing attention from the other artists in the alley. I turned around, and it was just Chase, who had a strange smile on his face. “All right, guys, knock it off—she’s had enough,” he said simply.
Not quite understanding what was happening, I turned back around to see the dirty blond and the bald guy doubled over in silent laughter, practically writhing on the ground. The bald guy looked up at me and pointed, dissolving into a heaving mass of hysterics as he tried to speak. The blond guy was able to collect himself, however; he shook his head and looked at me. “Aww, you should’ve seen your face. ‘He’s got a gun!’ Jeez, man, we really look that bad to you?”
“Chase, man, we’re sorry, but she was such easy bait,” the bald guy said. Then, to me, he said, “We didn’t mean nothing by it. It’s just . . . Pike and me saw you from a little ways off, and we decided to make a bet to see if you would get all . . .” He gave out a few high-pitched yelps, which I guess was his way of imitating a histrionic girl. “You lost, man.”
The blond guy shrugged. “Whatever. I wouldn’t have bought it if I was her. You look about as tough as a little girl wearing a Catholic-school uniform.”
It took me several moments to realize what was happening. I looked at Chase, aghast. “Are these guys . . . friends of yours?”
He smirked. “More like monkeys on my back.”
The blond guy smiled affably at me, as if he hadn’t just threatened me a few minutes before. “Thing is, last time Chase hooked up with a chick like you, she was convinced Reynaldo and me were gangsters or something.” He sized me up. “We just wanted to see if you could hang.”
My blood was boiling. As petrified as I’d been moments ago, I now felt humiliated and incensed. To think Chase had just stood by, silently enjoying his friends’ horrible gag, made me feel ill.
“For one thing, I am not hooking up with Chase. For another, that’s great—really mature, guys. Nice to know you get your kicks scaring innocent people half to death.” I turned to Chase. “And here I was, believing for a second that maybe, just maybe, Chase Adams was human. But I was right—you’re a fucking monster. I’m sorry I thought otherwise.”
“Oooh, busted, dude,” Pike hooted. “And for the record, I agree—Adams is a fuckin’ monster. I’ve known him since the fifth grade, and I think he was, like, put together from the pieces of a bunch of different corpses. Real Frankenstein shit.”
“Hey, chillax, muchacha. We didn’t mean nothing by it,” retorted Reynaldo. “And come on, you have to admit, you definitely had us pegged as thugs, right? I mean, no offense, but you don’t look like no girl I know from the Bronx.”
“Shut the fuck up, Reynaldo,” Chase said brusquely, then reached toward me. “Annie, come on—it was just a joke.”
“Not a very funny one,” I said, gathering my things to me tightly and storming up the alley, past Chase and the other two. They threw their hands up in the air, as if to signal they wouldn’t try to mess with me. I could still hear them chuckling as I huffed past the other (still completely oblivious) muralists.
“Your girlfriend don’t have a sense of humor, man,” Pike was complaining.
“Lay off—she isn’t my girlfriend,” Chase snapped back.
I glanced back, but he was poring over his masterwork as his friends play-punched each other and continued to marvel over their act of trickery. From where I was standing, Chase, however, was just as stone cold as he had come off when I’d first met him.
So much for the sudden vulnerability, I thought. And as far as asking for his help went, my patience had just about worn thin. When it came to finding a suitable street artist for my part of the Quentin Pierce exhibit, I knew exactly where I stood. I was totally alone.
Chapter Eleven
I’d brushed off Kendra’s questions later that evening, insisting I’d met a couple street artists but that Chase hadn’t been around. She seemed disappointed but didn’t press me any further. And Kendra actually had news of her own to share.
“Yannis Papadapoulos finally asked me out!” She had a smile the size of the Grand Canyon on her face, which also made me smile. I’d honestly thought the hot Greek guy was just a passing fancy at first, but I could see from the way they bowed their heads toward each other in class, so attentively it was like they were the only two people in the room, that this was more than Kendra’s flavor of the hour.
“That’s awesome—what are you guys gonna do?”
“Well, at first I was thinking of going to see Splendor in the Grass at Washington Square Park, being a huge Natalie Wood fan and all, but I decided to leave it up to Yannis, so it’ll be a surprise,” she said. “Besides, you and Harrison are going together, and I wanted to avoid hijacking your first date. Anyway, Yannis’s command of the English language isn’t so good, so I’m not sure how much he’d enjoy the film.”
My heart began to thump just a little harder when I thought about Harrison. He would be picking me up in a few minutes, and I still hadn’t decided what to wear. I stood in my bathrobe, rummaging through my closet, as Kendra twirled a lock of her hair around a curling iron.
As if she’d read my mind, Kendra said, “Go with the purple sundress—it’s a pretty warm night, and you’re gonna want to show off your legs. You can borrow my strappy brown sandals—they’ll go really nice with the ensemble. Besides, it’s late October, and this is probably the last balmy night we’ll have, so take advantage of global warming.”
I smiled gratefully at my friend. “My own personal fashionista,” I said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek as I got ready. After applying a little lip gloss and mascara, I observed myself in the full-length mirror. My skin was a little ruddy from the unexpected warmth of the past couple days, but the sun had tinged my hair with a few lemon-yellow streaks, which made me feel fresh and summery. Despite the stress that seemed to have poured over my life like an avalanche, the girl in the mirror was calm and poised and even had a slight sparkle in her cornflower-blue eyes. I felt beautiful.
“Looking hot, Annie! He’s totes going to try to take you home tonight,” Kendra said, eyeing me suggestively.
“Well, I’m not really that kind of girl, so the most he’ll be getting is a kiss. Besides, I have a lot to do for the curatorship, so I’ll be working
throughout the weekend.”
“Oh, Annie,” Kendra said, as if she were talking to a small child. “You only live once, and you’re going out with the hottest guy in school—might as well have a little fun while you can.”
I cowered a bit. I loved my friend, but I was somewhat uncomfortable discussing my sex life. I wasn’t exactly experienced. My first time had been with Peter during our junior year of high school, on his living-room couch, after a particularly hot-and-heavy make-out. We’d talked about doing it for a while, but when it came down to it, it was spontaneous and a little unexpected for both of us. And it wasn’t that it was bad—that time or any of the handful of times we took advantage of stolen moments when my mom or his parents were gone; it just never sent tingles down my spine or a flood of emotions coursing through all the parts of my body that longed to feel alive. The thousands of pieces of erotic art I’d seen, and the literature and films I’d most relished, suggested that the sweaty and disappointingly quick encounters I’d had with Peter didn’t come close to comparing with what I believed, on some level, really good sex could be like.
After Peter, I’d decided that satisfying lovemaking probably wouldn’t come after a night of studying, or gnoshing on popcorn and watching a movie on the couch. Not that any of that stuff was bad, but I was past wanting my lovemaking to be comfortable and mundane. When I’d tried to explain myself to my high-school girlfriends, they’d looked at me blankly. I wasn’t a prude—I knew my body well enough to know that it was capable of experiencing mind-blowing eroticism. It was just that I wanted something special, with someone who knew exactly how to penetrate my inhibitions and bring out the wild woman in me. But I didn’t know exactly how to voice this to others without sounding like a crazy person. And I certainly didn’t know if some college boy, even someone like Harrison Waters, was the one who would take me to that level of ecstasy.
At that moment, Harrison knocked on my dorm door. He was as gorgeous as ever, wearing boot-cut black jeans, a hunter-green polo shirt, and very expensive-looking leather shoes. His freshly washed hair was still damp.
So Damn Beautiful (A New Adult Romance) Page 9
