“I put a blanket out for you.”
I swallow hard, tightness in my throat almost smothering my reply. “Thanks.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Quiet noises in the apartment wake me hours later. Soft footfalls. The rustling of fabric and clink of metal. I open my eyes to the dim city light that filters through Willa’s curtainless windows.
She’s a shadow across the room.
I stir and her head snaps up, eyes glinting in the light. Her shoulders stiffen, as if I’ve caught her doing something wrong.
I sit up. She’s swapped her jeans for black leggings and her T-shirt for a long-sleeved dark shirt. Her black messenger bag bulges on her hip.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.” She moves to a shelf and stuffs something in the messenger bag.
“You look like you’re going to break in somewhere.”
She tilts up her chin, a challenge. “Maybe I am.”
I’m on my feet in an instant, moving between her and the door. “What? You can’t just go out and wander the streets and break in places.”
She huffs, her eyes hardening when I block her exit. “I can do anything I want. You wanted a place to stay. So stay. But don’t tell me what I can or can’t do.”
Willa moves to get around me but I shift to the side, and suddenly we’re chest to chest. Another staredown.
This time, our faces are inches apart. This time, our staring contest crackles with the electricity of our physical touch.
“Move,” she whispers.
My lips curl into a faint smile. “No.”
Willa scowls and shoves her body closer to the door, closer to me. I rest my hand lightly on her hip, so as she moves, I move. Like we’re dancing.
Her fist clenches the material of my dark gray shirt. “I said, move.”
Her demand is a hiss and I smell her breath, sweet and hot, cinnamon and clove. My eyes drop to her lips, and suddenly I want my mouth there. I need to taste her.
Her eyes darken, pupils dilating as I tip my chin slightly, moving closer. But before I can connect with that ripe mouth, she shoves my chest—hard.
“Wrong move, Dave.” She spins and grabs the door handle and she’s down a flight of stairs before I can pick my jaw up off the floor, shove my feet in my shoes, and follow her.
I don’t know why I follow, I just do. Acting on instinct, rather than from the million calculations that usually drive me.
Normally, I think with my head. I weigh the logic in any situation. But Willa defies logic. She’s like a force of nature, thunder and lightning, impossible to control.
I race after her, down four flights, hustling to catch up as she pushes out of her building and onto the sidewalk.
“Willa. Would you wait up for me?”
She flings a glance over her shoulder. “This can’t wait.” She doesn’t slow down, but she doesn’t speed up, either.
“What are you doing—really?” I hustle after her and pull my phone from my pocket to check the time. 1:18 a.m. Unless she’s going bar-hopping, there aren’t a lot of legal activities available right now.
Willa snatches the phone from my hand, and that jolt of electricity is back. She powers off my phone without asking. “First rule: keep up. Second rule: put this away. If it lights up or rings at the wrong time, we’re screwed.”
She hands the phone back and I pocket it. “What’s the third rule?”
“Do what I tell you, ask questions later.”
I nod, and Willa inspects my face in the slanting light from a streetlamp. She seems satisfied, so she turns and continues our brisk pace northbound, from the Lower East Side across Houston and into the East Village.
We jog west a few blocks, passing a noisy bar where a handful of patrons are smoking and chatting on the sidewalk outside. The thump of bass from the music reaches my chest, beating in time with my heart.
I stumble on a raised sidewalk edge and Willa’s suddenly not there beside me. I whip my head around, and I’m alone.
What the …?
A snap from the alley I just passed alerts me. I backtrack ten paces, and she’s there, hand on her hip, telegraphing annoyance. I broke the first rule: keep up.
I follow her down the alley to a quieter, narrow street lined with mostly apartments. A gray metal roll-up door is down and locked to cover a storefront. She digs into her messenger bag and pulls out a long, rolled sheet of cardboard and masking tape.
“Make yourself useful,” she whispers, and hands me one edge of the cardboard. In the moonlight, I see shapes cut through it, and I follow her gestures to hold it against the door. She tapes it up. I’m not sure of the cutouts, but I think they form words.
Sounds from the sidewalk at the end of the side street make Willa’s body go rigid. I hear voices, and suddenly she grabs my shirt and spins us in front of the door, her back against the cardboard cutout to partially block it. Her arms go around my neck and she yanks my face toward hers.
The voices grow louder. Two men are walking down the sidewalk.
“Kiss me,” Willa hisses. “Now.”
Rule three: do what she says, ask questions later.
She doesn’t have to tell me twice.
I lower my mouth on hers, finally tasting that cinnamon and clove. Her kiss is desperate, her fingertips digging into my shoulders as the men approach us. She hooks one leg around the back of my knee and suddenly my crotch is pressed right up against her, and I feel myself harden.
Through her thin leggings, I’m sure she feels it too.
And what the hell else is she feeling right now, as her lips move hard against me and her hips tilt up to meet mine? I dart my tongue into her mouth, exploring, and she moans. The men’s conversation drops off, but they’re still walking toward us.
My hands round her hips and fill with two perfectly muscled ass cheeks. The electricity of our touch sparks brighter, shooting want and need and desperate urges into my kiss that quicken the tempo of my pulse.
It’s something I haven’t felt in years. Something so raw it cuts to the bone, to what lies beneath our flesh and blood and ink.
Only a few yards from us, the men slow their pace. Willa kisses me harder, panting tiny breaths, and I inhale her scent and breath and being. I kiss her back, eyes wide open as I strain to understand her expression.
By their footsteps, I know the men keep walking. As their sound recedes, I feel the tension melt from Willa’s body, feel her more pliant beneath my hands as the men amble down the street.
I draw her lower lip into my mouth and suck on it, wanting to taste the fullness of cinnamon. The fullness of Willa.
And that’s when her hands unwind from my neck, trailing down my shoulders to my elbows. As the men’s voices fade, she disentangles herself from me, panting.
She runs a hand through her spiky pink layers. “That was close.”
No, that was awesome. I stay silent.
“If they’d come down this street a few minutes later, they’d’ve smelled the paint. They’d know we weren’t just here to make out.”
“It’s a good enough reason,” I say, disappointment churning in my gut. Was that kiss real? Or was I just covering for her?
Because that kiss wasn’t just a pretend kiss. It wasn’t just a here-put-your-lips-on-me-for-a-while kind of deal.
That was thunder and lightning and the heavy, heady feel of air rich with ozone in late summer. The kind of night that makes you feel even more alive.
Like tonight.
But Willa brushes off our kiss like it was nothing. I’m cold from the loss of her touch and the chill of night feathers over my sweat-dampened skin. Her hand dips into her bag again, then short, sharp bursts of spray from her can attack the door. She’s done in under a minute, the can capped and hidden again, then the stencil peeled back from the door.
“Now for the fun part.” Willa’s eyes glint with mischief and I see her take a syringe from her bag loaded with something dark red. Blood? She squirts small amounts
on the first two words in her stencil, making little rivulets of that drip down the door. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness of the side street and I can finally read her stencil.
Beauty lies within.
That phrase is sweet, innocuous, even encouraging. But the way Willa’s done it, in bold text with the first two words dripping in blood-red paint, changes everything. Now the stencil reveals a darker meaning: Beauty lies. Within.
Willa bends and grabs the stencil, then trots down the alley, tossing it and the red syringe into a Dumpster. I hustle to stay close, a part of me shocked that she just committed a crime, the other part in awe of this gutsy girl.
“What’s on the other side of that roll-up door?”
“Clinic. Plastic surgery, Botox, the works.” She scowls. “They’re not selling beauty. They’re just taking advantage of all the beauty lies that women are told. Thought they could do with some truth in advertising.”
I shove down an appreciative chuckle. She’s more than a gutsy girl—she’s a woman with a razor-sharp point of view. In a world of groupie Barbie dolls and calculating alpha bitches, Willa doesn’t give a shit who likes her politics. She’s going to shove it in their faces anyway.
I follow her down the alley and then another shadowed sidewalk, and as we pass a bar that’s emptying of its last few patrons, Willa’s skittish. She twines her fingers through mine.
Like we’re just a regular couple.
Out for a stroll at two a.m.
I hold her hand, enjoying its strong, even pressure. I don’t remember the last time I held hands with Kristina. Years ago? Probably. We held hands when we were young and fresh in love or lust, when we were exploring each other.
We travel a dozen blocks in silence, Willa’s pace faster than commuters at rush hour. It’s like her feet don’t touch the ground; she moves with the kind of purpose and agility I see in Olympic athletes.
We go under an elevated rail bridge and pass a handful of homeless camps: tents, cardboard, and some with their sleeping bags right on the sidewalk. Willa waves at a fiftyish man in a knitted beanie who’s sitting cross-legged and smoking.
“Hey, Hal.”
He nods back. “Good night?”
“Always.” She pats the bag on her hip. “Doing a little decorating.”
“Good night for it,” Hal agrees and blows out a long smoke trail. Willa approaches him and for a moment I think they shake, but I see a folded bill pass from her hand to his.
Is she doing a drug deal? The question makes me rethink everything I know—or don’t know—about Willa. I don’t want to get caught up in this.
But then Hal squeezes her shoulder and wheezes a thank you, and I realize Willa was just slipping him a little cash. The fact that she was trying to do it unnoticed intrigues me more.
She takes a sharp turn and ascends a flight of concrete steps—steep and narrow, we climb up a slope until we’re level with the rail bridge. She glances back at me, then ducks through a break in the chain link and steps out on a metal span, maybe a foot wide. She walks the beam to the middle of the bridge, maybe forty feet above the traffic zooming below.
And then she sits. Just sits down and gets comfortable, like it’s her couch and not a deadly fall into traffic.
Willa turns to me, still at the edge of safety, and the lights below her illuminate her expression. A challenge. Warehouses line most of this block and cars race below, filling the air with a constant drone of tires on pavement, but we’re above it all.
I pick my way across the beam, heart in my throat, until I get close enough to sit. Squatting down next to her is nearly my undoing, but I manage to get my butt on the bridge rail without plunging to my death.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“I don’t even want to think about getting up.” My sweat-slicked palms grip the grimy, cold metal edge.
“You get used to it. Mind over matter.”
“I take it heights don’t bother you?”
“Heights are what keep me from being bothered. Nobody’s going to mess with us here.”
I think of the men walking down the street and scoot just a little bit closer to Willa, my arm brushing hers as we sit side by side, feet dangling.
“Also, when you’re up high, you’re close to invisible.”
I raise my brow in a question.
Willa continues, “You ever see someone just walking down the sidewalk, looking up?”
I shake my head.
“Plenty of people look down, but hardly anyone looks up. Plus, cops’ hats have that brim, so stuff up high is hidden from their peripheral vision.” She shrugs. “Learn something new every day, don’t you, Dave?”
I nod, a smile on my lips. For the last hour, I’ve forgotten what could be waiting for me at home, forgotten about the filth that Kristina could shovel to the media about my band, forgotten my tickets on the pity train, the Poor-Me Express.
Willa let me live in her world for an hour. And it was magical.
CHAPTER NINE
I don’t date. There’s work, there’s art, and there’s sleep.
That doesn’t leave time to swoon over boys. But the time I spent on that rail bridge with Dave is the most date-like thing that’s ever happened to me.
Ask me to replay tonight and I can’t tell you much of what we talked about. It was just … stuff. Stuff we like. Funny shit that happened to us. Embarrassing stuff.
I talked about Nancy, how she and Ivy planned a trip to Paris after Ivy’s diagnosis. Ivy died before they could make the trip, so Nancy gave me a ticket. It was the first amazing thing anyone’s done for me since Thomas hired me, I told Dave.
Dave didn’t volunteer much about himself. When I asked about how he grew up, he shut it down.
“My parents are gone,” he said simply.
“Gone where?” Then I got his meaning and I mentally kicked myself. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Heart attack for my dad. While I was in college. Mom passed a couple of years before that, my senior year in high school. Lung cancer.” Dave said it like he was reading a report, blank and emotionless.
“You miss them?” I knew I was on shaky ground, but curiosity was winning.
“Yeah. But the band and Tyler’s mom took me in like family. And if I’m being really honest, they’re a lot more like family than my parents were. Growing up, it always felt like we were just trying to get by.”
“I know that feeling.”
We were quiet for a long while, just watching the traffic zoom below us, but my heart squeezed with a strange feeling.
The small pieces Dave revealed started shaping a bigger picture that I could almost see come together. It was like staring at a half-done canvas and being struck by a sense of where the next brush strokes needed to be, but not sure if I could trust myself to make them right.
I’m starting to get him, and that understanding comes with a whole boatload of feelings that make my stomach squirm.
Dave’s got this cloud hanging over him, the fear of what’s next, but there’s something inside him that’s seeking light.
Some of my crunchy clients talk about auras and chakras and energy fields, and while I don’t buy all of that, I get what they mean. When I’m inking someone, I have a sense of their light or darkness. My needle bites into their skin, I blot their blood as I work, and maybe it’s the smell of them or the feeling that ghosts across my skin when I meet their eyes as they lay back in my chair.
Blood and needles, ink and paint. Take all of humanity and you can boil down our motivations, our light and dark, into these essential elements. Murder, drugs, stories, art. They all come from blood and needles, ink and paint.
I come from this place.
Dave comes from another world. A world of rhythm—he taps out a beat without realizing it, his fingertips patting his jeans as I was painting tonight. He doesn’t know blood and needles the way I do. And yet, the way he’s hinted around the edges of a problem, I know there’s a darkness haunting him.
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As I led us back to my apartment, Dave’s silence was strung taut with what he left unsaid on the bridge. It’s like he wants to say it, but admitting it would make it more real.
***
I scrub my face, brush my teeth, and before I leave the bathroom I toe one of the loose floor tiles back into place around my stained tub. Like everything else in this crumbling warren of apartments, it’s beyond repair.
“Bathroom’s free if you need it.”
Dave’s pacing by my couch and he looks at me uncertainly. “Thanks.” He passes me and a current of air licks at my sleeve, as if he reached out to touch me. Goose bumps prickle my forearms.
My bed “room” is just a mattress on pallets, with clothes stacked on shelves built from crates. I hear the bathroom door close and I whip off my leggings, then trade my long-sleeve shirt for an extra-large T-shirt that hangs off one shoulder.
I catch myself wondering what Dave will think, and then I crumple up that thought and squish it back to the edge of my brain. I don’t have the pajama sets or pretty lingerie I suspect most girls do, but this is what I sleep in. I’m not changing that just because I have company.
I have no clue why Dave really needs a place to crash, but I’ve been there before. I can barely fathom his privileged life, let alone a secret so terrible that he has to abandon it.
I fill a plastic Subway cup with water in the kitchen, drain it, and look up to see Dave emerge from the bathroom, wearing only boxer briefs.
Holy hell.
My eyes instantly go to his chest, hard planes of muscle and a compact stomach with hair curling all the way down to … oh, no.
I turn around to force myself to stop staring. Ever since he kissed me—check that, ever since I made him kiss me—my body’s been on high alert. And now he’s practically naked and standing in my apartment.
This is either the best or worst thing that ever happened to me.
Dave steps toward me and his hand reaches past my shoulder. I look up, and his face is inches from mine. Is this another kiss coming? A real, voluntary kiss?
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