Spray Paint Kisses

by Bethany-Kris

  Evernight Publishing ®

  www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2014 Bethany-Kris

  ISBN: 978-1-77130-970-7

  Cover Artist: Sour Cherry Designs

  Editor: JS Cook

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  dpgroup.org

  DEDICATION

  For all the boys with spray paint on their fingers.

  dpgroup.org

  SPRAY PAINT KISSES

  Chapter One

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  Gage Masselin nearly dropped the aerosol paint can when he heard the feminine voice. Whenever he was in the middle of creating a tag, he was in the zone. There were no sounds but the constant whoosh of the spray paint can’s nozzle and his rhythmic breathing. No distractions took him away from his art.

  Well, usually.

  Turning on his heel, Gage forgot about the black and white bandana he still wore around his lower face as a shield from the paint fumes. The material muffled his surprise as he came face to face with the prettiest damned thing he’d ever seen in his twenty-two years of life.

  Long waves of golden hair were tied off to the side in a messy braid, falling over her front. There wasn’t a lick of makeup on her clear peaches and cream complexion. Standing in gladiator style sandals, ripped up jean shorts, and a faded band T-shirt, the girl could have been just about anyone.

  Except she couldn’t. Gage’s tiny New Brunswick hometown was a blink and you’d miss it kind of place. Growing up in Plaster Rock gave him the ability to know everyone, even if he didn’t officially live there fulltime anymore. Thing was, people moved away, new people didn’t move there.

  Everybody knew everyone else, or they thought they did. Gage didn’t know this girl.

  “Uh …”

  The girl smirked before waving in Gage’s direction. “Your face.”

  His face?

  What?

  “My—”

  Instantly, Gage realized what the girl meant. The bandana still covered the lower part of his face, including his mouth. He probably looked like some little hoodrat hiding in the alley, tagging the shit out of the high school library’s wall.

  No wonder she thought he was doing something illegal.

  Tugging down the bandana so it rested around his throat, Gage offered the girl a shrug in explanation. “Sorry, habit to wear it. I usually don’t have company when I’m painting, so no reason to have my mouth free to chat.”

  “You mean an accomplice, right?”

  “No, I mean company,” Gage replied with a smile.

  “I didn’t realize graffiti had become legal.”

  Oh, this girl had balls, or she just liked breaking them. Either way, Gage liked that.

  “It’s not. That’s probably why I spent two years in juvenile hall.”

  “Wouldn’t be juvie now, though.”

  “No,” Gage said. “It’d be the pen. Good thing it’s legal. I’m not looking to spend any more time in a lockup.”

  The girl still didn’t look convinced.

  “Honest, sweetheart. See …” Gage pointed at the piece of official paper taped to the brick wall. If a cop happened to stop by, all he had to do was refer to that permit. “Gives me the right to be here slumming up this wall with my work. The school commissioned me to do the piece. It’s all on the legal side of things, promise.”

  A small hand rested on her jutted out hip. The action caused Gage to let his eyes wander down the expanse of her creamy thighs and wonder if they felt as smooth and silky as they looked. They probably did. He bet she’d taste like salt, skin, and sin.

  Shit, how short were those jean shorts of hers, anyway?

  Short enough that they made Gage’s mouth a little dry just from staring.

  Fucked, that’s what he was, and he didn’t even know her name.

  “If you say so,” the girl mused.

  Gage couldn’t help but tease. “What would you have done if I said it was illegal? Call the cops?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s it?”

  She smiled a blinding sight. “That’s it. It is pretty.”

  “Uh, thanks?”

  “You’re welcome.”

  With one more glance at the bare bones of the mural just beginning to take form, the girl turned to leave. Gage was positive his heart leaped into his throat, creating a lump his words couldn’t make their way by.

  “Wait!”

  The darkened blue of her eyes glittered as she stared back. “Yeah?”

  Gage forced himself to swallow the nerves beginning to form in his throat. Nervousness wasn’t like him at all. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  “You didn’t tell me yours, either.”

  “Gage. It’s Gage.”

  “Summer.”

  Gage didn’t even have to feel her name on his tongue to know it fit the girl. She shone bright, even in the darkness of the alley. Whatever heat she held inside had touched him the moment he laid eyes on her.

  Women rarely had that kind of effect on Gage. If he found one who caught his eye, he made a move and that was that. For some reason, this girl screamed delicate. Like a flower with petals so precious they might crush to dust if he squeezed too hard.

  “Are you staying in town long?” Gage asked.

  Summer’s smile faded slightly. “Probably not.”

  What? No. “But—”

  “How long will your thing take?”

  Gage chanced a glance back at his mural, worried if he stared too long, Summer might disappear when he looked back. She was still there when he did, light shining in from the mouth of alley and haloing around her curvy form. The heart inside his chest did the oddest, deepest beats at the sight.

  Who in the hell was this girl?

  “Maybe a couple of days, if the weather stays good,” he finally replied.

  They were expecting a rain shower on Wednesday, though. That could put the finishing touches of the mural off for a while. Never mind drying time.

  “And you’ll be here every day, then?”

  Gage nodded. “Yeah. Every single day.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll stick around,” Summer said quietly. “At least for a couple of days.”

  Oddly, it seemed as though Summer left something hanging in the air between them. Like a request of sorts. As if maybe she wanted him to ask her to come back.

  “I’ll be here for a couple of days,” Gage repeated. “You should be, too.”

  Summer’s plump bottom lip disappeared under her top teeth in consideration. “Maybe.”

  “Are you staying at the Inn?”

  “It’s the only motel in this town, isn’t it?”

  Gage laughed, nodding. With that, Summer disappeared out into the bright lights of the street. Gage watched her go, confused and unsure. Every part of him urged to follow and find out more about the mysterious girl, but a deeper, quieter part inside said not to.

  Delicate, he reminded himself. The last thing he wanted was for Summer to think he was chasing her, especially if it would only push her away. She’d come back. Of that, Gage was most sure. That didn’t mean he understood how exactly he knew it, though.

  Turning back to his work with a heavy heart, Gage pulled the bandana back up over his lower face. The black strokes of the mural’s beginnings covered near
ly the entire face of the library wall. He hadn’t even fully decided how he wanted to continue with the design, but swatches of summer colors started to take shape in his mind.

  It wasn’t often Gage’s work was called pretty. Intricate, yes. Impossible to replicate. Bold lines and dizzying colors. The designs often swirled and overlapped to draw in a person’s eye and keep it moving from one side to another. Gage never went small when he worked, either. Everything he did had to be big, strong, and leave an impression. Each piece was one of a kind and he didn’t duplicate, regardless of what someone else wanted.

  Especially now that his work was being commissioned.

  What artist didn’t want their art sought after? Gage took it as a compliment, though. Getting to this point in his career had been hell. Juvenile hall was just one bump in the road, but it taught him where he didn’t want to go after getting out. Once he had his GED in hand, Gage moved to the city, four hours away from his small hometown, needing to get away from the judgement of small minds. In Saint John, he started volunteering at the local teen center.

  Apparently he was a legend of sorts. Even stranger, pictures of Gage’s work—what pieces the cops hadn’t covered or ruined—had been passed around between other artists and clubs. Each time something was handed over, or a video shared, Gage became a little more infamous. His popularity, thanks to social media, went far beyond his small hometown a heck of a lot quicker than he ever thought it would.

  Suddenly, people wanted his work on signs. Others requested canvases for their homes. Gage found himself with a full time job alongside his volunteer work at the teen center. He never thought he could make a career out of graffiti. Boy, was he wrong. If his father wasn’t proud of his law-breaking son before, the man sure laid the pride on thick, now.

  But, as Gage plucked up the can of flat black spray paint to get back to work, his mind was fully focused on only one thing.

  Summer.

  Chapter Two

  “Damn, what’s up with you, bro?” Dean asked.

  Gage jerked out of his overactive mind only to realize he was unintentionally burning the hamburgers he was supposed to be cooking on the grill. Cussing under his breath, he turned the patties and shook off the odd distracted feeling to get back to his friends.

  Now that he lived full time in the city, it wasn’t often he made the four hour drive home to hang out with his old crew. Well, the ones that still lived in the shithole that was Plaster Rock, anyway. Most had long gone, taken the trip out west to Alberta where money was the target and life was faster paced than the retirement slowness of their town. The few friends Gage did still have living in his hometown mostly worked at the local wood mill, had a steady girlfriend or wife, and a kid or two underfoot.

  Twenty-two was not the age Gage thought of when he considered children. Apparently the younger generation around here was so damned bored with themselves, they were finding trouble in a whole new way instead of the ways they used to with liquor, spray paint, and ATVs. Trouble that started in a bed and ended with a squalling child with sticky fingers.

  Speaking of sticky fingers …

  “Uncle Gage!” Twenty-two was way too young to be called the unofficial uncle of his best friend’s daughter, too, but Gage hadn’t been given an option to voice his opinion on that one. Two tiny hands fisted into the dark denim of his jeans, yanking hard to catch his attention. “Was you paintin’ today?”

  “I was,” Gage answered his three-and-a-half-year-old niece. “Are you going to come see it when it’s done?”

  Jennifer nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, Daddy says—”

  “Daddy says you need to go get your hands washed, baby.”

  Gage offered his best friend Dean a smile in thanks as Jennifer sulked off to find her mother. It wasn’t that he didn’t love the kid in his own way, because he did, but kids freaked him out. The younger they were, the worse his anxiety was. Funny how he didn’t mind a bit about working with troubled teenagers, though.

  Maybe it was because it wasn’t all too long ago that Gage was one of those teens. Perhaps if he would have had someone like him watching over his shoulder and giving him encouragement that didn’t involve something that would get him in trouble, he might have been okay.

  He was doing just fine now. Sort of.

  “Seriously,” Dean muttered, moving in alongside his friend. “What’s up with you? You’re out in space, or something.”

  “Nothing, man,” Gage said. “Toss me one of those beers, huh?”

  Dean seemed to drop the subject as he grabbed a Budweiser from the cooler. Handing it over, he asked, “How’s the piece coming along?”

  “All right. Worked in most of the basics today, got the lines I wanted settled.”

  “Primed, too?”

  “You know it,” Gage said with a smirk.

  “God, I miss drawing up tags for you sometimes, you know?”

  “Hey, family man, now, remember? You don’t need to be slumming it up with me, Dean. Besides, you’re working under Carl. It won’t be long before you can put that talent of yours to use in a different way.”

  “Not sure if I like tattooing like I thought I did, though,” Dean admitted.

  Dean didn’t have the technical skills with spray paint that Gage had, but his friend could design a piece something fierce. Problem was, if you couldn’t make the medium do and work how you needed it to, the finished product showed it. Spray paint in particular was something that needed to be handled in a faster paced fashion, and there were very little room for mistakes. A good artist could either hide the mistakes, or work around them. Not Dean.

  “Why not?” Gage asked, checking the meat on the grill. Dean shrugged, nodding at his wife of two years across the grass. Gage got the point. “It’s not stable enough in a place like this. I get it.”

  “Not really. I’m still working fulltime aside from the time I’m with Carl.”

  “Carl’s had years to work up a customer base here, though. He’s got people that come from the city just to get a piece of his art on their skin.”

  In fact, Gage had two tattoos by old Carl. One went across the backs of his shoulders, and his latest, a small piece with his mother’s initials, were on the inside of his left wrist. It was the only time he ever felt comfortable letting someone else do an interpretation of his graffiti for the purpose of making it permanent.

  “Plus,” Gage added, pointing the metal barbeque tongs at his friend, “… you will, too. Eventually. Especially working with Carl, it gives you some limelight of your own, man. Your work is being seen.”

  “But how long is that going to take?” Dean asked pointedly.

  “Then move somewhere else. That’s your options, Dean.”

  Without Dean saying it out loud, Gage knew moving wasn’t an option for his friend. Tessa, Dean’s wife, was the only child of her parents. They owned the small restaurant in town and one day, it’d be hers. She didn’t want to leave, so neither did Dean.

  “You’re right,” Gage said quietly. “It’s going to take a while to build up your brand and your name, but it’ll be worth it. Stick with it. You’re good at tattooing and it gives you an outlet for all of those sketches. You’re just like me, you need the artistic outlet. Being good at something other than penciling an image on paper is just a bonus.”

  “Didn’t take you a while,” Dean noted.

  Was that the problem his friend was skirting around? “Are you jealous of me?”

  “No, I didn’t mean … Shit, that’s not it, Gage. I just meant you were lucky, that’s all.”

  “Lucky that I missed out on high school, my mother’s last year of life, and a basic reputation for being a good guy?” Gage asked sarcastically. “Because that’s not exactly my version of luck, man. I scarified a lot for the attention I received. You know it wasn’t easy.”

  “I know.”

  “Then don’t call it luck.”

  Dean apologized before tipping back his bottle of beer and downing the remain
ing golden liquid. It was conversations like this why Gage fell back on his friendship with Dean so often. They didn’t need to say a hell of a lot to get the point across and both knew when toes were being stomped on a little too hard. Friends like that were hard to come by. They were even harder to keep.

  “So, seriously,” Dean said, dropping the empty bottle into a nearby box. “What’s up with you?”

  Gage sighed. “It’s nothing. I’m not in the zone with this one, I guess.”

  “The high school’s mural, you mean.”

  “Yeah. You’d think I’d be skipping with joy over tagging the high school that caught me in the first place, right? The bastards. I couldn’t believe when the superintendent contacted me about doing the piece. They just want the ability to say a famous local artist they taught donated their work.”

  “It’s great you demanded it be on the outside wall, though.”

  “It is,” Gage agreed, laughing lowly. “He almost said no. I refused to do one on a canvas for them to hang or hide if they wanted. This way, it’s kind of shoved down every throat in this fucking town. Shame it’s in the alley like it is.”

  “More kids use that alley to get out of the school during breaks than anywhere else,” Dean pointed out.

  That, in a nutshell, was why Gage eventually agreed to the piece’s placement. It wasn’t really about the town, the people, or the school. He wanted the kids to see it more than anything. It was a reminder for them that no matter how low you were, or what you did in your past, only you dictated your future. They could be whoever they wanted to be with the right drive and confidence.

  Even if they were nothing more than petty criminals, like Gage had once been.

  “It’s not like you to not be in it,” Dean said, eyeing his friend from the side. “And we talked last week before you made the drive down. You were fucking ecstatic about doing the mural.”