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“Light spray. Clean tip. No drips. No dicks. Got it.”
Wrapping his arm around my waist, he pulls me in closer, so close I can feel his breath on my neck. He grabs my arm and lifts it up, gripping my hand with his. “And don’t get too close. Even spray through and through, from about here, okay?”
“Yes, James. When did you get so bossy?”
He bites at the side of my throat before pulling away. “Last time I gave you free reign with a can, you gave me a deformed, dripping dick and a night in county. I don’t trust you for a second.” He shakes his can and gives me a devilish smile before the first blast of paint hits the wall.
I bite my lip to stop from laughing, but that only makes him stop, and he quickly pushes me hard against the brick, his paint flecked hand gripping my chin. “Please don’t tempt me to fuck you up here. Only got tonight to wrap this up and when I see you chewing on that lip it drives me fucking crazy.”
A pulse shoots between my legs, and I grip his sweater, pulling him flush to my body. “We can be quick,” I whisper.
“Fuck Katie,” he says, dropping his forehead to my neck. “You’re gonna kill me.” He glances up at his canvas—the white bricked building spanning at least thirty feet across—and then shakes his head. “After. We got a lot of ground to cover and only a few hours to do it.”
I grumble my protests, but I let him start, and as directed I follow closely behind, filling in his letters as we go. Mostly black, of course, and bold, blocky lines. Lines so perfect and straight they could be stenciled. I do my best not to drip, to keep my spray even as he’d asked, but I’m no street artist. I’m canvas and paint, brush and palette. I work in a bright room restoring old, expensive paintings by artists much more famous than I could ever dream of being. I don’t use aerosol cans, and I never work in the dead of night. At least, not without a light on. But he doesn’t say anything about my imperfections, just silently fixes them as we go,
James works and we don’t talk. He focuses on his art, and I focus on him. On his face, on his dark eyes, on his small pauses when he steps back against the bars of the scaffolding to observe a letter here or a line there.
Spray after spray, cannister after cannister. We work, we paint, we stain the white bricks with streaks of black. Spanning a good twenty feet we lay out his letters, one by one, spray by spray, until its 4 am and he’s cleaning up the last of my lines.
TAX THE RICH,it says in big bold font. And then underneath, smaller, it reads,SO WE DON’T HAVE TO EAT THEM.
“Pink still your favourite colour?” he asks me.
I drop a few empty cannisters back into the bag and throw it over my shoulder. “I’ve been kind of into blue lately. Turquoise?”
“Alright,” he says, digging into his pack and pulling out another can. Quickly, he sprays something underneath his letters, something I can’t quite make out, but the noise below us pulls my attention from him.
Flashlights, a cruiser parked at the end of the street, the sound of a radio beeping. Police.
“Fuck,” James says in a whisper, but he doesn’t stop his spray. There’s a yell from below, and the cop is saying something into his radio that I can’t hear.
I pause. “Do you have like… a permit or something?”
“Undo your rope,” he says calmly. “We’ll need to get to the roof.”
“The… roof? Why the hell would we need to do that?” He doesn’t look at me. He just keeps painting. Faster now, his spray dripping, his lines becoming uneven. Realization hits me. “Ohmigod James,” I say, dropping my voice. “No one hired you to do this. This is… ohmigod, ohmigod! This is so illegal.” I look down, and there’s a light shining up at us, and my heart is suddenly beating so hard in my chest that I can barely breathe.
“Someone hired me,” he says as he finally hauls his backpack on and pulls out a knife, quickly cutting the rope binding me to the scaffolding. “Just… not the owner of this building in particular.”
I want to throttle him, but there’s no time to argue, because another cruiser is pulling up, blue and red lights flashing, and James is grabbing my hand and pulling me towards the edge of the scaffolding, where he lifts me up and directs me to start climbing. Which I do. I climb and I climb. Up and up and up until I’m gripping the overhang of the roof and hoisting myself up.
And then we run.
Across the flat roof to a door. James already has a crowbar, and he slams it into the handle and breaks it open. I tally up the charges in my head. Destruction of property, vandalism, breaking and entering, evading police. All reasons enough for me not to slow my legs as James pulls me down the stairs and into a dark, empty office building. We don’t stop running, and my breath is heavy in my lungs when we run down another stairwell and barrel out a thick metal door onto the street. But the cops are right there.Right there.
“Hey!” one of them shouts.
James grabs my hand, and we bolt, but they’re heavy on our heels, and James drags me through laneway after laneway and I’m starting to slow. “Almost there Katie,” he says, and I pick up my pace as a hit of adrenaline courses through me, hoping to God that we’re in factalmost thereand that whereverthereis, will be safe enough for me to take in a full breath.
He pulls me down what looks to be a dead end, and my stomach drops. “James,” I hiss, but he keeps his hand gripped around my wrist and doesn’t stop until we hit it, and then he’s pulling me through a side door into another building and locking it behind us.
When we’re safely inside I slam my fist into his shoulder. “Asshole,” I snap. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
“Don’t be mad,” he says with a smile.Thatsmile. The one that makes it hard to breathe. His lips drop to my ear. “Would you have really changed your mind if I’d told you the truth?”
I swat at him, but he dodges me and grabs my wrists. “I would have at least thought about it!”
“You look sexy as hell when you do bad things with me.”
