“Fine, you wanna see it?” he pronounced through gritted teeth. He grabbed my arm tightly, making me yelp, and dragged me back up the metal stairs.
“Take your hands off me!” I screamed.
“I’m giving you exactly what you asked for,” he growled as he pulled me up several flights of steps. We didn’t end up back at his place. He just kept going until we came to the very top. He pulled me through a creaky metal door.
“What the . . .” I looked around us. We were on the roof. It was a clear, quiet, pristine night. I could see other dark rooftops and twinkling lights in the distance.
“Why are we here, Chase?” I asked, shoving my hands into my pockets. My mouth was dry.
He gesticulated wildly at something. “You wanted to see it. Here it is.” I looked where he was pointing, and I suddenly got very quiet. There in the middle of the roof was an enormous canvas propped up on a stand, maybe ten by twenty feet, covered with the most intricate sweep of graffiti I had ever seen in my life. As I neared it and looked more closely, I was in awe.
It was a larger-scale version of the impromptu piece Chase had thrown up on the corner of Drake and Spofford, on the night the cops had accosted us. While he had made that piece in a rapid fury, I could tell from the delicate strokes of paint, which were almost calligraphic, that Chase had slowed down his process quite a bit with this one. Spirals and curls of text evanesced into the unmistakable forms of faces and bodies, the kind you saw in New York City every day, ranging from destitute addicts to impenetrable-looking Madison Avenue professionals. The amount of detail and expression that Chase had managed to render from letterforms that were well known for their unreadability was astonishing. Unbelievably, the forms themselves were more organic than mechanical, as if he’d captured the very imprints of his subjects’ souls.
“I . . . I . . .” I wanted to tell Chase just how remarkable I thought the piece was, as I stared at it, my mouth agape. But when I looked at him, at the way he was studying me for a reaction, my heart hardened. I definitely didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d gone above and beyond once again. Not after what he had just done to me. Not after the humiliation of seeing Elsie’s simpering, triumphant face. Not after knowing that, even if there had been no sex, she had spent the night in his bed—touching him, holding him. I shook my head, as if to shake the picture of them together out of my memory.
“Okay, since it’s finished, let’s talk logistics. How soon can you get this to the sculpture garden? There’s still the question of installation to consider, especially since we need to make sure it blends seamlessly with the work of the other three artists.”
He made a strangled sound of exasperation. “Jesus Christ, Annie! Does it always have to be all business with you?”
“Get over yourself, Chase. Of course it has to be all business between us now!” I said. “So let’s hammer out the details. If you need help transporting it, I’m going to have to fill out some kind of work order—”
“I’m not done with it yet,” he interrupted me.
I raised an eyebrow. “It looks pretty finished to me.”
He laughed, but the sound of it was foreboding enough to give me goose bumps. “Yeah, well, you haven’t seen what I’m gonna do next.”
“Chase, no!” Before I could lunge toward him, he had taken one of the huge buckets of paint flanking the canvas and proceeded to splash it all over the place.
I could feel my knees give way and drop to the cold concrete.
“How’s this for graffiti? You feeling it yet, Annie? It’s fucking experiential art!” he screamed as he took bucket after bucket, heaving them violently so that layers of gooey color cascaded over his monumental canvas.
I forced myself off the ground. The once-flawless work was bursting with puddles of paint, which bubbled like open sores across the majestic surface. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me away.
“What the hell, Chase? Why are you doing this?”
“People think graffiti’s all about defacement, but the way I see it, defacing your own work is kind of like performance art. By the way, I give you permission to put this on YouTube if you want!” He continued to throw senseless globules of paint on the mural. The way he had created the piece on Drake and Spofford was ominously similar to the way he was destroying this one. He was like a man possessed, a hurricane of frenetic energy; his muscles were tensed, and he was utterly consumed by what he was doing.
After what felt like hours, he was finally done. His shoulders were shaking, and he kicked a few of the empty buckets near him. “Happy fucking holidays,” he said sardonically.
I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. For several long moments, I was silent, in a state of shock. And then I began to scream like a crazy woman. I was devastated as I stood before what had been one of the most incredible works of art I’d seen in my life. The sight of it was distressing. The beautiful, intricate mural had been reduced to a barely recognizable mess of botched paint strokes and angry swipes and scratches. Order had given way to chaos.
“I hate you!” I moaned, grabbing both sides of my head until I could almost feel myself ripping my hair out. “How . . . could you?” I screamed. I could feel tears and snot running down my face, but I didn’t care. This was what Chase had reduced me to—an undignified, desperate person. When I thought of all the work he’d put into it, as well as the fact that it had all deteriorated to nothing in a few minutes of rage and pandemonium, I felt nauseous.
I could feel myself shaking and heaving in the cold autumn air. I had been trying to keep it together for so long, but now that I’d seen Chase with Elsie, and now that I knew the last few weeks of bliss I’d spent mooning after Chase had come to nothing, I felt all the fight in me evaporate. I could feel my body slumping to the ground, my arms hugging my chest in one final gesture of helplessness and capitulation. I had no idea what I was going to do, where I was going to go, and for the time being, I didn’t care. I just wanted to disappear. I just wanted to go back to the time before I’d met Chase and found myself embroiled in all this disarray.
I suddenly felt arms around me. Chase was embracing me tightly, pulling me off the ground like I was a sack of potatoes, and holding me close. He kissed my hair and murmured words I couldn’t quite make out. I could barely believe this was happening. One minute he was on a destructive rampage, and the next he was . . . comforting me?
I pulled away, even though his touch had been like sweet torture. “Don’t you touch me,” I said in a low and icy tone. “After what you just did, you don’t have the right.”
He was calm, but his shoulders were slumped in what I could only imagine was a mixture of shame and acquiescence. “I know, Annie, but I didn’t destroy the mural to hurt you. I’ve just been trying to show you all this stuff is temporary, it’s meaningless compared with the important stuff. What’s important is that I love you, and that’s so much bigger than something it took me a day to create.”
I felt myself convulsing in a fit of angry laughter. “Love? I can’t believe you, Chase. If you loved me, you wouldn’t have Elsie Donegan around. If you loved me, you wouldn’t have made me watch you wreck the piece you promised would be ready in a week’s time.”
He raked his hand through his hair, and his beautiful green eyes were forlorn and desolate. “Annie, I don’t give a damn about Elsie. I don’t care about her. She’s the one who came to me.”
“You are one sick puppy, you know that?” I sniffled. “The one person at your apartment when I show up just happens to be my mortal enemy?”
“Look, I promise I didn’t fuck her. I was just . . . using her to try to get over you. I haven’t been with another girl since you and me, Annie. Shit, I’ve barely been able to look at anyone else—I was so messed up over how you left things between us. I thought hooking up with Elsie would get me on the right track, cheer me up or something . . . but I was wrong. And I also didn’t know what her deal was,” he insisted. “It’s clear now,
and I’m really fucking sorry. But what was I supposed to do? You’re the one who made a point of choosing Mr. Moneybags over me. You’re the one who walked out on me!”
I stared at him coldly. “I was just trying to do what was right,” I said quietly. “But all of that is beside the point. It doesn’t fix the problem we have on our hands right now.”
Chase closed his eyes tight, as if he was debating whether or not to tell me something. “Annie, there’s something I want to explain to you about Quentin Pierce, about why I said I’d do the show to begin with.”
I was almost afraid of what I expected to tumble out of Chase’s mouth. I knew there was some hidden, ulterior motive, but Chase had always been so vague and avoidant when I’d pressed for further details that I’d stopped prying. “Go on,” I said, crossing my arms.
Chase’s face was stony as he spoke. “About five years ago, Quentin had started to make a name for himself, but he didn’t have widespread recognition yet. At that time, he was still hanging out on the streets and doing live demonstrations at places like Tuff City Tattoos or non–permission walls in cruddy parts of the city. I was in the foster-care system at the time, but I was already starting to get some experience on the scene. People liked my stuff—it was clean, original, outrageous, and distinct. Quentin noticed, too.”
Chase breathed the cold night air deeply. “Quentin was just starting to work in digital art, but he was a jack-of-all-trades. His graffiti was tight—really raw and smart. He was this guy who walked his talk. He was the one who introduced me to the works of people like Keith Haring and Banksy. Like me, Quentin came up right on these streets, and he was the one who taught me about the ugliness of the art world—the way it commodifies its most talented people, chews ’em up and spits ’em out when it’s done extorting all the goods. He made me realize there was something truer, something freer—right out here, on the streets.” Chase opened his arms, indicating the city around him.
“So . . . what happened to change your opinion of him?”
“Well, at some point, his true colors came shining through,” Chase said. “The fairy tale ended. I’d been running some of my newer designs by Quentin—not just the tagging, but the other things I was beginning to do. I had these visions. . . . I was starting to do things that were more stylized, bigger, multidimensional—stuff that really popped out from the wall and sent people scurrying down rabbit holes. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, and I was a little overwhelmed. I hadn’t had any real training, so I trusted Quentin when he took me under his wing, when he started to give me a more ‘classical’ education on stuff like color theory, perspective, representation, working properly from references, stuff like that.
“Long story short, I walked by some big gallery one day, some place on Seventy-Eighth Street where they get people like Damien Hirst to come in and decorate the walls.” He paused, like he was remembering something particularly painful. “And there were my latest pieces, stuff I’d been leaving on walls around the city—but they were paintings. Paintings! I was beside myself. I didn’t know what was happening. So I went inside and asked how that stuff had ended up there. And the gallery curator just looked at me like I was some gutter punk and said, ‘These are the works of Quentin Pierce, one of the most prominent artists creating work in New York City today.’ Those were his exact words. I remember them to this very day.” Chase smiled wanly. “That sent me into a fit, of course. So the guy asked me to leave, even got some security up in there. The irony of it was just . . . laughable.”
“Did you try to tell them who you were?”
He shrugged. “Who the fuck was I, exactly? I was nobody. I was a hoodlum, a street kid—and beyond that, I was two weeks away from dropping out of school. There was nobody in the world who could have vouched for my ability—nobody but Quentin, that is. So I went to talk to him, wanting to figure out what the fuck was going on. Like, was this some kind of giant prank or something? But he acted like I was delusional, like I was overreacting. I kept screaming at him, telling him, ‘Those were my fucking pieces, man!’ And he just blew me off, denied he’d done anything wrong. He didn’t even come close to admitting what he’d done, just insisted that plagiarism is a garden-variety artistic technique, and besides, he was the one who’d taught me all those tricks. So, in essence, he thought of me as an apprentice. The guy had fucking convinced himself that I was the one pilfering his ideas. The best I got from him was ‘You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet, man.’ Fuck!” Chase balled his fists. “Then this guy, who’d always lectured me about why artists must never sell out if we want to save the world, went on to fucking Hollywood. Cry me a fucking river, right?” He looked at me sardonically.
I touched his arm softly. “I’m so sorry, Chase. Did you ever think of exposing him, maybe even showing people the pieces you’d done that were identical to what he’d stolen?”
He shook his head. “Goldilocks, I’ve always told you that real art never sticks around long enough for someone to add it to Wikipedia. By the time Quentin landed that gallery show, my pieces were long gone. Besides, I was a nobody and he was already gaining notoriety. And beyond that, the golden rule in this world is that you never snitch.” He nodded resolutely. “Fame isn’t the point, Annie. I was never resentful of Quentin for going down that path. That was his choice. But I’d looked up to him, I’d viewed him as a mentor and older brother. I’d let him into my secrets, my insecurities . . . I’d trusted him.”
I thought about Quentin’s Masterpiece Hoax, his most famous project. “So he didn’t start with Vincent van Gogh,” I said dourly. “He started with Chase Adams.”
Chase nodded. “And that’s what people call brilliance.” He laughed. “So, as you can see, me and Quentin Pierce are not simpatico.”
There was one thing I didn’t understand. “Why did you agree to do my project, Chase?” I said softly.
He shifted uncomfortably. “I admit it was for selfish reasons, Annie. I thought, Now, finally, I have this dickhead where I’ve always wanted him. I may not be able to convince people that Quentin is a fucking monster, but at the very least, I can make him look stupid. Really stupid. And from where I’m standing now, that kind of statement actually has a modicum of clout.”
“So, let me get this straight. You decided to fuck me over in the process of fucking Quentin over?”
He shook his head. “I might’ve started out on that foot, but I don’t care about that anymore. I care about you—and I know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t care about me, Annie.”
Something in me broke at that point. I was overwhelmed by emotion over Chase’s confession. It suddenly all began to make so much sense: Chase’s self-destructive and darker tendencies, his penchant for railing against the powers that be, and his smoldering hatred of gallery artists were all consequences of the unfortunate turn of events with Quentin. I had been so blind to all of it, in my eagerness to impress Quentin and graduate to the next level of my career.
I held my arms out to Chase. Wordlessly, he enveloped me in his embrace. I couldn’t help but cling to him, wanting to take in his scent and taste and very essence. “Make love to me,” I whispered.
“Here?” he said, his fingers digging past my sweater and into my thin cotton T-shirt.
“Yes,” I thundered, totally unconcerned about who might stumble upon us at that moment.
He didn’t hesitate. He tore off my clothes in that heedless, frantic way that sent my pulse racing and made my knees feel like mush. The rough surface of the rooftop dug into my ribs as he pushed me down onto the ground. In moments, our clothes were off. I needed to feel him, and I needed to feel him now. This time around, everything was drawn out to an excruciating crescendo. As I guided him into me, our bodies felt like primal drums, reverberating with the secret meters and downbeats of the night. Unlike the other times, tonight felt slow, constant and gentle in its heat, more like the dancing pulse of a candle flame than a blowtorch that threatened to destroy everything around us wi
th its impetuous passion.
The entire time, his deep-green eyes steadily held my gaze, and there were moments when the power of it made me wonder if he was me and I was him—the sensations that played upon me seemed to be less “mine” than “ours.” They didn’t belong to me, only to the merged perfection of our bodies. He flooded my face, my neck, my breasts, with tender kisses. Tears, saliva, our bodies—all of it mingled together as he whispered sweet words to me. “Annie . . . my angel . . . my beautiful angel.” There was nothing in any known language that I could utter to tell him what he meant to me, or what was happening to us. “Lovemaking” seemed too sentimental and mundane a term for it. I don’t know how long we were there, clinging to each other, lost in the wild and wordless sea of each other’s eyes, but when we came, we came together. It was like an expulsion of lava. The heat was intense, cauterizing, healing.
We lay there, huddled together, shivering, right in the middle of what had been Chase’s pièce de résistance. And despite the fact that everything was, at least on the surface, in a state of turmoil, I knew on some level this was exactly where I needed to be.
“Annie,” Chase finally said. “About Elsie . . .”
“Shut up, Chase,” I ordered.
That made Chase chuckle.
“I don’t want us to fight ever again,” I said.
“The sparks that fly between us have to do with the fighting—at least partially, I think.”
I laughed despite myself. “You’re crazy, Chase.”
“Just the way you like me.”
I sighed. “So, now that you destroyed the piece you were going to have in the show, does that mean you aren’t going to do it at all?”
He grinned. “That wasn’t my piece for the show, babe. That was my gift to you.”
I propped myself up on an elbow and looked at him. “Some gift!”
He looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, I know I need anger management or some shit like that. But the truth is, I could make you a hundred thousand murals and they wouldn’t be able to sum up the way I feel for you. I mean it, Annie. I wasn’t just talking out of my ass when I said I loved you.”
So Damn Beautiful (A New Adult Romance) Page 25