Just then, Chase turned to me and gave me a kiss that made me light up from my toes to my ears. When he pulled back, he nodded over his shoulder, indicating we should move back in. Once we did, he wrapped his hand around the back of my neck, drawing me toward him, putting his hungry mouth to mine, and I could feel his fingers fumbling with the buttons on my jeans, but I stopped him midway.
“Right here, Chase? But when’s the train gonna stop?”
He gave me a smoldering look. “I have no fucking idea.” Somehow, in the midst of the noise of the clamoring freight train, the icy wind that was creeping into every nook and cranny of our car, and the bumpiness of the ride, we managed to unpeel our clothes. The animalistic passion of our lovemaking made me wonder if we would accidentally hurtle ourselves off the train, but it was hard to care too much. If I died that night, in Chase’s arms, I would die a happy woman. For weeks, I had been expecting his effect to wear off on me, but as his tongue and mouth circled around my most sensitive spots, and as I filled myself voraciously with his taste and heat, something in me knew that Chase was a drug I’d never grow tired of.
The force of my first orgasm made me dig my teeth into Chase’s shoulder and run my fingernails up from his ass to his back. He howled in ecstasy and continued to pump his hips into mine, bending down to kiss my breasts. His motion was overwhelmingly pleasurable, and I could feel tiny, white-hot fireworks exploding from my belly down to my thighs as I continued to come. Chase’s body was like a spark plug I was drawing vital energy from. The whirl of lit-up walls outside, paired with the urgency of our fucking, made me feel like there were multiple rainbows inside and outside my body, arcing and intersecting. Chase groaned as he came. We lay there together, gasping and scarcely able to speak.
Finally, he managed to get out a few words. “I don’t know how we do it, Goldilocks—I’m gonna have a heart attack one of these days.”
I laughed. “You and me both!”
We curled up into each other for a while, but it was way too cold to lie there naked in the afterglow of our sex.
As I hooked my bra, Chase studied me intently.
“What?” I asked.
He smiled. “Nothing. You’re just so gorgeous. I can’t believe I got so lucky.”
“Chase, I’ve seen your past girlfriends. They were all knockouts.”
“Yeah, they were hot. But I’ve never seen anything quite as beautiful as you.” He crept up beside me and kissed my neck.
I cupped his beautiful face in my hands and looked into those green eyes—eyes that had seemed so distant and impervious only weeks ago. I was in a state of incredulity every time I thought of how things had developed between us—and of how they had changed me.
“You know, we could just do this Saturday night: ride the trains, fuck ourselves into sweaty absolution . . . ,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“All I’m saying is that if you want to back out of the show, I’ll understand.”
He shook his head. “No way. I put too much work into this to back out of it.”
He’d continued to be secretive about his final work for the show, but I’d chalked it up to artistic idiosyncrasy. I was looking forward to seeing it, but a part of me was also afraid, especially considering that Chase and Quentin were going to be in the same room after years of not having seen each other.
He traced my mouth tenderly with his fingertips. “This meant the world to you, Annie. You put a lot of work into it, too. Do you really want to give Elsie and all those other art-school flunkies the satisfaction of flaking out at the eleventh hour?”
I shook my head and pulled my turtleneck over my head. “This isn’t about Elsie or anyone else.”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s just . . . I know art is always going to be my first love. I want to breathe it, I want to live it . . . I just don’t know if the old way works,” I said, hugging my knees into my chest. “I sometimes wonder if I put myself in a box at an early age by thinking this was what I wanted to do. I didn’t have the foggiest idea of how the gallery world even worked, but I just kept moving forward anyway, like if I stopped, it would mean I was weak or something.” I looked at Chase. “Sometimes I think art became my way of overcoming the fact that my dad was a noncommittal shithead who walked out on my mom and me.”
Chase caressed my hair. “I don’t follow.”
“He couldn’t commit to us, and I wasn’t going to end up like him. I wasn’t gonna be a loser whose short-term desires meant more to me than the bigger picture. I always had to have a bigger picture.” I shook my head. “But I wonder if my bigger picture kept me from seeing what was right in front of me. I was always so fixated on principles, on ideas, that I barely noticed what was real.” I gestured at the whirring trail of murals outside. “I ignored this stuff for years because I thought it was trash, but I was so damn wrong! So what else have I been wrong about? What if I made my world so narrow that I didn’t even get to dream about the other possibilities?”
Chase gently snickered. “If that’s the case, my world’s been pretty narrow, too. All I have is graffiti, and I’ve never even been outside New York.”
I shook my head. “But you’re talented, Chase. You have something that’s all yours, that nobody can take away. Me, on the other hand? I’ve been so busy trying to be good that I’ve never really gotten a chance to follow my heart.”
“What about now?” he said softly.
I smiled. “This is the first time I’ve ever done anything so foolhardy—and so right,” I responded.
He brushed my lips softly with his. “Well, if you’re looking for a career change, maybe I need to teach you how to write,” he said playfully. “You’ll be throwing up your own tags in no time!”
I laughed. “I’m fine with the role of awestruck spectator for a little while,” I said. “Besides, I’m definitely not artistically talented. Believe me, I’ve tried, but I never really got past stick figures.”
He shrugged. “Stick figures can be interesting.”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand, Chase. You probably emerged from the womb the way you are, but me? I’ve always struggled with that. I found solace in schoolwork, maybe because I was never all that good or talented at anything in particular.”
He made a sound of derision. “That’s bullshit, Goldilocks, and you know it! There’s no way I would’ve agreed to working with just any NYU chick.” He looked at me with a mixture of admiration and lust. “It takes bona fide talent to get Chase Adams to do anything not already on his to-do list.”
I tugged his hair teasingly. “I got you to do something? Then maybe I should become a con artist. Or a Mafiosa.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You make backdoor deals while I tag up the city. We’ll be an unbeatable team, Goldilocks.”
I drew him closer. “You bet your sweet ass.”
“Also, it’s never too late to change your mind about Saturday. It’s your call.”
I considered it. What was worse: showing up to the exhibit without Chase’s piece or letting him reveal what was sure to be a showstopper, and not necessarily in a good way? All the same, I knew how important it was for Chase to be able to confront Quentin—if not directly, then with a conversation piece guaranteed to make people question Quentin’s integrity. I wholeheartedly supported Chase in this, and I knew I’d be a hypocrite either to censor his unfettered expression or to skulk out of my curatorship to avoid responsibility. For better or worse, Chase and I were in this together.
“It’s going to be perfect, Chase,” I said, looking deeply into his eyes. “With you, it always is.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The night of the art opening finally rolled around. I’d withstood several sleepless nights in a row, either because of Chase or because I was too nervous to do anything more than toss and turn. Now that the big event was finally upon us, I found myself in a flurry of busywork.
“Annie, make sure the bartenders
don’t run out of sparkling wine!” Claudia chirruped from across the sculpture garden. She was in the midst of issuing a continuous volley of orders and critiques. I was surprised she hadn’t equipped the committee with walkie-talkies.
Although things were chaotic, all of it seemed poised for success. A staff of waiters walked around with trays of long-stemmed champagne glasses and delicate hors d’oeuvres, and a constant stream of visitors (by invitation only) flowed into the garden. Hayden’s artist, whose gorgeous fiber-optic monument was holding down the fort on the south end of the garden, had equipped the entire place with softly glowing LED lights, which made it feel like we were in some kind of enchanted forest with fairies whirring around us in a rush of luminosity.
Todd Butcher had given Elsie a signature piece: an intricate teepee dwelling covered with beautiful designs and choppy projected video of turn-of-the-century New York, interspersed with news coverage and footage of iconic locations in the city. Elsie had told us that Todd’s video loops comprised about 150 hours of footage, and that the number of combinations, which came on at five-minute intervals, was infinite.
Shawn’s artist had contributed pieces that felt a little less high-concept but were definitely the most engaging: whimsical robot people who periodically moved around the space, offering ambient soundscapes garnered from the conversation that was present at any given time. I was having fun singing snippets of pop songs and listening to how the robots interpreted them, but we still had a lot of work to do, so I forced myself to focus.
Although I was feeling somewhat nervous about the course of the evening, I was relieved that Chase had installed his artwork a couple hours before the rest of us had come onto the scene. He’d texted me to let me know that it shouldn’t be unveiled until he got there. Much to my surprise, the piece, which was covered by a heavy tarp and playfully surrounded by stanchions and yellow tape (the kind you’d find at a crime scene), had been placed smack in the center of the garden. I didn’t know how long he’d been at work installing it, but I was glad he’d made it past the security guards, who’d been manning the sculpture garden pretty staunchly for the last week or so.
The speechmaking portion of the show was going to start in fifteen minutes, and my heart was racing as I looked around for any signs of Chase. People were beginning to cluster around the stanchions and yellow tape, wondering aloud what would be revealed.
Chase, where are you? I asked silently, glancing at my phone for any new texts.
That was when Claudia, dressed in a slinky black dress, walked up to me. She was with an unassuming-looking guy, whose simple mustache and horn-rimmed glasses gave him a professorial demeanor. “Annie!” she boomed happily. “Before it gets too crazy around here, I wanted to introduce you to Quentin!”
I did a double take. This was the famous Quentin Pierce? I had been expecting her to tell me he was the head of the art department or something, given his modest and somewhat subdued persona. Then again, Quentin Pierce’s persona itself was a performance that was constantly in flux.
“Hi,” I said, not knowing exactly how I should face the guy who’d betrayed my boyfriend so profoundly.
Quentin nodded stiffly and smiled at me, but his eyes darted back and forth and his attention was clearly occupied by other things.
Oh, I don’t warrant any attention? There must be celebrities in our midst tonight, I told myself wryly.
“I was the committee member who commissioned Chase Adams,” I said in a clipped tone, attempting to draw his attention back to me.
It worked. Quentin’s eyes lit up with surprise, and his focus zeroed in completely on me.
“Chase and I go way back—it’ll be nice to see what he’s been up to in the last few years. I’ve been hearing a lot about him lately. At the very least, it seems like he still has a good sense of humor.”
My blood was boiling. He sounded sincere enough, but I could sense a smug superiority below the surface of his words.
Before I could respond, Claudia whisked him away to a cadre of well-dressed men and women. And that was when Chase came into the garden. My eyes gravitated toward him instantly, and our gazes met. He was wearing a black dress shirt, black pants, black shoes, and a black blazer. His face was like a slab of perfectly chiseled marble, and, as usual, his intense green eyes made my stomach do backflips. He was effortlessly suave and beautiful, and more than a few people’s heads turned to admire him as he walked over to me. Amazingly, Quentin didn’t notice.
Chase and I gave each other a wordless nod, and everything that happened after that felt like slow motion. Without announcement, he went over to his piece, took the stanchions away, cut the yellow tape, and pulled the tarp off in one motion.
I gasped at what I saw. He hadn’t told me what the final project was going to be, so while I had been expecting to have my breath taken away, the spectacle facing me wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind.
It wasn’t a mural. It was an elaborate installation, complete with a urinal, toilet stall, and trompe l’oeil mirror. It was beautiful and colorful, crude and creepy, all at once. Every surface was sprayed with paint and covered in angry scrawls of graffiti that resembled just about any public restroom you would likely see in New York City. The strange and vivid scene was almost lifelike, from the floating cesspool of yellow liquid in the urinal to the damp-looking roll of toilet paper streaming onto the floor, alongside fake syringes glued to the mottled tile. The more elaborate graffiti images, which were recognizably beautiful, were flanked by ugly caricatures of Quentin Pierce, alongside source images culled from popular magazines.
The installation had the appearance of being both dramatically weathered and detailed, as if we were witnessing a space that had been home to years and years of choleric statement-making. Resolute platitudes like “Dream big” and “Don’t let the bastards get you down” bled in gobs of paint down the surface of the mirror and sink, right next to barefaced put-downs like “Quentin Pierce is a hack” in permanent marker. It was like Chase had teleported one of the portable bathrooms of New York City into the sculpture garden—and it was simultaneously shocking, gruesome, and transcendent.
People quickly gathered in large numbers to ooh and aah over the piece. Some were visibly disgusted, but most of them were transfixed. “It’s weirdly stunning and so intimate,” one woman commented. “It’s amazing they’d get something so incongruous to be installed in a place like this, but I love it.”
A man in a polka-dot suit agreed. “What an incredible statement, especially when you think of the historical importance of public restrooms in our culture as spaces of vital creative exchange and forbidden communications between strangers of different classes and social persuasions!”
I heard a bunch of other enthusiastic endorsements of Chase’s work. “A biting critique of corporate culture . . .” “The insults on the wall show us how the seeds of anarchist uprisings get planted—this is such a great example of resistance . . .” “Funny, self-reflexive, and subversive . . .”
I was so dumbfounded that I didn’t know if I could be quite so articulate about what I felt and thought. On the one hand, this seemed to be a giant “fuck you” to the powers that be, including Quentin and his wealthy celebrity friends, but on the other hand, it was way too thought-provoking (and conversation-rousing) to have been made purely for shock value.
Several media folks came up to Chase and began snapping photos of him alongside the piece. As interviewers mobbed him, I could hear him say, “It wasn’t all me, actually. The amazing Annie Green commissioned me for the piece.” He looked over at me, and I nodded. I’d already given him the go-ahead to mention me, but I felt a little odd taking credit for Chase’s work.
More people began to cluster around me and ask me what I thought about Chase’s “incredible act of protest,” but before I could get into it, Claudia yanked me over to an aghast-looking Quentin.
“What the fuck is this?” His geniality from just a few minutes before had disappeared complet
ely, and his face was gnarled into an ugly expression. But after all I’d been through, I wasn’t intimidated.
“It’s the piece I commissioned,” I said coolly.
“Annie, this is totally out of line!” Claudia hissed, looking apprehensively at Quentin. “This is not what we asked for!”
Quentin scowled at me. “If this is your idea of a joke, you are fucking finished in this city. You can kiss any job within a hundred miles of the gallery world good-bye.”
I could feel my heart sink a little bit, but then I heard Chase’s familiar voice.
“Hello, old friend.” I turned around and there he was, a triumphant little smile on his beautiful face.
Quentin narrowed his eyes and got right up in Chase’s face. “You ungrateful little turd,” he said in a low voice, poking at Chase’s chest with his finger. “I took a chance on you, and this is how you repay me?”
“Ungrateful?” Chase scoffed. “This, coming from the guy who’s built his entire career on ripping off artists—starting with a fifteen-year-old gutter punk? I’m curious as to whether you ever stopped to bow before the altar of all the people you stole from, including me.”
The small enclave of curious bystanders had increased exponentially in the last few minutes.
“You’re still a gutter punk,” Quentin said. “I should’ve known you were a lost cause from the moment I set eyes on you. I’m calling security to boot you the hell out of here.”
“He’s not going anywhere!” I insisted.
Claudia gave me a wide-eyed look that denoted both alarm and anger. “Annie, I’m warning you . . .”
“Make sure they’re both gone by the time I get back, or you’re out of a fucking job,” Quentin said to Claudia before stalking off.
“Annie, I don’t know what you’re playing at here, but this is serious,” Claudia remonstrated, grabbing my arm.
I pulled away from her grasp. “This was my commission, fair and square, and it stays—or else I take it to the trustees themselves,” I said firmly. She stared at me, gave a shriek of frustration, and ran off—presumably to get the security guards.
So Damn Beautiful (A New Adult Romance) Page 29