by Cecilia Gray
He grins at my response and then we leap over the barrier. The rope pulls taut after a foot and we face the building, our feet swinging side to side a few inches. I hit the spray and lay out a thick layer of paint as Sebastien walks us slowly to the right to fully cover the stencil.
I ignore the cries from below and hope Vivi is keeping the guard sufficiently distracted. Once I’m done, Sebastien grabs his pocketknife and cuts off the lines of the stencil banner. It ruffles to the ground and crumples on the sidewalk.
Without warning, he releases our rope.
That sense of freefall, like at the top of the rollercoaster, bottoms out my stomach. In panic, I grab the rope. The cord burns my palms with friction. We drop maybe three feet, the ground rushing up, before the rappel gear snaps tight and we go careening toward the wall. We swing our feet out to push against the stone. Then continue our drop.
I feel a little ashamed at the panic—like I should have been better prepared for field work. Next time, I will be.
The crowd on the sidewalk backs away. We’re on fire, practically radioactive.
“You okay?” he asks, out of breath.
I glance down at my mangled palms. My knees are shaking, but more from exhilaration than fear.
“Hey.” He lightly grips my chin and forces me to look up at him. “You okay?”
“Yes.” I smile. “I’m having good timing.”
He grins back and hand trails down the column of my throat. He pulls his hand back a moment. The switchblade makes another appearance to slice through our rappel rope. I shimmy out of my harness.
His eyes are like the calm in a storm but my head is still in freefall, that drop in the pit of my stomach like I’m going over the edge of a coaster.
The security guard and Vivi come running out of the building.
She eyes us and says, “Stop! Vandals!” She’s barely holding in her laughter but she’s obviously in the clear—the security guard isn’t concerned with her.
I glance up at the building. The entire front face of Cochon headquarters has become our work of art and the sidewalk has taken notice. People even spill out of neighboring buildings to look. I allow myself a second to revel, then I take off.
Sebastien and I sprint at the same speed. He maneuvers through the crowd like air currents. He turns back and when he sees me, he chuckles and picks up speed. I chase after.
As far as rushes go—the rush of catching a criminal, the rush of covert work, the rush of making a physical mark—this is the best yet.
~~~~~
Café de la Paix, Brussels, Belgium
Sebastien tunes the radio station on his mini-player as we wait for Vivi to join us. “Nothing yet.” He switches stations.
Vivi finally walks into the café and sits down next to me, her hand up in a high five. I slap it with my elbow and show her my rope-eaten palms, which sting like nettles.
“Gnarly,” she says. A grin plasters her face and she kicks her feet fast like she can’t contain her energy. “That was awesome! We were awesome.”
Even sitting I feel a ball of energy in the pit of my stomach that balloons out. Our eyes meet and it isn’t about the mission or an objective being handed down from someone else. It’s about me and her and this thing we’ve created.
“Pay attention, ici, écoutez,” Sebastien says, upping the volume on the news at the top of the hour.
She pulls away, but not before flashing another smile.
I mentally translate the broadcast: “Gros Porc strikes again. Graffiti was painted on the Cochon office building depicting the famous Leonardo da Vinci Last Supper scene with fat piglets. The act of vandalism—”
“Vandalism?” Vivi snorts.
The waitress comes over to ask for our order.
“Frites, s’il vous plait,” I say.
“They fry them in duck fat here,” Vivi says disapprovingly.
Weapon—a fork to my eye. “Switch me to a salad,” I sigh.
She gives me a thumbs-up and orders the same. Sebastien barely looks up as he orders a glass of ice, still staring at the radio as if he were reading it instead of listening.
“They called us animal rights activists, at least,” Vivi says.
“What are they talking about now?” I ask as the radio host brings on a guest who speaks too quickly for me to grasp.
“The security guard is giving his statement about how he was distracted by helping a poor, innocent lost girl,” Sebastien says.
Vivi bats her eyelashes. “You know I never did use the bathroom and I actually really have to go. Back in a sec.”
Once she’s gone, Sebastien turns up the volume. He laughs.
“What?” I ask.
“The security guard is admitting he likes the drawing. It made me him feel..how do you say? Young again?”
I rub at my cheeks and smile at my knees. Not the reaction Vivi probably wanted but evocative all the same
Sebastien turns off the radio and leans across the table with sudden intensity. I can’t keep staring at my knees or the table or the radio or other things. I have to look at him. “I have something to show you,” he says.
“What?”
“It’s a secret.”
Did he say a secret? To me? “What is it?”
“A secret.”
“What kind of secret?”
“The kind you keep secret.”
Crud. This guy is unbreakable! He’s Goosed a few times but it’s like his brain is so sharp, so focused, it’s always in the moment instead of wandering away. “Show me, then.”
“Tomorrow.”
The waitress drops off our orders. Sebastien grabs a handful of ice from his glass, wraps it in a napkin, and places it in my palms. The burn on my palms eases as I grip the ice which melts, sending rivulets of water chasing down my bare wrist.
X
Stella Artois Restaurant and Bar, Brussels, Belgium
Sebastien dries glasses behind the bar. A man whose eyes are crinkled at the corners closes out the register next to him. He beckons for me with cupped fingers as I step inside. “Viens ici.”
I walk over as requested, keeping cool.
“Je veux rencontrer la jeune fille qu’interesse mon neveu.”
Hmmm, wants to meet the girl who’s caught his nephew’s interest. He’s got this look about him—kind of like an old-school movie star you’d see in a black and white.
Sebastien whips a white hand towel off his shoulder and tosses it into a wash bucket, nailing his uncle with a wary glare. “Ne la taquinez pas.”
Not sure what that means—too slangy—but I want to keep things light, so I offer my hand to his uncle.
He waves away my outstretched hand. “This isn’t how we say allô in Belgium.” He leans over for cheek kisses that brush the air above my skin and come with exaggerated sound effects. “Mwah. Mwah. Mwah. I’m Benard.”
“My uncle,” Sebastien supplies. “He owns the bar.” His smile lights up as it settles on me. On muscled forearms, he heaves himself up and over the counter to land in front of me. The tips of his fingers brush my earlobe as his lips drift from left to right cheek.
“Attends,” Benard sets up three shot glasses and fills them with honey liquid from a spouted bottle. “A quick drink to your health. Salut.”
Sebastien stifles a sigh, lifts his glass with a quick “Salut,” and downs his shot, then slams the glass down on the counter. I grip the shot glass. “Salut!” After taking a breath, I swallow. It burns. I scrunch my eyes shut and my mouth puckers.
I cough as a sense of ease sets in.
“Elle est jeune et jolie,” Benard says before catching himself.
“Benard,” Sebastien chastises his uncle as my cheeks burn at his compliment.
“My apologies,” Benard says with a rueful look. “But it is all true.”
“Thank you, sir.” What a relief when a Goose is a compliment.
Sebastien grabs a backpack from the counter and swings it over his shoulder.
“Don’t forge
t this.” Benard tosses Sebastien a helmet, which he catches with his right hand.
My face casts a worried reflection in the helmet’s metallic black surface. “What’s that for?”
“My motorcycle.”
~~~~~
Rue de Sables, Brussels, Belgium
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
With my left cheek pressed to Sebastien’s leather jacket, the rushing wind flinging my hair about the nape of my neck, Sebastien’s own curls tickling my forehead, and the sensation of speed all around me, my mind has room for little else, not even the job. There’s nothing to hold onto except him.
The engine rumbles between my legs as he accelerates to duck between two cars. I squeeze my hands tighter around his waist. Oh shiiiiiiit.
We make it, popping out from between the cars to ease ahead. The bike tilts, so I follow the lead of his body, letting mine lean to the right with him. The bike rights itself and sputters as it slows and comes to a stop in front of a two-story white complex with floor-to-ceiling windows.
He sets one foot down to prop the kickstand and lean the bike on its side. Without the roar of the bike or the rushing wind in my ears, I can hear my heartbeat.
He swings his leg over the bike, then holds out his hand. I grab it to steady myself, my limbs weak from exhilaration, and stumble off the bike.
“Not so bad?” he asks as I pull off the helmet. He rests it on his bike and clips it to the back, then grabs the backpack stored in the seat.
“So…where are we?”
“You’re impatient.” He places a warm hand on my back above my waist and steers me to the entrance for Centre Belge de la Bande dessinée.
We walk into an open marble foyer. A crowd of well dressed, artsy types in black mill along the walls admiring framed works of art. The pictures are clustered in threes and fours, running the length of the open room. A silver banner stretches from one end of the foyer to the other: Exposition Comique de Franco-Belge.
A Comic Museum.
No exits necessary.
We dawdle around the exhibit, resting in front of the clusters of framed works by Rosinski and Morris. The schematic style of the famous Tintin comics, with its simple renderings, contrasts with Francois Schuiten’s etchings from Les Cités Obscures, which I’ve never seen before.
The steampunk style golden city catches my eye, but it’s the hero I glom onto. A man who discovers the world around him is nothing more substantial than wall panels giving the illusion of a real world, a real life.
“You like this one,” he states as I linger in front of the Schuiten segment.
“It’s hard to know.” My mouth struggles to form the words. “I don’t know if I like it, or if I can’t look away from it.”
“I like the cartoonish ones better. Like Asterix.”
“Hey, Sebastien?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m having good timing.”
He pulls me toward a small door in the back.
The open door leads to a small room, half the size of my bedroom at Porter’s, with a desks-and-chairs setup resembling St. Anne’s. Open art books, graphite pencils, and blank pads of paper are scattered atop each long desk.
He plops into a seat and flips through one of the books. I join him, reading through step-by-step sketch-along instructions for basic comic conventions. An anatomical comic heroine atop a symmetrical grid. The intersecting circles form a playful puppy dog.
Sebastien grabs a pencil and salutes me with it. “May the most talented artist win.”
I raise an eyebrow. “I thought you didn’t draw.”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
I select a challenging sketch of Asterix and the cartoonish inhabitants of a hamlet. More than fifty characters populate the page. “This one.” I raise my wristwatch to his face. “Twenty minutes?”
He points his pencil in the air like an Olympic flame. “Twenty minutes.”
I focus on the sketch, blocking out all other sounds and senses. With the pencil in my hand, the world that exists is the one I put on the page.
I scale the background buildings against the townsfolk. My wrist flicks as I circle to set the faces for each figure, marking their place in the page. My hand breaks right to fill in the background clouds. The graphite pencil medium is all wrong for comics, but makes quick work of shading to imply the straw roof of a hut. The whisking sound of the pencil against paper acts like meditation music and before I know it, the drawing’s done.
I peek over to his page—but it’s blank. I glance up at him in surprise and he’s watching me.
My body goes still, even my hand, so the soft scratch of pencil back and forth on the page fades away.
“Sneaky,” I say.
“You’re focused and passionate when you draw.”
I melt—it’s like I physically melt—and it makes me feel awful that I need something from him. I hand over the page, keeping it between us like a barrier.
He plucks it from my fingers and grasps my hand, brushing his thumb pad over my knuckles one by one to smear the charcoal across my skin. My flesh feels tight across the bones from his touch, so I have to yank my hand back.
“Is this what you wanted to show me?” I glance up at the domed ceiling and out to the hall to the exhibit. Looking at him makes me want to tell him things, tell him things the way I make people tell me things. Only I can’t tell him things.
“No, there is more.” He swings the backpack off his shoulder, unzips it, and dips out a comic book in a plastic sleeve. He hands it to me. It’s the Wonder Woman: Traitor comic I fell in love with that afternoon I ran into Sebastien at the bookstore.
“Oh my,” I breathe. I don’t even want to slip it out of its cover, it’s so perfect.
“Bonne anniversaire. Vivi told me it was your birthday.”
My throat itches and my eyes feel tight. The plastic crinkles between my fingers. My wrist suddenly feels so naked without my cuff which is still sitting on the dresser in the bedroom at Vivi’s house.
He seems to sense it because he draws a finger over my wrist bone. “Why this one?” he asks. “Out of all the comics that day.”
I flip the comic around and then back to its front. “Isn’t there anything that…you look at it, and it makes you feel like you know who you are?”
He stares at me with a smile playing at his lips. The moment stretches into a full minute and I fight the urge to lean forward. It’s so weird how he’s looking at me, like I’m a piece of art.
“What are you looking at?” I ask.
“Je te souhaite.”
“What?” I’ve never heard the phrase and it’s easy to think he said something dirty or mean, but the way he said it…it doesn’t seem so.
“I am sorry, I…” He shakes his head. “I did not mean to say that.”
“What did you say?”
“You do not know?”
“No.” But I’m damned sure going to find out.
He smiles in relief. “Then please do not ask. It is embarrassing. Ask me something else.”
There’s so much I could ask him—I don’t know anything about him, not really. I know as much about him as he knows about me. Chelsea was never one for dating advise. It was also her mother who was full of ideas about how to meet men.
A man isn’t a gentleman unless he treats you like a lady.
Don’t show all your cards too early.
The best predator acts like prey – let the man chase you.
The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
Sebastien can already cook. None of these were helpful, and he’s looking at me expectantly. I run through the other smidgens of advice I remember her giving Chelsea unsolicited.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
You don’t marry the man, you marry the family.
Don’t trust a man who doesn’t know his mother’s maiden name.
I remember thinking I would never date a guy at all, much less date a g
uy long enough to know something personal about his family. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” I ask, half-joking.
“Aert.”
I don’t know who jumps up first—him or me. But within seconds, his chair screeches back, mine falls to the floor, and we’re both on our feet on opposite sides of the table.
Aert?
Kid Aert?
It’s impossible. Kid Aert is supposed to be in his twenties. Sebastien is seventeen. How could Sebastien be the guy traipsing around the globe?
He’s worldly.
How could Sebastien be the guy performing death-defying stunts to reach impossible locations?
He’s agile.
How could Sebastien be the one creating those works, those evocative pieces? I thought he and Vivi were small time—although they do keep big company.
How could he lie? To me? But had he lied? Had he ever said, “I’m not Kid Aert”? I rack my brain for every conversation, even the ones I had with Smacker and Vivi.
Little pieces snap into place. Snippets of conversation.
Vivi and Sebastien aren’t bosom buddies pulling jobs together. Sebastien is helping out Vivi—as a favor, because they’re friends.
Sebastien is Kid Aert.
I meet his eyes, and he’s studying me, calculating—whether he can trust me, maybe.
He’s Kid Aert.
He’s a legend.
My stomach twists because I should be happy. I have the asset. He’s in my pocket. He likes me. I could get him, witting or unwitting or any way I want him, really. But I don’t want him to be my asset. I want him to be…mine. For once, for one night, I was supposed to have something just for me.
“You know,” he says. “You know me? Anthony said you were asking. So you know. You understand.”
I don’t trust myself to talk or trust what my voice will do. Instead, I pick up my chair, sit down and sketch out his dog tags—one with the letter K and the other with the letter A. He closes his eyes a moment, and then sits back in his seat.
“I knew this would happen,” he says. “When Vivi first invited you in, I knew there was risk.”
I stay quiet. I don’t want anything he says to be a mistake. I want everything to be a gift to me, for now, until I have to ask for what I want. But Sebastien is comfortable with quiet and after a few moments I have to say something.