by Daryl Banner
“But what?” she asks.
I smile. I love how enthusiastic she sounds. This isn’t the Nell who sent me on a walk of shame out of her loft the other night. “Well, I kinda got a text in the gallery before I found you. Turns out, my roommate Dmitri is going to some cast party with Eric and the others, so my place is kinda … unoccupied for the rest of the night. They usually stay over there until well past three or four, so …”
“So you have the place to yourself,” she finishes.
“I have the place to myself,” I affirm.
We make our way down the dimly-lit streets back to campus, where we cut across to make our way to my side of town. This late at night, the University Center looks almost creepy, asleep with its windows darkened and the trees so still, they could be fake props in another badly-directed play.
However, my present company makes the walk anything but scary. We laugh about all of the different exhibits we saw at the gallery, and although I thought most of them were pretty bad-ass, I give in to her cynicism on some of them, laughing at how desperately the works of art tried to shock us or make us cringe or unsettle our souls.
Nell’s done a good enough job unsettling my pants.
When we hit the courtyard of the theater where I’d just been earlier tonight, my phone buzzes. I bring it to my face and find a most annoying message greeting my eyes.
DMITRI
Creepers at the party.
Not fun.
So Eric & I are heading back.
Want us to pick up some Taco Bell for you?
I stop in my tracks. So much for that plan. Fuck.
“What’s up?” prods Nell.
“Damn roommates are heading back already,” I gripe, then tap my thumbs to respond.
ME
Not unless they got
PINK TACOS ON THE MENU.
Thanks a bunch, cockblockers
>_<
“I have an idea.”
I lift my face from the phone. “Yeah?”
Nell smiles devilishly, then wiggles her eyebrows. “Follow me.”
Dmitri buzzes a reply, but it’s lost in my pocket as I stow away my phone and follow Nell back across the courtyard. In a minute, we’re heading around the back of the School of Art, opposite from the wing that houses the art gallery where certain school-sponsored showcases are held. Following a line of long windows that terminate at an inset in the building, we arrive at a door hiding in the shadows.
Nell grips the handle, lifts it up high with all her weight, then jerks it open. The hinges creak in protest. “Kelsey never locks it,” she admits.
“Who’s Kelsey?”
“Who cares?” She holds the door open. “After you.”
I pass through, coming into the back of a dark art studio. With the stray light from the pathway lamps outside washing in through the long windows, I see the creepy silhouettes of easels scattered around the room like a bunch of odd, pointy creatures in the dark.
The door slams shut behind me. I turn around. For a second, I think Nell is about to come up and tackle me to the ground. Instead, she walks past me and says, “Come on, camera boy.”
I grin, then obey.
She leads me to a side door which opens to a short corridor lit only by the eerie green light of an exit sign, which seems to flicker and buzz as we pass under it and into a stairwell. The stairs wind up and up, and I enjoy the view once again as I trail behind Nell like a puppy on the sexy ass of my mate.
We reach a door at the top. She pushes it open and kicks off a shoe, placing it on the ground to keep the door from shutting and locking us out. We’re on the roof of the north wing of the art building now, overlooking the School of Theatre beyond the courtyard and the grassy hills. In the darkness of the night, the ground far below seems to disappear, giving us the illusion of being high atop some brick mountain, nothing but shadows and strange, glowing amber light from all of the lampposts.
“Niiice,” I sing.
She slips past me, kicks off her other shoe, then sits right on the edge of the building, her legs dangling off.
I feel my knees trembling already and I’m still hovering near the door. “Far drop,” I mutter. “Can we chill, uh … Can we chill back here?”
She looks at me over her shoulder. “You scared?”
“Nah.” I swallow. “I mean, y’know. Campus security might spot us. And, like, y’know … if we’re back here … maybe we’re less, uh …”
“Brant, come and sit the hell down.”
“Alright.”
As if I’m traversing some super narrow bridge, I place one careful foot in front of the other, cautiously approaching the ledge where she sits. The gravel of the rooftop crunches beneath my feet, only serving to make this experience that much more unsettling. When I finally reach Nell, it feels like an eternity later. I slowly crouch down, sitting cross-legged next to her.
“I like this spot,” she murmurs quietly as a sudden gust of wind picks up all her hair, flailing it around. “So few places left where I can just let myself go and … just fucking exist.” She whips her head around to face me. “Know what I mean?”
“Totally.” I’m gripping my thighs so tight, I could bruise them. I don’t want to show her I’m afraid, though; she’ll never let me live that down. “I’m still kinda wet in my pants. I think.”
“I should’ve thought ahead,” Nell admits with a dry chuckle. “I … really wasn’t planning to do that to you in that little slobber room. It was just a sudden impulse I couldn’t ignore.”
“Is that usual for you? Chasing impulses?”
“It’s all I do. Art doesn’t exist without them.” She nudges me with the side of her leg. “It’s the reason we’re sitting all the way up here having ourselves a chat.”
I nudge her back playfully. “I can be impulsive myself. Problem is, I don’t know if I choose the right impulses to … act on.”
“Was picking photography an impulse?”
“Yeah. And also no. See, my dad took photography when he was in high school. He took photos for the school newspaper. He’d, like, proudly show me his yearbooks, pointing out all the pics he took. I played with his cameras growing up. He owned four. He used to shoot photos for some nature magazine. I don’t know exactly. It was a side thing he used to do when I was a kid.”
“So you caught the bug from him,” she surmises. “It wasn’t a total fluke that you ended up here.”
“Well, it was also a bit of a fluke, too.” I smirk, picking at a stray thread in my jeans. “My dad pushed me toward business, which I didn’t take to. Then he pushed me toward engineering, which I tried out for both semesters of my sophomore year. Last year I was partially undeclared, then tried to pursue architecture, but they had no more room in their program. I was playin’ around with my dad’s camera the end of last school year, brought it back to school with me after spring break and started taking photos like crazy. I was the unofficial photographer for Dessie and Clayton’s spring musical. Fuck, that girl can sing. Got this really great shot of her singing to someone behind her, another actor in the show, and my light somehow also caught Clayton standing somewhere backstage … and he was watching her, enraptured. The pic was totally unintended. Totally can’t use the photo for their archive or whatever … but it’s my favorite of them all. It’s so … accidental. Candid. Real. It caught something it wasn’t supposed to catch. The intense love in Clayton’s eyes. The passion in Dessie’s. The whole fuckin’ world just squeezed together and became that short moment, caught in that photo. Fuck. I wish I was good enough to capture something like that intentionally.”
When I look up, Nell’s studying me with a look of vague curiosity and calmness about her. She doesn’t say anything, simply staring at me with those glistening emeralds in her eye sockets.
I chortle dryly. “What’re you lookin’ at? Hypnotized again by my baby blues?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she teases with a smile. “I was … actually quite drawn in by yo
ur story. I didn’t think you had such a background coming into the art school. You give off the impression that you just shut your eyes, poked a finger at the student catalog, and said, ‘Ah, photography, alright, I’ll give it a go.’ But now you seem … different.”
“I make other decisions that way. Like, what to eat. What to do with my day. Who to hang out with.”
“Yeah? Am I just a blind pick for your evening?”
My face straightens. “Hardly. You were a very … deliberate choice. I was secretly hoping I’d see you at the Brigade show.”
“Brigand,” she corrects.
“And I’m really glad I did,” I finish. “I don’t know what it is about you. I want to be around you, Nell.”
She hesitates for a moment, as if questioning whether I’m meaning what I’m saying. Then she seems to trust it, a smile finding her face. “You definitely keep me entertained,” she murmurs.
“So … what is this?” I finally ask. I gesture between her and I. “What do we got goin’ on here?”
“Just friends.”
“Yeah? Just friends? Like you insisted at the art show? Or are we friends with benefits? I think we’re friends with benefits.”
“Why label it?” She shrugs, kicking her feet. “Let’s just go with it. Let it become whatever it wants to become. Like a work of art, Brant. You just apply one stroke at a time.”
“Is that a cock joke?”
“And you don’t judge or criticize or worry about the strokes,” she goes on, trying to ignore my jest despite her lips curling into a tickled smile. “You just keep making them until you have a beautiful picture in front of you.”
“Is that what we are? A beautiful picture?”
“We’re … something.”
Her words cause the next joke on my tongue to die away, left unuttered. We’re something. My chest flutters at the sound of her voice saying that, working me up inside. What the hell is this feeling? Is it hope? Is it anticipation? Is it worry? The emotion is so alien to me, my gut reaction is to be terrified of it.
Or maybe I’m just still freaking out about being on the ledge of a tall-ass building.
“We’re … We’re something,” I return, and it feels like an affirmation of a hundred other words neither of us seem brave enough to say just yet. “I don’t know if …”
“Hmm?”
I swallow, lick my lips, then try again. “I don’t know if maybe it’s too soon to ask, but uh … I’d like to take you on another date. To make up for the awkward time I kinda made of our last one.”
“I’m not really the dating kind of gal,” she admits. “All the fuss. All the fixing up. All the obligation and expectation and worry. Can we just call it hanging out?”
“Sure,” I say, jumping on her wording at once. “Hanging out. Let’s hang out, Nell. I’d really, really, really like to hang out with you.”
“Good. And what’ll we do?”
“I was thinking, my friend Dessie—that’s Clayton’s girl—she has a show this weekend at the Throng & Song. Not sure if you’ve been there before …”
“Nope.”
“Well, she’s singing a new thing she co-wrote with the resident band that plays there. Maybe you’d like to be, like … my person … who goes with me. To that thing.”
“Your person who goes with you?”
“My date. Except not my date. Because we’re not dating.”
She tilts her head, which has the lovely effect of tossing all her dark, beautiful hair. She bites her lip, considering my proposal for too long a while.
Finally, she nods.
“That’s a yes?” I ask, excitement drumming through me. “Yes? You’ll go with me?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Hell yeah! Score one for Rudawski.” I give the night air a fist pump and a hoot, which earns a snort from Nell. “I think you’re gonna have a lot of fun. You’ll get to meet my roomies too. Everyone’s gonna be there. I can’t fuckin’ wait.”
“Why don’t you dangle your legs over?”
I blink. “But my shoes might fall off. And then they’d be lost to me forever. I happen to like these shoes.”
“No. They’d just be in the courtyard below, or stuck in a tree for the squirrels to play with. Who cares? Dangle your damn feet with me.” She gives her own a little twirl in the air, which seems to ignite a fearful twirl in my stomach.
I push away the fears. I’ve got no room for them anymore, not when I’m sitting by the prettiest damn girl on campus. “Alright, you win.”
My legs open and flip over the ledge, dangling alongside hers. I feel like my kidneys just dropped out of my butt and my esophagus twisted up as though being ungently hugged by a noose. My breathing tightens and my fingers claw into the gravel, as if any of these reactions will save me from a fall, should I somehow slip.
“Your heart’s pounding,” she observes.
“You seem to have a talent for making my heart race,” I note, giving her a teasing side-eye. “You’re gorgeous.”
Her shining eyes burrow into mine, fixing me into a trance at once. Maybe my words hit her at just the right moment for her to really, truly hear them. She needs to hear them. She needs to believe them, because they’re the damned truth.
And then I give her another truth. “I really want to kiss you right now, Nell.”
“I’d like that,” she murmurs back.
Heart racing, legs dangling, I stare into her eyes and gently lean into her, letting my lips seek out hers in the semidarkness. I find her neck at first. Then my lips softly work up to her cheek, drawing a path of kisses until I reach the warm velvet of her mouth.
Why label it? she had asked. Let’s just go with it.
Here we are “just going with it” as our heads bob side to side, gently yet intensely locking mouths in our mutual conquest to consume one another at an agonizingly slow pace.
Let it become whatever it wants to become.
I gently open my lips to her, letting my tongue inside her warm, wet mouth. Her tongue joins mine, sensuous, slow, savoring every moment. We are those two slobbering fools in the video on the wall. Our world is reduced to just a pair of faces, a coupling of tongues, a marriage of mouths, a partnership of breath. I’ve never wanted anyone so badly.
Like a work of art, Brant. You just apply one stroke at a time.
One.
Stroke.
At.
A.
Time.
I’ve been Nell’s work of art before. I’ll be her work of art again, and with any luck, she’ll soon be mine.
Chapter 15
Nell
I meet him outside in the parking lot of the Throng & Song. He’s wearing a formfitting black button-down shirt untucked over a pair of torn jeans. His hair darts over his face in carefully arranged tufts of light brown and his killer smile is armed and dangerous tonight.
“You look beautiful,” he tells me, his voice hitching on that last word, which makes me smile.
“I hope they serve hard liquor,” I mutter. I’m going to need it.
Brant reaches for my hand. Fear charges loudly from one end of my brain to the other, leaving no room to focus on anything but the sight of his gently outstretched palm in the cool, unsettling semidarkness of the parking lot. How can just a kind, well-meaning hand affect me so horribly?
“Ready?” he prompts me.
Stuffing my hesitation at once, I take his hand. The world is pulled back together in an instant. The parking lot, sinister only a second ago, suddenly feels downright friendly.
I meet his eyes. “Lead the way.”
The Throng & Song is already packed from one corner to the other with people from campus. I imagine 99% of their clientele is comprised of Klangburg students, though none of them look familiar to me. Must be mostly Theatre and Dance peeps, I figure. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, booze, and body heat. Music from the band thrums through my body, which reminds me almost too much of my dad’s music as it would pummel throughout
the house from the garage where he did most of his meticulous model-painting work. This place also reminds me of a favorite bar that Minnie and I used to frequent downtown every weekend my freshman year. Overall, I’d say I could easily get pretty comfortable in a place like this. Considering how many student housing units are nearby within walking distance, I don’t imagine this place worries too much about intoxicating its customers and draining their wallets dry—wallets filled with Mommy and Daddy’s hard-earned money, no doubt.
“YO!” cries Brant, cutting through the crowd in pursuit of a person I cannot yet see. Our hands still joined, I follow him, nearly taking someone’s elbow in my face on the way.
When we emerge from the other end of the crowd, we’ve arrived at the bar. Brant lets go of my hand to give a hug to a guy I’ve seen before. He’s the shorter dude I saw Brant walking with that one day when they took a pic of a girl’s ass. It was the same day I unintentionally left my Pussy on that grassy knoll for the benefit of—I presume—a bunch of greedy-ass birds perched in the trees above me.
“Nell. This is Dmitri, one of my roommates.”
I offer my hand to Dmitri, who looks at me through a pair of thick-rimmed black glasses and spikes of jagged jet black hair that rests atop them. His complexion is pale and his black brows are thick, giving him a very intense demeanor.
He takes my hand. His own is shockingly smooth and cool to the touch. “Nice to finally meet you, Nell,” he murmurs, his soft voice nearly lost in the noise.
“Likewise.”
Brant leans into me. “You want a drink?”
“I’ll take a Dos Equis.”
He eyes me curiously, then presses himself to the counter to catch the attention of a bartender, all of whom are busy at the other end.
“What’s your specialization?” Dmitri asks me, kicking back his Blue Moon for a gulp or two.