So Damn Beautiful (A New Adult Romance) (33 page)

“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.”