That Alex, it seemed, was only for me, and I had the strangest sensation—that there’s a Greer who’s only for him.
So I’m still feeling it, that suspended animation. I’m still thinking it,Press Play. But this time, I’m not silently encouraginghim. I’m encouraging myself, first for the long walk out of that lecture hall, and again when we’d come across this crazy, unexpected thing—guerrilla art. It feels as sure as Alex’s hand on my back, the one pushing me forward while I took my shots in the park.
I don’t want to watch it. Iwant to do it.
At first he hangs back while I help fill balloons, my hands shaky with nerves and anticipation, and it’s almost as if he’s standing watch over me, over the whole situation. His hands stay in his pockets, his jaw set, but when I pick up a balloon in my hand, stepping back to the strip of colorful tape Britt and Tarek have placed along the sidewalk—a starting line for the chaos—Alex moves too, grabbing his own balloon and fixing me with the same sheepish smile he’d given me when he’d asked to walk me to my car. The night is warm, and more than a few of these students have come bearing the heavy smell of marijuana. One of them has set his iPhone on top of a newspaper box and he’s playing Rage Against the Machine like we’re really out here doing something subversive. It is ridiculous and hilarious, and the tiny space between Alex and me is filled with silent, knowing laughter.
Britt stands in front of the wall, her arms spread wide as she tells us to do our best to cover the whole surface, to work as quickly as we can. And when Tarek cups his hands over his mouth to tell us to have fun, Britt whoops loudly and ducks out of the way of at least fifteen airbornepaint balloons.
And it’s so,sofun. It’s sloppy and loud and maybe a little pointless given how one splash of color is so quickly covered by the next. We jostle around the hampers for more balloons; we pay no attention to the small crowd of onlookers we’ve attracted; we make the kind of fast, entirely impermanent friendship that’ll only last as long as we stand here cheeringeach other on.
It must only be a matter of minutes that Alex and I stand beside each other, our increasingly paint-splattered fingers tossing the small, heavy balloons against the wall, laughing as we watch them explode unevenly in great, messy bursts of color. Alex throws high, all his balloons hitting the upper quadrant of the wall, and everyone hoots and hollers every time he lands one. Britt claps him on the back and leaves a red handprint, which Alex either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about. I discover quickly that my splatters are bigger, more prominent, when I aim toward the middle of the wall, and when I hit two in a row almost exactly beside each other, like a set of big, bright, watchful eyes—one lime green, one purple—I clap in delight and feel the paint on my hands make a fine spray onto my face.
I’ve neverfelt so alive.
I turn toward Alex, catch him right at the moment one of his balloons hits. He looks how I feel, young and surprised by delight, his eyes widening and shining up at the mess we’ve all made together. He lifts his forearm, swipes it across his brow, but he’s not gotten off so easy either, and now he wears a smudge of bright yellow paint at his temple. It tangles with his jet-black hair, an abstract, zooming bumblebee on his skin, and I laugh, a louder sound than I’m used to, at least out here in the open air.
He looks over at me then, catches me watching and laughing—watchingishelping—and for a few seconds we stand like that, smiling at each other as though we’re in on some kind of big, happy secret together. And the thing is—we are. This Alex—boyish and inexperienced, easily entertained—this Alex is my secret. And this Greer—loud and impulsive, quick tolaugh—I’m his.
“Your freckles,” he says, and before he’s even finished, before he’s made that last sibilant sound, I’ve pushed onto my tiptoes, I’veleaned forward.
I’ve pressed my mouth right against his.
* * * *
It’s sudden enough that it’s a little wobbly, off center, and his hands rise to catch me right underneath my elbows. For a split second I think—Oh God, he’s going to pushme away—but no.
No.
Instead he’s steadying me, holding me still so he can tilt his head, so he can shape his mouth to mine, so he can make this kiss what I meant it to be—hungry and close and paint-splattered-together—and before I know it he’s moved the hands cupping my elbows up to my triceps, gathering me to him. It’s nothing at all for me to lean in, to press my whole body against his, to tip my head back, to feel his arms wrap around me and hold me close, hold me up so that my heels lift from the ground again while we kiss. I know there’s people and light and color and sound around us; I know there’s still that faint smell of marijuana and the angry sound of Rage Against the Machine. But I don’t see, hear, smell, touch, taste anything other than Alex. The man I guess I’ve been waiting to kiss for two whole years.
It’s him who pulls away first, and if there’s a comfort in that, it’s the sound he makes, a protesting grunt that I’m grateful to hear before the other noise intrudes—a loud, deep voice calling out, “That’s enough now, time’s up!”
I turn my head to see a cop by the floodlight closest to the wall, Britt and Tarek already headed his way to make a protest, and I hope they work it out, I really do—but I also hope I’m not here to see it. I hope I’m somewhere in the dark with Alex, finishing whatwe’ve started.
“Let’s go,” he says, backing away only enough to catch up my hand in his, dipping in one smooth move to pick up my bag from the ground, towing me behind him as soon as he’s got it, and this is perfect too—the way his strides eat up the ground, not cautious or tentative about whether I can keep up, not rough but not gentle either, where hegrips my hand.
We turn a corner into darkness, the sounds of the group muted now, and I feel a small shiver of fear tracing up my spine at what this will trigger. It’s different, this space, narrower than the one behind Betty’s, narrow enough not to be a storage spot for garbage cans or HVAC units or some old mattress a tenant didn’t know what to do with. It’s notclean, strictly speaking, but it’s free of cigarette butts and beer cans. There’s some gentle light, a beam shining from a streetlamp on the sidewalk that led us here.
“Of course it’s an alley,” Alex says, his voice rough and impatient. When he turns back toward me, his hair fallen over his furrowed brow, I think it’s to retreat and quit this whole thing. But instead he guides me back toward the wall, looking down at me with heat in his eyes, keeping a foot of space between us instead of pressing up against me, which is what I really want right now. “This okay?”
Okay? Let’s get married in this alley, who cares.“I mean, it’s not an ideallocation, but—”
“No,” he says, laughing softly. “This. You there. Me here.”
“Closer would be better.”
He doesn’t kiss me again, not right away—he steps into me, placing his hands at my waist, his lowered head beside mine, so that his hair tickles my cheek and forehead, his breath soft beside my ear. “Greer,” he says quietly against the shell of it, and it sounds like a surrender, as though he’s sinking his whole self into my name, and I close my eyes, let that sound shudder through every part of me. He pulls his head back, kisses me softly on the lips, and before I’m even recovered from that first time, he says it again. “Greer. Do you want to open your eyes?”
I shake my head, firmly, my temple pressing against the sharp line of his jaw, his coarse stubble prickling deliciously against my skin. “No,” I whisper back, and I can feel his eyes trace over my face as sure as if it were his fingertips. When he moves again, it’s to put his lips softly against first one of my closed eyes,then the other.
“No?” He moves his lips to my forehead, a touch that should be gentle, comforting, innocent—but when the tip of his tongue touches right at the arch of my eyebrow, my hips roll of their own accord, and he presses his own into me briefly, too briefly, before drawing back again.
“I just want to—” I pause, take a shuddering breath at the way one of his hands has drifted higher, stroking right at my rib cage. “Feel this. Feel you.”
He nods and runs his lips over my temple, down to my cheekbone, and then back over, this time to the lobe of my ear, which he nips once with the edge of his teeth, and I guess I didn’t realize that that’s where my entire central nervous system was located, because oh myGod. “Keep them closed, then. Whenever you want, tell me to stop.”
“Okay.” But I know already I won’t be telling him to stop.
