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The man grins. “Only handsome men.”

“Then I believe you.”

The vendor laughs, and Clint smiles back, easy and sharp, and it pulls at me like a magnet.

The path narrows between stalls crowded with silver bracelets, woven bags, and bright blankets. A woman fans herself behind a display of beaded jaguars while a kid munches from a bag of potato chips beside her.

Everywhere, color presses in—turquoise, red, orange. I move in closer to Clint, and then slightly behind him. I’m close enough that the smell of his skin fills my mind with memories of this morning. I get that sharp tingling in my limbs that I had almost forgotten about before I met him.

Clint pauses at a table of small wooden boxes and opens one carefully. The lid clicks back on its hinge.

“Secret compartment,” he says.

“For what?”

He looks at me. “Secrets.”

I pretend to examine the box closer, but really I’m just feeling the heat off his arm.

“I’m trying not to keep those.”

“Yeah, well, cold turkey’s rough.”

I laugh, and he gives me that sideways smile that still feels odd in public.

We stay close enough that our shoulders bump when tourists squeeze past, close enough that when the path dips unevenly, Clint’s hand catches my elbow. I assume on instinct.

A few stalls later, I stop in front of a wall of paintings. A dozen canvases clipped to wire grids and leaning against each other in crooked rows. Beaches. Churches. Calle scenes. Men fishing in boats too blue to be real.

Clint stops with me.

“You ever sell yours?”

The question finds me too quickly. It takes me a moment to remember the answer.

“No,” I say. “I wasn’t good enough.”

Clint looks over.

“Not buying that.”

I exhale. “Because it’s not entirely true.”

His eyes perk up. “Look at you admitting lies in real time. That’s growth, dude.”

“I sold a few things when I was younger.”

“How many is a few?”

“Enough that Renny decided I needed a space.” I keep my eyes on the paintings and try not to think about mine. “He bought a little storefront in Downtown Riverside. Good windows. Terrible plumbing.”

Clint shifts beside me. “He bought you an art studio?”

“As a surprise.”

And it immediately strikes me how weird and awful it is to say that your partner bought you a building on a whim. Worse to think what I did with that building in the years after.

The art vendor smiles at us from a plastic chair but doesn’t interrupt. I wish that he would. One of the paintings moves in the breeze, tapping softly against the metal grid.