Foolish One ✷ Jess Mariano

VI: The Thief and the Gallery

In the wise words of a charming boy with stupid confidence and sarcasm in his lungs, she was one hell of a girl.

"Wait till you get to the top, Mariano," Kitty smirked, and her eyes flashed and glinted in the pale moonlight as she looked at Jess. A bag filled with all those cans of spray paint flung over her shoulder, "Then tell me how much of a girl I am."

She slapped his back amicably as she ran past him, but the contact of her warm palm against his back sent an electric shock through his shirt and all the way up to his spine, forcing him to jerk upright and follow, breathing heavily to try and regain his composure.

Kitty walked up a rusty ladder, stuck to the side of a dirty mural, with ardent determination and her tongue pulled between her teeth. Once they got to the top, she turned around with a grin and held her hands out vicariously. "What do you think, Mariano?" She asked, feeling a wave of pride wash over her at the sight of him utterly flabbergasted.

"This is..." It was a mural, a wide one that was probably visible all the way from Doose's Market. He runs his fingertips over the bricks, finding them smooth enough for his liking. His open mouth mounded into a smile," I mean," He pauses. "How did you even find this?"

"I have my ways," She shrugged and spoke the words in such a soft way he almost craved her saying his name, "Can you give me the purple?"

She took a moment to admire him as he searched in her overloaded bag, which had fallen to the ground unintentionally, too absorbed in the huge white space in front of her. His hair fell from one side to the other, not as perfectly moved by the wind as hers, but rather messy and with two paler, more brunette tones, under the bright moon.

He bent his arms, grabbing the last spray can stuck underneath all the rest and she could see a small tear in the neck of his shirt while he did it. His lips were drawn in a soft smile, like that of a young boy who had not yet seen anything wrong in the world. Although she knew that Jess was none of that, he was hard, callous and rough on the edges; but the moon and his presence gave him a look so soft that she could not find a way in her to look away.

Their fingers touch when he handed her the can of paint, and he nearly dropped it all over the concrete rooftop they were standing on. He asked her if that was the shade she wanted (it wasn't) and she says it was before hazardously spraying a stroke across the wall. He perched himself on top of the wall as she began spraying back and forth, shaking the container every now and then.

Kitty Lovelace was an art gallery; it was obvious. With the way every memory was hung in the pristine hallways of her brain, with underneath it a card of everything she memorized from that moment, it was almost uncanny. She was born to do art and give everywhere she resided a taste of untamed rebelliousness, the scent of cheap paint and coconut curl-cream and those goddamn lollipops lingering everywhere she went. She had one in-between her lips as she shaped the face of a man on the bricks, smearing paint everywhere on her exposed skin, making him laugh every time she looks up at him with a new color smushing her cheek or the sweaty bridge of her nose.

As for Jess Mariano, he was the scoundrel. The petty thief who couldn't afford himself an entrance, so he broke in and hoped she would never kick him out. He loved her art like someone who died holding a paintbrush, and he swore to himself that he would never let its light die. He would never forget what she looked like, basked in the moonlight, smiling at him with those eyes that were more than enough to send him in a drunken haze.