Foolish One ✷ Jess Mariano

VI: The Thief and the Gallery

She doesn't look away from her painting nonetheless. There was a swirl she wanted to perfect, flattening the tip of the spray can every-which-way until the white had vanished and the sky was a soft blue instead. There was a boat she had sketched over the gradient, and she switched the can to black paint to begin outlining the bow.

When she pulled the can away from the brick surface, Jess whistled, an unspoken compliment, telling the wind just how beautiful he believed the girl's masterpiece to be.

Kitty hadn't caught a glimpse of him yet, but she still knew that he was standing right behind her. If she had focused a little bit more, she could have sworn she felt his heartbeat race, echoing through the concrete floor underneath their feet. "It isn't even done," she muttered, face unmoving, perfecting the gradient she had spent half an hour on.

That didn't bother him the slightest. He was still fascinated. When it came to her, he got too giddy way too quickly. "Still, Grant Wood would be proud," Jess insisted. She bit back the subtlest of smiles.

Kitty looked at the painting and sighed, tracing the smile lines with her index. When she noticed the paint had smudged on her fingertip, she wiped it off on her skin in a hurry.

"Who is he?" Jess approached her carefully, and spoke softly. Softer than she was used to, and it made her flinch lightly.

"You don't care," Kitty spoke, a sure statement.

"I don't," He confirmed. And it was as if they were hands, reaching for his jaw and clenching it shut.

Kitty sighed, and found herself putting down a can on the ground. She wiped her hands on the rag hanging from her bag. Jess asked: "Done for the day?" And she nodded, claiming she would finish it another day, which was code for getting bored of it. That wasn't hard to believe since Kitty had a habit of getting bored dangerously easily. Like the flip of a switch.

Kitty swallowed harshly and walked away, making a beeline to the edge of the roof. "Got any weed?" She wondered out loud, sitting down harshly at the edge. The soles of her shoes grazed the air and she swung them back and forth like a little kid.

"The day I say no is the day I die, Lovelace," Jess shrugged. He sat by and rolled a joint for her.

She waited for him to finish, then she grabbed it from his fingers to take the first hit. When Kitty exhaled the smoke, she threw her head back, eyes squeezed shut. "If I tell you, are you going to care? Because if you are I don't think—"

"I'll make sure to slap myself if I'm caring, Kitty." He nodded. After she'd taken a couple of long inhales, he grabbed the joint from her and put it in his mouth.

Kitty debated on it. She fiddled with her ring, then looked up to meet his eyes. He looked down at her though his lashes, examining the way her lips parted. The height difference was flagrant, even sitting down. "He's my dad."

He brought his hand up through his hair, calloused fingers running through brunette curls. "And why the boat?"

"Every summer for seven years, I would visit him in California," She paused, and bit her bottom lip nervously. "He lived right next to Santa Monica, and he loved fishing so every day we'd go on the boat."

"Why don't you go anymore?" He asked, frowning curiously.

She looked at her feet and tried to avoid his eyes, those all-consuming caramel-eyes of his, as well as she possibly could. The agony that rippled over the floorboards could send anyone into perpetual nightmares, terrors lurking in the shadows, poisoning them with syringes full of disaster, killing them slowly with their own pleads choking them.