Page 81 of Be Mine Forever

“I don’t know. Candy Crush?” Cam pulled out spray cans and started setting them on the ground close to the building. “It goes without saying that you are never to come around here by yourself, right?”

Jo observed the trash cans, the sole occupants of the alleyway. Her eyes drifted to the package store, just beyond the street, and the surreptitious hooker working that corner. Don’t come back alone? He didn’t have to tell her twice.

Cam found her a crate to sit on, propping it along the wall facing his stone canvas. There wasn’t much light, just what the streetlight provided a few feet away. She pulled up the pattern on her phone, determined to finish this scarf for her father. Knitting Harvard’s coat of arms was no easy task and required her complete focus. She concentrated so hard on getting it right, an hour had gone by before she realized it.

She glanced up, doing a double take at the colors and shapes overtaking the wall. How did he do that? Transform a slab of cement mediocrity into a Technicolor marvel? He’d painted a jungle war zone but occupied by demons and angels instead of wild animals. He’d depicted a battle, but the combatants wielded fruit and vegetables instead of weapons—hand-to-hand combat with bananas. An angel pulling the key on a pineapple grenade. A corncob held execution style to the head of a demon on his knees. It was a vivid courtship of whimsy and violence, so typical of Cam’s trademark style.

Only there was nothing typical about him. An imagination this rich. A gift this rare, and he barely acknowledged it.

He was shaking an orange can when he noticed she had stopped knitting and was gaping at the wall. The first time Cam had ever shown her one of his drawings on a napkin he’d worn the same look on his face as he did right now. Uncertain, vulnerable.

“So…what do you think?”

If she gushed, he wouldn’t believe it, so she tempered her awe, put down her knitting, and crossed over to the wall he’d transformed into an aerosol opus. She tilted her head as if considering. It was brilliant. It was museum-worthy. It was breathtaking.

“I like it.”

Those three words, not even a fraction of what she felt, wiped the anxiety from Cam’s face. He relaxed into a smile, stepping back to assess his work as if for the first time.

“You do?” He shook the can of paint but made no move to spray.

“What does it mean?” Jo scooted a few inches closer, linking their pinky fingers and laying her head on his shoulder.

“I guess it’s a commentary on how ridiculous and senseless most violence is.” Cam narrowed his eyes on the images he had sprayed on the wall. “A contrast between the foolishness of ego and agenda and all the twisted things that lead to wars and the actual cost of it. The lives. Growing up here, it was nothing to see someone shot for the sneakers they’re wearing or the jersey on their back. Sometimes I don’t think our world leaders are much more sophisticated than that when they make choices that cost people’s lives.”

Could she love him any more? Probably not, but she wanted to spend the rest of her life trying.

Jo turned her head in the direction of approaching footsteps. The alleyway sheathed the person in darkness. The closer the steps came, the tighter Cam’s hand wrapped around hers. He subtly positioned himself in front of her.

The streetlight carved the person’s features out of the dark until he was fully revealed. A man about their age or younger, wearing a Charlotte Bobcats jersey—Jo wasn’t sure which player’s—under a leather jacket. His jeans slouched dangerously low around his hips, the belt barely earning its keep. The brim of a Bobcats hat partially obscured his brown face.

“Whassup.” He flipped his chin at Cam, but his eyes inspected Jo’s curves in the skinny jeans and cropped hoodie. “Damn, girl. You ever want some dark meat, letmeknow.”

He reached out and touched her hair, which had been blown loose during the motorcycle ride.

Jo gripped Cam’s hand, stopping him from lunging at the man.

“And if you ever want your balls in a jar,” Cam said, the words barely making it through his clenched teeth, “touch her again.”

Jo had never heard Cam’s voice so low and deadly. Only moments before he had philosophized on the futility of war and violence but now looked ready to snap the stranger’s neck like a fistful of spaghetti.

“And who you s’posed to be?” Bobcats took a step even closer to them, setting off hydraulics in Jo’s heart.

Menace circled them for the first time that night. Had it been this close all along? Just around the corner, one word, one encounter away?

Before either she or Cam could respond, another man walked into the light.

“We got a problem?”

The man’s slow drawl was at odds with the energy crackling around him like a magnetic field. His golden brown skin lay taut over sharp, high cheekbones. His eyelids seemed to droop a little, and Jo couldn’t help but think of that as a trick of nature, a defense mechanism to deceive his enemies into believing there was anything slow or lax about this man. Dreadlocks hung past the bulging muscles of his arms, like living things snaking around him every time he moved his head. His tawny eyes made a rapid assessment of the scene.

Bobcats shattered the brittle silence with a chuckle.

“I was just about to—”

“Cam?” The new stranger’s eyes narrowed and then widened, a younger man’s smile splitting his lips to reveal a white smile, studded with one gold tooth. “Well I’ll be damned.”

Cam watched the man for an extra second before an almost identical smile took over his face.

---