I shrugged. But he was biting . . . and that was the problem. His words made me want to lean over and sink my teeth into his well-muscled left shoulder, and bite him too. I wanted to bite him hard enough to express my frustration, yet sweetly enough that he’d let me do it again.
“So what else? What are your other laws?”
“Thou shall paint.”
“All right. Looks like you’re obeying that one. What else?”
“Thou shall stay away from blondes.”
He was always trying to sting me. Always trying to get under my skin. “Not just Georgia, but all blondes? Why?”
“I don’t like blondes. My mother was a blonde.”
“And your dad was black?”
“That’s the assumption. Most blondes can’t throw black babies all by themselves.”I rolled my eyes. “And you think we’re prejudiced.”
“Oh, I’m definitely prejudiced. But I have my reasons. I never met a blonde I liked.”
“Well, then. I’ll go red.”
Moses’s mouth split into a grin so wide I thought his face would split in two. It surprised me and it sure as hell surprised him, because he leaned over and braced his hands against his knees, laughing like he’d never laughed before. I grabbed the brush he’d taken from me and made a long red streak down the length of my braid. He wheezed, laughing even harder, but he shook his head no. Reaching out his hand, he demanded the brush.
“Don’t do that, Georgia,” he sputtered, laughing so hard he had tears in the corners of his eyes.
But I kept painting, and he lunged for me, trying to take the brush, but I spun, turning my body so that my back was pushing against him, creating a barrier between him and the brush in my hand. I held the brush as far out in front of me as I could, but Moses was taller, longer, and his arms easily wrapped me up and yanked the brush from my fingers. Now there was paint on my palms, and I turned and wiped them down his face, making him look like an Apache warrior. He yelped and immediately used the brush in his hand to repeat the motion down the side of my face. I leaned over and found the paint can, dipping my fingers in the silky red liquid. And I turned on him with a smirk.
“I’m just trying to obey the law, Moses. What was it? Thou shall paint?” I smiled an evil smile and Moses caught my wrist. I flicked my fingers and sent little droplets flying, covering his shirt in tiny red dots.
“Georgia, you better run.” Moses was still smiling, but there was a gleam in his eye that made me weak in the knees. I smiled sweetly up into his face.
“Why would I do that, Moses? When I want you to catch me?”His grin cooled, but his eyes grew warmer. And then, still holding my wrist in one hand, he grabbed my braid, slick with paint, with the other and pulled me toward him.
And this time, he let me lead.
His lips were gentle, waiting for me to set the pace. I sucked at his mouth and pulled at his T-shirt, and generally wished there were no laws. No rules. That I could do what I wanted. That I could lay down in the shadowy interior of the barn and pull him down with me. That I could do the things my body wanted to do. That I could paint his body in red and he could use his body to paint mine in return, until there was no difference, no black or white, no now and then, no crime, no punishment. Just vivid red, like my vivid red longing.
But there are laws. There are rules. Laws of nature and laws of life. Laws of love and laws of death. And when you break them, there are consequences. And Moses and I, like a stream of fateful lovers who had gone before us and who would come after us, were subject to those laws, whether we kept them or not.
Moses
EVEN THE SMELL WAS HEADY. It made me dizzy and exacerbated the pounding in my head and the weight in my chest. Slashing red and yellow, swirls of silver, streaks of black. My arms flew, spraying and moving, climbing and blending. It was too dark to see whether I actually created what I saw in my head. But it didn’t matter. Not to me. But it would matter to the girl. The girl needed someone to see her. So I would paint her picture, I would show the world her face. And then maybe she would go away.
I’d been seeing her off and on since mid-summer, since the night of the rodeo when I’d found Georgia tied up and taken her home. Ever since then, I’d started seeing Molly. She wrote her name in fat cursive letters and looped her Y in a long swirl. I saw that name on a math test. She showed me a math test, of all things. There was a crisp A at the top, and I suspected she was proud of it. Or she had been proud. Once. Before.
Molly looked a little like Georgia—blonde hair and laughing eyes. But she showed me things and places that meant nothing to me, like the math test. Sunflowers lining the sides of roads I’d never driven down, a turbulent sky, and rain drops against a window fringed by curtains with yellow stripes, a woman’s hands, and an apple pie with an expertly woven pie crust, perfectly browned.
And then my painting was lit from behind, twin spotlights illuminating the underpass. I threw the can in my hand and slid down the slanted concrete wall, the spray-paint cans in my makeshift work belt slapping against my legs and clanking together like chains as I ran.
But the lights followed, trapping me between the beams, and I tripped, sprawling painfully, the cans digging into my abdomen and hips, the skin of my palms embedded with gravel. The car swerved and braked, and I was released temporarily from the glare as the lights shot over my head. I was on my feet again immediately, but there was something wrong with my right leg and I fell back down, crying out as the pain cut through my adrenaline.
“Moses?”
It wasn’t the police. And it wasn’t the girl’s killer. I was pretty certain she had been killed. There was a certain solemnity and freshness to her colors that I only saw when the death was violent and unexpected. When the death was new.