As I was walking past the first door on the left, I heard a noise. That wasn’t the kitchen, was it? I pulled the door open with one hand, holding the cake with the other. I poked in my head.
“Oh!” I cried. The room I’d opened up was a den of some kind, with leather sofas and books lining the walls. There was a pool table in the middle of the room.
And on the pool table, a woman lay on her back. The man standing at the far end of the table looked up at me, his pants around his ankles. His tie fluttered over her ample cleavage as he bent over her, between her legs.
From his expression, he was busy putting something into a pocket. When he saw me, his eyes widened only slightly in irritated surprise.
“Room’s occupied,” the man grunted.
“Unless you want to join,” the woman said, looking at me from upside down.
“Uh… no. No thank you. Sorry to interrupt,” I said, a fierce shame burning on my cheeks. I closed the door quickly behind me.
I made my way down to the end of the hall. From the left, waiters streamed out of a door. Okay. That was the kitchen. I was almost there when something caught my eye.
No way.
I snuck over to the door across the hall from the kitchen. It was ajar, and inside I had caught a glimpse of something.
But no, it couldn’t be.
One of my favorite graffiti artists in NYC had stopped putting anything up in the city two years ago. Nobody knew who he was apart from his tag—he signed all of his pieces with the name “Kage.” I’d tried to catch him in the act of tagging, lots of people had, but he was invisible.
His letters flowed like water, like sunlight through tree branches. When he painted a wall, nobody ever dared paint over it. That was how good he was. His pieces grew out of cracks in the brick, like his paint was a force of nature finding a way to flow out and into the world. Every painting he did was perfectly suited to the place he put it. It was as though the ugly bare walls had been waiting for him to come along and make them beautiful again.
I’d pored over his work, finding his stuff posted online and going to visit some of his pieces in person. He liked to throw his bigger pieces up in the alleyways downtown rather than in the subway. Much more dangerous. Much more risky. Maybe he had finally gotten caught, and that’s why he wasn’t painting anymore.
Now, though, staring me in the face was a painting by him that I had never seen before. I darted a glance back over at the kitchen door, swinging shut after another tuxedoed waiter passed through.
I had time, didn’t I?
I always had time for art. Just a peek, and I’d be back to deliver the cake. Then back to Steph’s to change, another ten minutes to get to my job… yeah, sure. I had plenty of time.
Pushing the door open, I stepped inside of the dimly lit room. There was nobody in the front of this room, although it looked like the room continued on through another doorway. The painting by Kage took up most of the wall, lit up by a single spotlight from below. I took a step closer and—
“Ohh!”
My heel sunk into the carpet and caught there, sending me tumbling forward. I lunged forward and caught the cake before it fell, but I heard the contents shift inside the box.
“Stupid heels! Stupid, stupid,” I repeated. I kicked both of my heels off quickly and set the cake down on the carpet. I opened it up, praying it hadn’t gotten messed up.
“Oh no. Oh no.”
I bit my lip and looked closer. One of the orchid branches had bent, it looked like. The flower petals were digging into the gold icing on top. I reached in and pried back the fake flower, only to have the gold lift away on my fingertip. Frowning, I pushed the flower back. It didn’t look wrong like that. Maybe a little different from the one Steph had finished, but not bad.
I closed the lid, picked the cake back up, and was debating whether to enter the kitchen barefoot when I heard a noise.
“Hello?” I whispered. The rooms in here seemed so dim that I couldn’t imagine anyone from the party would be inside. But I had heard something.
I stepped inside, edging my way across the room. I still held the cake box in my hands, but it was easier to creep barefoot on the plush carpet. My toes sank down into the lush fibers.
“Hello?” I said, a bit louder. Then I poked my head around the doorway into the next room.
“Wow.”
This wasn’t a bedroom or a kitchen. This wasn’t just another ordinary part of the house.
It was an art gallery.
I gaped at the paintings that filled the walls of the room. There were a dozen or so large canvases hanging from steel wires in the middle of the room. The canvases were big, and hung a couple of feet above the floor, creating a sort of viewing maze. And there, in the middle—