Isla and the Happily Ever After(40)

And then…he comes alive.

His plan unfolds quickly. He’s painting a mural on the inside of the rooftop’s wall. He begins with a sketch, an outline, and moves around the interior in a complete circle. It’s already clear what this mural will be.

I smile and let him work in silence.

Josh switches to a larger brush and bolder strokes. Fat green leaves and thick green branches appear across the wall’s peeling white paint. I lose myself in a book about the search for an ancient lost city in the Amazon, glancing up occasionally to watch the tree grow. But when he circles around again, unexpected shapes appear between the leaves. He’s creating a mock-up of the surrounding skyline. It’s precise but with his usual touch of whimsy – certain buildings rounder, others more square.

Jacque visits. He purrs against Josh’s leg.

When Josh doesn’t notice – which is a first, Josh adores Jacque – he scowls and saunters towards me. I feed him scraps of duck gizzard from the salad I had for lunch, and he allows me to pet him for a few minutes before disappearing back over the rooftops.

The sun beats down. Josh takes off his shirt. He’s so deep into his work that he’s forgotten I’m here. He’s a work of art himself. The lines of his back and arms are strong, more so than his slender body would suggest. He has a small mole on his right shoulder blade and a faded scar on his lower back. The skull-and-crossbones on his arm looks even more him against this backdrop of similar brushstrokes.

And…his hips. They jut out skeletally from the top of his jeans, and I find my eyes returning to this area again and again. This right-above-the-pants area.

Christ.

Josh removes a second jar of paint from his shoulder bag. As he circles a fourth time, yet another unexpected layer appears behind Paris. Towering skyscrapers. Suspension bridges. Statues of lions. He paints a Flemish building with climbing garden roses and a tiled roof, and then a brownstone with ivy window boxes and an American flag. What surely must be his house.

I was wrong. Josh didn’t just turn my rooftop into an actual tree house. He turned it into a tree house with a view of the world. Our world. Paris and New York.

He circles around one last time, sprinkling in a few birds among the tree branches. Some look almost real. Others are so fantastical that they must exist exclusively in his imagination. The complete mural takes less than six hours.

When Josh emerges from his trance, he is dazed and art-drunk. He blinks at me. Inexplicably, I burst into tears. He continues to stare at me without expression, and I continue to sob – embarrassingly fat tears. He tilts his head. Another blink. And then he drops to the blanket. His eyes are wild with fear.

“It’s…it’s beautiful,” I say.

Every muscle in his body relaxes. He laughs so hard that he collapses backwards. His paint-covered hands clutch the blanket, and his body shakes with uncontrollable laughter.

“It’s not funny.” I dab at my face with the blanket.

He doubles up even harder.

“I’ll have to wash this blanket now anyway.” I gesture towards his paint smears.

Josh slowly stops laughing. He smiles up at me – a beatific, godlike smile – and holds out his long arms. I nestle into them, green paint and all. He hugs me tightly. My ear is pressed against his naked chest, and his heart is beating a thousand times a minute. I run my hands down his body. He closes his eyes. I kiss his skin and the paint and his sweat. He lifts my face towards his and kisses away my tears. “Thank you,” he says. “That was the best reaction that anyone has ever given me. For anything.”





Chapter fourteen


My heart reacts to his news by shattering. A heap of fragile glass shards. “You’re going home? Why didn’t you tell me this could happen?”

It’s been exactly one week since Josh turned the Treehouse into a tree house. But tonight is too chilly for an open-air rooftop, so we’re slumped against each other on the top of my bed. At least he looks miserable, too. “I don’t know,” he says, tossing aside his phone. “I guess I hoped that maybe, somehow, they might…forget about me.”

“Your parents wouldn’t forget about you.”

“You’d be amazed at how many minutes we’ve spoken to each other since school began. Twenty? Maybe? And most of them just now?”

I sigh. “Happy birthday to you.”

Josh’s parents chose today – of all days – to inform him that they’re flying him home for the entire week of elections. He’ll be an interest story for the news: the eighteen-year-old who gets to vote for his father for the first time. His parents want footage at the polls, a gushing post-vote interview, the whole charade. “It’s so sleazy,” he says. “They’re bringing me into their world of sleaziness, and they want me to sleaze for their cameras.”