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us just now.”
    I followed his gaze. I caught a glimpse of a couple at the end of the block just before they turned the corner. The woman wore heels and the man a suit.
    Right. That had been a decoy kiss, not a real one. I cleared my throat. “Quick thinking.” But oh my God, how mortifying. I felt like he knew that I was wet between my legs, and that he’d made me that way. “See?” I said, trying for a casual, teasing tone. “It’s good I came with you.”
    He just shot me a questioning look I couldn’t quite decipher.
    â€œBecause you can’t make out with yourself,” I added, realizing belatedly that explaining wasn’t helping. “We should go, right?”
    He stooped and rummaged around in his backpack. “Yeah. I just need to sign it.” He produced a can of spray paint.
    â€œOh, you mean like tag it,” I said. See? I was cool. I was in the know. I wasn’t a lust-addled college student. Or at least I wasn’t only a lust-addled college student.
    â€œNo, tagging’s not really my thing. I respect it, but to me, graffiti isn’t about marking my territory or anything.”
    â€œIt’s about saying something.”
    He ducked his head like he was embarrassed.
    â€œIt’s using art to make a statement. And you should sign your art.”
    â€œSomething like that.” He made a dot in the bottom right of the picture using gold paint.
    â€œThat’s it? Just a little gold dot?” I made a mental note to start looking for the same mark in his other pieces around town.
    â€œJust a little gold dot.” He shrugged. “I can’t sign my actual name for obvious reasons. I had this random gold paint on me the first time I went out—this was in my hometown, years ago. I was probably eleven or twelve. It was from some Christmas project we were doing in school. I hadn’t used it for the actual graffiti—because, really, who does graffiti in gold?”
    â€œDisco graffiti artists,” I said, laughing.
    â€œExactly. You’re basically never going to see gold graffiti—or at least it’s going to be rare—so I just impulsively added a gold dot as a way to distinguish the piece.”
    â€œLike a period at the end of a sentence.” I understood the motivation. Punctuation was my department.
    He laughed then. He actually laughed, and I was absurdly proud to have been the reason he did. “Yep. Like a gold period. And then it just became a thing.” He rummaged around some more and produced another can. “Here. You sign too.”
    â€œReally? I didn’t do anything.”
    â€œYou helped.”
    I could feel my skin heat. An A on a test or term paper had never thrilled me like his praise. “Okay.” I shook the can like I’d seen him do, aimed the nozzle, and deposited a dot next to his gold one. “Pink!” I couldn’t help exclaiming in delight.
    He just shrugged, put up his hood, which had fallen during our interlude, and turned, silently gesturing for me to follow.
    Matthew
    â€œInteresting.”
    The word punctured the heavy, smoke-filled silence in Curry’s studio, a silence that had been stretching on as my critic circled the table on which I’d unrolled my latest crack at the “make a picture of something mundane in every medium” assignment. Curry hadn’t told me to do it over. We hadn’t spoken at all, in fact, since my last visit, which was pretty much unheard of. He usually called me midweek and issued mumbled instructions for what he wanted to see at our next session. The fact that he hadn’t worried me.
    Anyway, I was stubborn—and proud. Even though I told myself I just wanted to extract a senior portfolio from this “mentorship” so I could graduate, in truth, I couldn’t stand Curry thinking poorly of my work. So, even though I technically had no assignment this week, I had taken it upon