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I shrug my shoulders and go back to packing my bag. “Doesn’t matter. I’m never seeing him again.”

April adjusts her collar in the mirror by the front door before running a finger around her mouth to fix her lipstick. “Too bad. You could use a fling with a body-painting sex machine.”

I could.

“Maybe he’s bad in bed. I mean, he didn’t even try to have sex.” I feign indifference.

She gives me a deadpan stare. “Did you orgasm?”

I glance up at the ceiling. It’s none of her business.

“Exactly.” She sounds pleased.

I drop my eyes to her. “The only reason I stayed out that night was because I thought you’d have someone here yourself.”

April opens the door. “Yeah, yeah. Keep telling yourself that. You had fun with him.”

“I did not,” I lie.

“Have a good day at work, dear,” she says as she closes the door behind her.

I love her like the best friend she’s always been to me. What I don’t like is how she knows me better than I know myself.

It’s not that I don’t want April to know about my night with Tanner. It’s just … everything that transpired seems so special. I’m afraid, if I start to talk about it, I’ll realize it was all just a dream.

What the hell is wrong with me?

I clean out my cup and hang it from the mug rack on the counter. With my tote bag in hand, I put on my jacket, and I’m out to catch my bus.

I cling to the metal bar on my way uptown. There’s a guy next to me, reading a Stephen King novel. He’s really handsome with light-brown hair and a suit under his overcoat. I want to snap a picture of him and submit it to the Hot Guys Reading Instagram page, but knowing my luck, I’d probably get caught and then have to explain to him why I was taking a picture.

Yeah, I don’t do awkward well.

When I get to my stop, I step off the bus and see my friend Willa, another teacher, exiting the school. Her straight black hair is swaying as she bounces down the steps.

“Um, class is that way,” I tease.

She smiles, handing me a small white bag. I glance inside at the doughnut she bought me.

“I knew you’d be here soon. Someone just told me our local lawbreaker struck again over the weekend. Come with me to check it out.”

The lawbreaker she’s talking about is the graffiti artist we’ve been following over the past year. I know graffiti is bad and technically illegal, but the art this person creates is remarkable. It’s not tags you can’t read or gang signs that only claim territory. This guy—or girl, for all I know—creates masterpieces out of mayhem.

New York City is a mixture of good and bad. Most of it is beautiful with streets so nice with well-maintained buildings and brownstones, museums, restaurants, and stores. On other blocks, there are completely run-down buildings infested with rats and unsafe drinking water.

I come from a working-class neighborhood in Queens with row houses that don’t seem like much, but they’re worth more than four-bedroom colonials in Southern states. The area is where people live and die because they love it so much, yet when I was younger, my father would have killed me if I’d hung out a few train stops away from our town.

Unfortunately, the school I work at is one of those locations. The building is well cared for, but some of the buildings around it are lacking. I tried to rally the school, some of the parents, and even the city council to do something to fix it up, but I’m a microorganism in a huge ocean that no one seems to be concerned about.

I break off a piece of the maple doughnut and place it in my mouth just as we turn the corner, and I stop dead in my tracks. In front of me is not just a graffiti piece; it’s a portrait of a couple in a graceful yet erotic embrace. The colors and shading look familiar—too familiar—and it makes my heart race.

My reaction isn’t because I’ve been looking at this artist’s work for the past twelve months, and I know the style well. I’ve been more intrigued by the act of creating art than actually analyzing it.

No, the thing that has my mind reeling are the words written across the figures.

“You’re welcome? Huh? That’s weird,” Willa says with a twist to her mouth.

“Yeah.” I nod and stare at the image with a questioning eye. “What do you think it means?”