Monterey always said the city looked prettiest when it was half broken, the way a bruise blooms under pale skin and pretends it is a color instead of a warning. That was the night she met Fitzgerald.

He was leaning against a brick wall outside the bar, hands buried in pockets, looking like a man who had already left the conversation twenty minutes before his body followed. The purple street light behind him kept blinking on and off, painting his jawline in poisonous red, then stripping it back to grayscale. He watched people the way some men watched watches, timing exits, measuring how long it would take to walk away.

Monterey did not walk. She prowled. He saw it before she even knew he was seeing it. Her boots thudded against the concrete in a slow rhythm, the leather creaking with a quiet ache, her coat swinging open just enough to show a black dress that did not apologize for the lines of her body. There was a faint scent of tobacco and hotel soap clinging to her hair, as she had just left somewhere she was never supposed to be.

Inside the bar, the air was heavy with stale beer, burnt citrus rinds, and broken promises. Outside, it was colder, sharper, the night carrying exhaust and rain and the metallic aftertaste of a city that never learned to sleep. When she stepped into his orbit, he could feel the temperature shift, that tiny crackle that lives in the half inch between two people who have not yet decided whether to destroy each other or pretend to heal.

“You look like you are thinking about running,” she said, voice low and even, not flirting, just stating the weather.

“I always am,” he replied.

She laughed, small and precise, as if she had weighed the sound before letting it out. “Then why are you still here?”

He exhaled through his nose, the faint ghost of cognac drifting between them. “Bad habits,” he said, and looked at her like she might be the newest one.

It should have ended there, an exchange of glances, two strangers under bad lighting. Instead, the city conspired. A distant train wailed, a siren rose and fell somewhere far off, and the bar door opened, spilling out a blast of hot air and cheap guitar riffs that shoved them one step closer together. They had not touched yet, but it already felt like contact.

Monterey had been warned about men like him, the ones who could make silence feel like oxygen and then hold it just out of reach. Fitzgerald had a careful way of standing, as though every angle of his body had been negotiated in advance. Eyes too steady, sentences too short, a mouth that softened only when he was talking about something far away.

“I am Monterey,” she said.

“Fitz,” he answered, and then corrected himself as if the word had been put there by someone else. “Fitzgerald.”

The name lingered between them like the last note of an old record. She tasted it in her head, rolling it over the raw edge of her thoughts. Fitzgerald. It sounded like expensive trouble.

They went back inside without making a plan. It was just assumed, the way gravity assumes you will fall.

The bar was dim and overconfident, sticky floors, cheap whiskey, a jukebox that skipped on the same track every hour as if it was trying to confess something. They took a corner booth where the faux leather was cracked and rough under her bare thigh when she slid in, that minor abrasion telling her she was somewhere real. Fitzgerald sat across from her in the shadows, fingers wrapped around a glass he did not drink from, watching her with a detachment that should have insulted her and somehow instead made her lean in.

He listened more than he spoke. She talked because his quiet made space for it, made it feel like her words were being collected and stored, even as his gaze sometimes wandered over her shoulder to the door, to the window, to the way the bartender wiped the counter.

He told her almost nothing about himself. A city he used to live in. A job that sounded like a placeholder. A childhood cut up into fragments and handed over like receipts. When she asked fundamental questions, he slipped away, changing the subject smoothly, turning his answers into fog. He did it with an elegance that would have been charming if it were not so surgical.

“You are allergic to being known,” she said at one point, swirling the ice in her glass, the cubes clinking like tiny bells at a funeral. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

He smiled without warmth. “I have heard worse diagnoses.”

“What is the best one?” she asked.

He met her eyes, the faint glow of the bar light catching the flecks of something unreadable there. “That I arrive like a storm and leave like a power outage,” he said, and then laughed at himself, a short sound, dismissive and tired. “People like pretty metaphors when they talk about being abandoned.”

“You do not look like someone who abandons,” she said.

“That is because I stay long enough to make it feel like a choice,” he answered.

She should have walked away then, boots tapping toward the door, choosing oxygen before he could ration it. Instead, she signaled the bartender for another round and leaned forward, her knee brushing his under the table, the contact quick and electric. He did not pull away. He did not lean in. He simply registered it, a data point in whatever dark ledger he kept in his head.

They left together around closing, the air outside colder, cleaner, streetlights buzzing like bees trapped in glass. The city hummed with late-night machinery, trucks dragging metal through empty streets, train tracks shivering somewhere underground. He hailed a cab because walking would mean time for questions.

Her apartment smelled like old books, spilled coffee, and the ghost of paint thinner, the remnants of projects half-finished and restarted. The hallway carpet scratched lightly at their ankles, the elevator cables groaned in a low, aching rhythm as they rose. The hum of fluorescent lights in the corridor followed them to her door, a faint headache wrapped in a halo.

Inside, the world narrowed. Her place was small, crowded with canvases leaning against the walls, ashtrays with forgotten stubs, glass jars holding brushes stiff with dried color. On the kitchen counter sat a bowl of overripe fruit, their skins darkening, collapsing into sweetness and rot. The air was thick with the smell of turpentine and melted-down vanilla candles, wax hardened into irregular pools.

He stood in the doorway, taking it all in. “You live like a crime scene that refuses to be cleaned,” he said quietly.

“And you look like the detective who never files the report,” she answered.

He moved toward her then, slow, deliberate, that careful distance he had been keeping all evening finally collapsing. Their first kiss tasted like cognac and winter and the stale sugar from the rim of some forgotten cocktail. His mouth was controlled, at first, then not, lips pressing, teeth grazing, breath catching in small stutters that betrayed more than his words ever would.

Her hands found the back of his neck, fingers sinking into the warm tension there, feeling the knot of everything he refused to say. His fingers traced the edge of her jaw, the hollow at the base of her throat, studying her like you would study a map you only plan to borrow. Every contact felt both deliberate and withheld, as if he were constantly measuring how much of himself he could allow to exist in the same room as her.

They did not sleep much. The night was a fever written across tangled sheets, city light smearing blue and amber across the walls, each passing car casting brief, moving shadows over the curve of her shoulder, the shape of his hand on the small of her back. There were no gentle declarations, only half laughter, bitten-off curses, gasps that sounded like names and never fully formed into them.

Her muscles ached in that satisfying way that says you have worn yourself down to something honest. His gaze, when she glanced over, was already remote again, even with his body still warm beside her.

“You are thinking about leaving,” she murmured.

“I am thinking about coffee,” he replied, but his eyes were already on his shirt draped over the chair, on his boots by the door.

He did leave, eventually, after coffee, after a cigarette on the fire escape where the cold iron pressed through their bare feet, after a silence that sat heavy between them like an unpaid bill. He kissed her once more at the doorway, softer than the night before, which somehow hurt more. He said he would call, but the words sounded like he was reading them off someone else’s script.

Monterey was not naïve. She had known men who orbited pain and called it romance. This felt different, at first, because he did not make promises. He existed at a certain distance and invited her to miscalculate it.

The affair did not explode into drama. It seeped. It was messages at odd hours, his name glowing on her phone screen like a match in a dry field. It was cancellations at the last minute, excuses that sounded polished from overuse, I had a thing, something came up, I am not in a good place tonight. It was nights when he showed up at her door without warning, eyes exhausted, muscles strung tight as if he had been holding some invisible line all day and finally decided to let it snap in her space.

When he was present, he could be intoxicating. He would listen to her talk about the paintings she never finished, the jobs she barely endured, the mother who called only to remind her of all the lives she was failing to live. He would tilt his head, eyes steady, asking small, precise questions that made her feel seen in an almost violent way.

“You are too much,” he told her once, tracing absent circles on the inside of her wrist with his thumb, the sensation faint and maddening. “Too much heart, too much honesty. You pour yourself into people like they are bottomless, and then you blame yourself when they leak.”

“And you,” she said, “are what. Too little.”

“I am efficient,” he answered, smiling, eyes colder than his mouth. “I give exactly what I can afford to lose.”

Sometimes he would praise her as if she were a performance he had curated, calling her brilliant, feral, beautiful, in words that dripped with sincerity and condescension at once. Other times, he would pick at her like a loose thread, telling her she was dramatic, too sensitive, imagining things. If she cried, he grew distant. If she did not, he questioned whether she cared at all.

“You are so emotional,” he would say after pushing her past the point of composure, voice soft, almost fascinated, as if he were watching a storm through soundproof glass. “You need to calm down. Nobody wants to drown in someone else’s weather.”

Minor corrections often followed his compliments. You talk too much. You give too much. You are too intense. His affection felt like sunlight through prison bars, warm but limited, never fully reaching the skin that needed it most. When she tried to talk about what she needed, he would go quiet, gaze drifting away to some invisible horizon.

“I just do not have the capacity,” he would say. “It is not about you. It is just how I am wired.”

Yet when she pulled back, when she tried to match his distance, he would reappear with a sudden tenderness that left her dizzy, sending messages drenched in longing, calling her his only real thing in a counterfeit world, saying that no one understood him the way she did. He knew exactly how to sound like a confession while confessing nothing at all.

One night, they fought in the kitchen, the overhead mid-mod buzzing, casting a harsh pallor over everything. The sink was full of unwashed dishes, the smell of garlic and burnt butter clinging to the air from a dinner that had gone untouched. Her hands trembled around a glass of red wine that tasted like old arguments.

“You disappear for three days, no word,” she said, voice low and shaking, “and then you show up here acting like I am hysterical for wanting a single explanation.”

“I said I was busy,” he replied, leaning against the counter, arms crossed, eyes narrowed not in anger but in bored defense. “Why is that not enough?”

“Because busy people still send messages,” she snapped. “Because you were posting photos from some rooftop with people I have never met. Because you vanish whenever things get close, and then you come back expecting me to be exactly where you left me.”

“You are reading into everything,” he said. “You twist things so they hurt you. I cannot keep tiptoeing around your insecurities.”

Something hot and bitter rose in her throat. “You light landmines, then accuse me of walking wrong,” she said.

He rolled his eyes, a tiny gesture that cut deeper than any shout. “You are impossible,” he muttered. “You need so much. It is exhausting.”

The word hung in the air between them. Exhausting.

Her vision blurred for a moment, the room shimmering slightly, details distorting, the humming light turning into a high-pitched whine. The countertop pressed against her hip, solid and unforgiving. The taste of wine turned metallic, as if she were biting down on a coin.

“And yet you stay,” she whispered. “Why. If I am that much.”

“Because when it is good, it is good,” he said. “Because you make me feel something. But I cannot suffocate for you.”

“You never suffocate,” she replied. “You stand in the doorway and watch me drown, and you call it an experiment.”

He said she was being dramatic. He said she was making things up. He said she was distorting his words, his intentions, his entire being. By the end of the night, she was apologizing, throat raw, for how she had reacted, for how sensitive she was, for the way her heart kept tripping over itself in his presence. He left with a sigh, muttering that he needed space, that he hoped she would get some perspective.

For three weeks, she barely slept. The bed felt too big, the sheets too cold, the city too loud. Every vibration of her phone shot through her like electricity, only to settle into a dull ache when it turned out to be a bank notification, a spam call, a reminder from an app to breathe. His absence tasted like old coffee left on the counter, bitter and stale, clinging to her tongue even after she rinsed her mouth.

She painted during those weeks, violently. Canvases filled with layered color scraped back down to raw linen, shades of blue so deep they looked bottomless, streaks of black slashed across as if she were vandalizing her own sky. The studio filled with the sharp sting of solvents, the dry rasp of brush bristles grinding against surfaces. Her hands were stained, her nails chipped, her body humming with the kind of exhaustion that comes not from working too hard but from refusing to stop.

When he finally messaged, it was casual. Hey, hope you are okay. Been dealing with a lot. Can we talk?

She stared at the screen until her vision doubled. She could almost feel the weight of his thumb pressing those words into existence, the calculated softness of them. He was not saying he was sorry. He said he was the kind of person who had a lot to deal with, and she should be the kind of person who understood.

They met at a diner where the booths were cracked, and the coffee came in chipped white mugs. The air tasted like fried onions and melted cheese, the grill hissing behind the counter.

He looked tired, which was unfair, because she was the one who had been awake at three in the morning, counting the patterns in the ceiling plaster. He reached for her hand across the table, his fingers warm and familiar, the contact triggering a rush of memory so intense she almost forgave him before he spoke.

“I have been in a dark place,” he said. “You know how I get. I pull back. It has nothing to do with you. You feel it more than most would.”

“I feel it,” she said slowly, “because you place it on me.”

He frowned, a tiny crease between his brows. “You always think the worst of me,” he said. “I am doing my best. I am flawed, yes, but I care about you. You are one of the only real ones I have.”

The compliment was wrapped in chalk. Real. It was a word she had bled for her whole life. He knew that. He fed it back to her like a narcotic.

He promised to try. He promised to communicate more. He promised to show up, not to vanish, not to turn every conflict into an indictment of her nature. The promises sounded sincere, his voice low, eyes shining with a vulnerability that would have convinced almost anyone. Maybe it even convinced him.

For a while, he did show up. Texts in the morning. Calls late at night where his voice was raspy and warm, asking her what she was working on, what she was listening to, what she had eaten, pretending to worry. He brought her small things that felt enormous because they meant he had been thinking of her: a book by Vonnegut with underlined passages, a pack of red licorice, a battered vinyl record of Exile on Main Street, he said, that reminded him of the way she laughed.

They took walks through the city in the middle of the night, passing under streetlamps buzzing with moths, the sidewalk rough under their shoes. He would talk about abstract ideas, philosophy, strangers they saw, never about himself. When she tried to ask about his past relationships, he would shrug them off. They were crazy, they were needy, they were unstable, they did not understand him. The pattern was a neon sign she pretended not to see.

One evening, they ended up on her roof, sitting on the rough tar and gravel, the sky smeared with city glow that made stars look like a rumor. The wind carried the faint smell of hot asphalt cooling, cigarette smoke from some neighbor, and the distant sweetness of a bakery closing up for the night.

“Do you believe in love?” she asked, lying back, staring up at the blank glow.

He thought for a moment, fingers drumming on his knee. “I believe in gravity,” he said. “People fall. That is the only part that is real.”

“And what about staying?” she pressed.

“Staying is optional,” he replied. “Falling is not.”

She turned her head, studying his profile, the way his jaw tensed, the shadow of stubble along his throat catching the light. She wanted to tell him that love was not just the fall, but the bruise, the healing, the scar, the choice to walk on the same damaged limb anyway. Instead, she reached over and laced her fingers with his.

He let her. He did not squeeze back.

The decline was slow and precise. He stopped remembering details she told him, then accused her of never having said them. He made jokes at her expense in front of other people, then called her too sensitive when she winced. He would be tender when no one was watching, then cold when there was an audience, as if her feelings were a currency only valuable in private.

When she got a small gallery show, walls lined with her paintings, the air heavy with the smell of fresh varnish and cheap white wine, he arrived late, kissed her cheek distractedly, then spent most of the evening on his phone in the corner. When she introduced him as her partner, he gave her a look that felt like a slap, subtle, quick, gone before anyone else could see.

Later, when she asked him about it, he said, “Do not label things. It scares people away.”

“I am not trying to trap you,” she replied, voice shaking. “I am trying to name what you already inhabit.”

“You are so intense,” he said. “Can you not just enjoy what we have without suffocating it under expectations?”

The love between them began to feel like a room with no windows, air thinning every time she tried to open a door, and he insisted there was no door at all, that she was imagining the walls, that the dizziness was her own fault.

She started to doubt her memory. Did he really say that? Did he really promise this? Did he really pull away, or did she lean in too far? He would tell her she was misremembering, that she was twisting things, that he had never raised his voice when she could still feel the echo of it under her skin.

“You rewrite reality,” she told him one night, tears burning hot lines down her face, the salt sticking to her lips when she tried to speak. “You turn my reactions into the problem, so you never have to look at your actions.”

He sighed, long and theatrical. “You have been reading too many self-help threads,” he said. “Not everything is trauma. Sometimes you are just dramatic.”

His words settled into her like poison disguised as medicine. She began apologizing before she even knew what for. She stopped bringing up her fears, stopped asking for reassurances, stopped mentioning how her chest tightened when he left messages unread for days. The love between them became a quiet ritual of self-erasure.

The last night they were together did not announce itself. There was no storm, no slammed doors, no grand speech, just a slow unspooling.

They lay in bed, the sheets cool against their skin, the window open to let in the city’s restless breath. Somewhere below, a car radio played Charlie Parker, guitar strings bending under the weight of a voice that sounded like rust and regret. The room was dim, the only light coming from the orange glow of a streetlamp filtering through the blinds, striping Fitzgerald’s chest in shadow.

Monterey traced a line along his ribs with one fingertip, feeling the shift of bone and muscle, the subtle flinch when she moved too close to his heart. His breath was steady, his eyes on the ceiling, as if the plaster had a better story to tell.

“Do you ever think about what we are doing?” she asked quietly.

“Lying down,” he replied, the ghost of a smile on his mouth.

“Do you ever think about what you are doing to me?” she clarified.

He turned his head, expression unreadable. “I am giving you what I can,” he said. “If it is not enough, that is unfortunate, but it does not make me a villain.”

She swallowed, the inside of her throat dry, the taste of old smoke and unsaid words lingering. “You look at me like I am a cathedral,” she said, “and then call me demanding for asking you not to set fires in the nave.”

“You see,” he said, eyes drifting away, “this is what I mean. You turn everything into martyrdom. I am just trying to live my life without being cast as your salvation or your executioner.”

“You are not my salvation,” she said. “You are my habit.”

He did not answer. The silence between them felt heavy and granular, like sand slowly filling a room, grinding into every surface. She could hear his heartbeat where her head rested on his shoulder, steady, untroubled, the rhythm of someone who had already stepped out of the story in his mind.

That was the moment she understood that he would never leave her clean. He would stay until she shattered herself into small enough pieces that she could be swept into a corner of his life without making a mess.

In the morning, he got dressed in the slow, methodical way he always did, each button, each folded cuff, an act of quiet retreat. The room smelled of sleep and hangover and something faintly salty, like the aftermath of a storm that had not yet happened.

“You will be okay,” he said at the door, as if reassuring a child. “You are stronger than you think.”

She smiled, a thin brittle curve. “I know,” she said. “That is why I am going to lose you.”

He paused, frowning slightly. “What does that mean?”

“It means you cannot keep someone who finally believes their own memory,” she answered.

He shrugged, as if the weight of her words was nothing, and left, the door clicking shut with an ordinary finality that felt obscene. No slam, no echo. Just absence.

The weeks that followed dragged and flashed at the same time. Nights bled into mornings, coffee tasted like ash, music sounded like static. The city kept moving, indifferent, sirens wailing, buses grinding over potholes, the sidewalks still rough under her boots. She would catch glimpses of him on social media, smiling in photos that looked like advertisements for a life that had never included her.

He did not really reach out. A like on an old post. A reaction to a story. Small electronic hauntings that said I remember you, but not enough to break my own pattern. She almost replied once, fingers hovering over the keyboard, but the memory of his voice telling her she was too much burned them away.

So she wrote instead.

She wrote about a man who lived like a closed door with the light on behind it, and a woman who kept knocking until her knuckles bled. She wrote about a love that tasted like cheap bourbon, sweet going down, corrosive in the morning. She wrote about how you can miss someone who never fully arrived, how the body grieves what the mind never truly had.

In those pages, Fitzgerald became larger and smaller at once, myth and pathology, storm and empty weather report. She captured the way his hand felt on the back of her neck when he was being kind, and the hollow that opened in her chest when he turned away while still in the same room. She painted him with words the way she painted her canvases, layers of color and scraped away truth, until what remained was something raw and undeniable.

The story did not redeem him. It did not vilify her. It simply told the truth, which is often the cruelest kind of love affair there is.

Months later, long after the last unread message had finally been deleted, she walked past the bar where they had first met. The brick wall still leaned into the sidewalk with that same exhausted posture. The night smelled of exhaust and rain, the pavement slick with reflected light. Somewhere, a passing car was playing Hank Williams, guitar strings bending under the weight of his voice that understood loss as a second language.

She stopped under the purple buzzing streetlamp where he had once stood, listening to the hum of electricity trapped in glass, the faint buzz vibrating in her bones. Her heart did not race. Her hands did not shake. The ghost of his presence felt thin now, like dust in sunlight, visible only if you were looking for it, and she was finally, blessedly, not.

Monterey lit a cigarette, the smoke curling around her face, stinging her eyes, settling on her tongue with that familiar bitter heat. She took a slow drag, exhaled, and let the night move around her.

Fitzgerald would go on repeating his pattern, drifting in and out of other people’s lives, offering crumbs and calling them feasts, vanishing whenever the mirror turned back toward him. Somewhere, he would tell another woman she was too much, too sensitive, too intense, and she would believe him until she did not.

Monterey went home to her studio that smelled of paint and coffee and new beginnings. She put on a record, Blood on the Tracks, that crackled with age, a voice raw and aching pouring out of the speakers, sliding along the chipped rims of her cheap wine glasses, settling in the corners of the room. She picked up a brush, dragged color across canvas, listening to the rough whisper of bristles against textile, the quiet percussion of her own breathing.

The love affair did not end with closure. It ended with clarity.

It was not a tragedy, not precisely. It was a lesson written in skin and late-night messages, in the way her body still tensed when her phone lit up, in the way she now chose who was allowed to enter her world.

She had loved a man who lived at a distance, who mistook his own reflection for depth, who fed on admiration and called it connection. She had drowned and then learned to swim. She had held the blues against her ribs and realized that sadness could be a song and not a sentence.

In the end, the cruelest thing was also the most liberating.

He had never truly been hers.

She, finally, was.

-jspc ] the streetartist of wanton [