Obsessions

4.[rūn]

"Nat," I sighed. "We're so cliched. It's inevitable, no matter what we do, you will still be the hot bad boy with the sad backstory and I will still be the good girl gone bad who is also featuring a sad backstory!"
"False!" Nat declared. "We are so not clichéd. I mean, we might look it to other people, but who gives a damn about what people think? That's so..so early 2000's."

He was right, we weren't clichéd, not to ourselves, at least.
Perhaps cliché is a word used by the ignorant, and believed by the unknowing.

Nat pushed his SnapBack back to look at his work, and then continued, "Alex, in reality we're just not bad enough to be the clichéd bad kids. We're just too ordinary."

Ordinary? I wasn't too sure about that.

I watched him spray on a cabbage and write "my cabbages". After my first year with him, I had decided that I would never understand his references.

Nat's SnapBack sagged forward and fell on his eyebrows. As he was about to push it back again, I took it, "Nat what does this emblem even stand for?"
It was a broken heart held together with a safety pin.
He bit his lip failing to hide a grin, "Some things are best left unsaid." Unsatisfied with his answer I put his SnapBack on and continued working.

Black, white and yellow. It was a beautiful mess consisting of lines, arrows, and particularly unladylike words. Perfect.

I eyed Nat's. His was a splash of colour that when looked at carefully, formed words and phrases like "my cabbages!", "lemur", and "flying bison".
If I'd learned anything about Nat's artistic style after living with him for two years, it was to never try to understand Nat's work, just enjoy it as it is. Because his work was a visual representation of what goes on inside his head, and what goes on in there is something else...

"Hey Nat," I said, finding my voice. "How much time do we have left?"

Nat looked down at his watch, as he did so, his lip ring glinted in the sunlight. "About 2 minutes," he said. He went back to work.

2 minutes? I pulled up the silk bandana that had fallen to my collar bones. The black bandana covered the bridge of my nose and stopped underneath my chin. When had we put on the bandanas for the first time, Nat had whistled and said, "Damn, Alex. Your brown hair, and your green eyes, and the black bandana!" I had giggled at his response.

I watched Nat slide his bandana over his chiseled features. First his sharp jawline, then his cheekbones...
Nat, like myself, had the kind of cheekbones that a b.itch could get cut from. My cheekbones were high, yes, but Nat's everything seemed to have been carved by Gods.

He grinned at me, "Done? Without me?"

I rolled my eyes, "Of course not."

It was tradition for us to slap our "artist names" on at the same time, a minute before the police were expected to arrive.

Across the centre of his work, in black, was his artist name, Legend.
In a couple of strokes my artist name, Royalē, was placed in a corner of my forbidden masterpiece.

Alex," Nat turned to look at me, "we have to go now."

This was the best part.

We listened for the fast muffled footsteps coming towards us--we always waited until they're almost too close.
I smirked at Nat, they're coming.
Simultaneously, the two of us reach to pull our hoods on.
"Run," Nat whispers.