No one sees, the first time a pink dot appears on Parliament House, tucked in the ridge between the third pillar and the ground.

It’s Anna’s idea, one night while we’re drunk and kissing, kissing while drunk. “I want to make a tally of every kiss we’ve ever had.” She throws out her arm, sloshing soju out the window. Her car’s parked on top of the hill and it’s just us and kicked-off shoes and music blaring. “I want to show the whole goddamn world I’m kissing you.” 

“You’re such a romantic,” I tease.

Her eyes widen. “You don’t believe me?” She brings my mouth to hers. “Sarah Kwan, I’m gonna paint the whole city in your kisses.”

We taste like white grape and smudged cherry lipstick and I laugh, coiling my fingers through her ponytail. “The aunties will have something to say about that.”

“Screw the aunties,” she says.

*

One: Pull up in the dead of night.

Two: Hop a fence with the love of your life.

Three: Crouch in the shadows of a column the British left behind, along with their laws.

Four: Pop the cap of lipstick in shade Captive, watch as she paints your kiss onto the wall.

Five: Get the hell out of dodge. 

*

My heart could beat right out of my chest. She turns my cardiac system inside out, changes the rhythm every time she smiles. Anna Long is bad for my blood pressure and she’s terrible for my life expectancy; when I’m with her my body falls to pieces and relearns itself again and again, learns ways of becoming it didn’t even know it could become. 

She wants to paint the world in my kisses, leave tags on every corner we’ve held hands, and it’s the cheesiest thing but maybe we deserve cheesy every once in a while, you know? Everyone’s always obsessed with our pain. We deserve to be innocent, stupid kids for once. We deserve the right to be obnoxious. To do things like declare gratuitous, everlasting love. 

Like puckering pink onto Parliament House.

*

The second dot: on the side of a fountain. The Defence Minister stops to admire the ixoras growing along the marble, plucking a flower and twirling it in her hands, remembering how she once plucked the stems and sucked the sweep sap claiming it was magic. Then, remembering she’s forty-one now, not eleven, she lets it fall. As the red flutters, subsumed in the frothing currents, a secret kiss stays fervently in its place.

A custodian spots it first. After that he starts finding new ones every day, budding in the most furtive places. “Like rash,” he mumbles amusedly. Or measles. Or pollen. Either way, it’s spreading. 

One night he hears scuffling footsteps, sees the whip of white sneakers vanishing into the dark. The next day he finds the new dot on a lamp. He brushes it with a thoughtful finger, thinking about being that kind of reckless again.

*

My phone rings and its Arisha, their syllables tripping into one another. “Sarah. I told my friend about what you guys did, and she told her brother, and he just went on a date and he and the other guy went and left one on the wall, and–” 

–and rebellion, especially the romantic kind, lilts like folksongs and passes down quicker. This is a small city, but you’d be surprised how many of us you can find, if you peel back curtains, unfold prayers. We’re not on the shelves or on the screen. But we’re tucked in the ridge between the third pillar and the ground; we’re dotted under the lip of a fountain; we’re scattered between streetlights, hung in the eaves, strewn across tiles like a constellation. Even if they get one, they’ll never find them all. 

Or, one day we’ll run out of hiding places, and the kisses will spill out into the open. And they’ll keep wiping and wiping, but the thing about kisses is that there isn’t just one. The first one might be the most exciting, but if you do it right, they’ll keep on coming.

Anna and I, eating cookies in her bed in old T-shirts and inventing stories about the people the kisses belong to. The one on the fence: a drag queen swept by after her show, pressed her lips to the metal and laughed. The one blotched like wings, against the balustrade: a kid who isn’t sure, still wearing ratty sandals and a shirt their mother likes. 

I like to think that this is a milestone, where girls like us and boys like them and those who aren’t either mark their first kisses with permanence. A coming-of-age movie where everyone lives life a little too large, plays music a little too loud, speaks in quotes that no one would ever really say out loud. Getaway cars, smuggled lipstick, soft-soled shoes, hurried whispers. 

Anna smiles, runs her thumb over the back of my hand in a way that sends electricity up my spine. “You’re such a romantic.”

*

We’re not supposed to leave kisses where people can see. Although, if we asked very nicely we could leave them on enclave walls, designated to be hipster and experimental, hemmed in by boundaries and paid per square metre.

In 1994 a boy called Michael Fay was sentenced to the cane for vandalising trains, and we didn’t break into train cars but we did break, and we left our marks all over the place. They’ll charge us if they catch us.

They won’t.

We’re renegades loving on our own time, a clusterfuck of people loving stupid and fierce. We dab the penumbra of our lips with gloss and spray, with crayon and permanent marker, with foil confetti shredded to fit. She’s the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me, and Anna Long, I’m going to paint the world in your kisses.