"Nothing. I just like both versions."
She cocks her head. "There's only one version."
"There's the one with the jacket and the one without it."
"Same person."
"I know." I zip my gym bag. "That's why I like both."
We stop at the front desk on the way out. Liz is on the phone, but she waves. Charlie is still drawing. He holds up his graph paper masterpiece as we pass: a fire truck, red, with a figure on top that might be a firefighter or might be a very tall bird.
"That's amazing," I tell him.
"It's Engine 11," he says.
He goes back to drawing. Torres is going to hear about this, which means by next shift the entire crew will know I was at Foundation Fitness with my girlfriend and there will be questions and Teague is absolutely worth those questions and any awkwardness that comes with them.
We walk to Nico's. Teague gets her egg and cheese on a roll with real butter. I get the same because she's right, Nico's uses the good butter, and we eat on the bench outside and watch the neighborhood move and I lean into her shoulder and she lets me stay there.
"Girlfriend," I say into the leather of her jacket.
"You already said that."
"I know. I'm going to keep saying it."
"Figures." But she smiles and her arm comes around my shoulder, casual, like it's always been there, and we sit on the bench and eat our sandwiches and the morning is warm and ordinary and ours.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Teague
The water detail takes hours.
Vanessa works in sections. She starts at the wrist, where the koi's tail curls, and builds the current outward in tight, layered strokes that hurt in a way I've stopped registering as pain and started registering as progress. Blue and white and gray, the water threading between scales, filling the negative space that's been empty since we started this piece eight months ago.
I hold still. I'm good at holding still. Three years in this chair and my body knows the protocol: flatten the arm, loosen the shoulder, breathe through the tender spots, let Vanessa do what Vanessa does.
The shop is quiet. It's morning, no walk-ins yet. The receptionist is at the front eating a bagel and scrolling her phone. Music from the shop playlist, something low and instrumental that I don't recognize but that fills the room without competing with the needle.
"Stop flexing," Vanessa says.
"I'm not flexing."
"You're tensing. Same result. The skin bunches and my lines drift." She wipes the area, checks her work, dips back into the blue. "What's in your head?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing doesn't tense."
I exhale and flatten my arm again. She's right. I'm holding tension in my shoulders that's pushing down into my forearm and she can feel it through the needle because Vanessa can feel everything through the needle, three years of reading my body the way she reads a design, knowing where the resistance is before I admit to it.
"I went to a gym," I say.
Vanessa's needle pauses for exactly one second. Then it resumes. "You."
"Me."
"A gym. With equipment."
