"And mirrors."
"Why?"
"Zoe wanted to go."
The name lands in the room like I dropped something breakable. I've never said it here. Not once, across all the sessions where Vanessa asked if I was seeing anyone and I said no, across that conversation months ago where I said she was a customer and Vanessa said I looked lighter and I said it was nothing. The name has been absent from this chair, and now it's here.
Vanessa doesn't react. She keeps working, blue ink, white highlights, the water taking shape on my skin. But I can feel the quality of her attention shift. She's listening with her whole body the way she does when she knows something is coming.
"Zoe," she says. "The customer."
"She's not a customer anymore."
"Since when?"
"Five weeks. Six. I don't know." I do know. I know exactly. The kiss. The first time she stayed.
"And she got you into a gym."
"She got me into borrowed shorts and a t-shirt and I did pull-ups in front of people who own water bottles. It was gross. I don't ever want to go back. But, if she asks, I know I probably will. Because it's her and she's got this way of asking and I know I'm going to say yes even before she finishes talking."
Vanessa almost smiles. I can see it in her cheek, the muscle pulling before she stops it. She doesn't smile while she works because smiling shifts her posture and her posture determines her lines and her lines are everything.
"The bar customer," she says. "Twenty-two."
"Yeah."
"The one you said was nothing."
"I was wrong."
Vanessa lifts the needle. Wipes the area. Sits back in her stool and looks at me over the tops of her glasses, the librarian-who-could-kill-you look that I have received approximately forty times in three years and that has never once failed to make me feel like I'm being examined at a molecular level.
"Tell me," she says.
"Tell you what?"
"Whatever's making you say her name in my chair after weeks of pretending she doesn't exist."
I look at my arm. The koi is almost finished. The water is filling in around it, giving it context, giving it somewhere to swim. For eight months this fish has been floating in empty skin, beautiful but isolated, a creature without an environment. Now it has one.
"She called me her girlfriend," I say. "At the gym. In the locker room. She didn't plan it. She just said it, and then she looked at me like she'd accidentally stepped off a cliff and was waiting to see if she'd fly or fall."
"What did you do?"
"I said it back."
Vanessa nods. She doesn't say anything for a long moment. Then she snaps fresh gloves on, picks up the machine, and goes back to the water detail.
"I've been doing your ink for years," she says, working. "The moth was your first big piece. You sat in this chair for four hours and didn't say a word. I asked you about your life and you gave me nothing. 'Fine.' 'Same.' 'The bar.' Three words on rotation."
"I'm private."
"You were shut down. There's a difference." She blends a shadow along the current line. "The geometric piece, you talked more. Started telling me about Anthem, about Carl, about the contract. Started eating before sessions instead of showing upempty. Started tipping the receptionist, which you didn't do the first year because you didn't think about other people's money situations because you were too busy surviving your own."
"Vanessa."
"I'm not done." She wipes, checks, continues. "The koi you asked for specifically. You brought me a reference for a fish swimming upstream. You said you wanted it on the forearm so you could see it. A fish fighting a current on the arm you pour with, the arm you close the bar with, the arm you built your whole life around." She looks at me. "You didn't pick that by accident."
