A compass rose on the back of the wrist. A run of script I didn't let myself read. An anchor. And lower, near the bend of the elbow, a band of names in heavier, older ink — a different hand, a different year, nothing you get for decoration. My eye caught on it, and I moved on, because some tattoos are a man's history and some are his grief, and you don't put a finger on a stranger's grief over coffee.
“Military,” I said, nodding at the compass and the anchor. “And you didn't pick these off a flash sheet. Someone who knew you did them.”
“Most of 'em.” He held my eyes a beat too long, and the porch went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
I looked down into my coffee, which was safer. “I'll stop. I read strangers like charts and then I say the chart out loud, and I am now going to drink my coffee and be a normal person.”
He didn't drink his coffee, just kept that almost-smile on me, and I'd got as far as planning my own quiet death by mug when rescue arrived in a kaftan.
“Morning, lovebirds!”
Willow stood at her fence in a kaftan the color of a tropical disease and a sunhat the size of a satellite dish, watering can in hand, the whole of her tipped toward us.
“Morning, Willow.”
“Don't ‘morning Willow’ me, I have eyes. Caleb Maddox on Sophia's porch at the crack of dawn.” She fanned herself with the hat. “I'm eighty-four, dear. I am not dead.”
“Belly dancing today?” I tried.
“Nine sharp, and Deborah does not hold the back row.” She pointed the hat at me like a wand. “You two enjoy your day. And don't be good.”
"We'll do our best," Caleb said, and the smile went all the way up and took his eyes with it, and he shook his head at Willow like she was a much-loved menace.
“That's the spirit.” She gathered her can and her dignity and sailed up her path.
He watched her go, then turned the slow look back on me, and the morning tilted toward something.
“So,” I said, before it could get there. “Show me what's in your garage.”
He took my hand and walked me over — down the path and across the warm asphalt of my own road, in front of God and Willow and anyone awake. His garage door was up. He'd left it up before he ever knocked on mine.
I stopped in the mouth of it and forgot the door, because of the bike.
I had never once looked at it in daylight.
It was black, and then it wasn't: a deep oxblood came up through it at the edges of the tank, lit from inside where the light caught. Worked into it, fine and patient and nothing a machine had done, was a long line of artwork running the tank and down the cowl. I stepped closer without choosing to, and closer, until I saw the pattern was made of things — a compass rose I'd had eighteen inches from my face ten minutes ago, a run of script, a shape near the back I couldn't yet make out.
"You did that." It didn't come out as a question.
"Yeah."
"All of it. The build. The paint." I couldn't look away from it to look at him. "All of it."
"All of it. Better part of two years."
My hand came up and stopped an inch off the tank, the heat coming up off the metal into my palm. He'd come up on my left; I felt the warmth of him down my side before he spoke.
"You can touch it," he said, low.
I laid my hand on the steel. Sun-warm, and smooth, and under the smooth the faint grain of every layer he'd put down.
I followed the line of the artwork with one finger, toward the shape I hadn't been able to read — and he leaned in over my shoulder to point it out, his chest warm against my back, close enough that I heard him breathe.
And the shape came clear. A headstone. Worked into the oxblood, small and exact, and across the face of it, fine as thread, a name. JASON.
I went still over it. I'd walked past that name once already this morning — the band of older, heavier ink at the bend of his elbow, the piece I hadn't touched.
"Who's Jason?" I'd turned to face him; the bike couldn't answer me.
