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Once the man chose his earring—a simple gold stud—Jasper cleaned his earlobe with a prep wipe and dotted it with a tiny purple mark. He passed him a hand mirror so he could inspect the placement. “Does that look good?”

“I fear I don’t have a trained eye for such things, but I trust in your expertise.”

Jasper didn’t usually do piercings. But yeah, sure. Expertise.

He rolled up the sleeves of his black button-down, sanitized his hands, and pulled his gloves on. “Is this your first piercing?”

“Yes. And likely my last. This one is purely for sentimental reasons.”

Jasper didn’t ask the reasons. Hiyori might have, but he thought himself an honest man, and didn’t see the point in asking a question when he didn’t care about the answer. He pulled his chair closer with his foot and opened the package containing the needle. When he glanced up, the man was staring at him.

Jasper couldn’t help the immediate lifting of his eyebrows. It was an expression that asked, rather bluntly, may I fucking help you?

He wasn’t hostile by nature. His face just did whatever it wanted, with or without his input.

Unbothered, the man pointed to Jasper’s cheek, just shy of touching. “You have a little something there.”

Charcoal, most likely. He’d probably smudged it there when he wiped his face earlier. Leaning away from the man’s finger, he rubbed his cheek against his shoulder, unable to touch anything that wasn’t sterile at the moment. His stubble scratched against the soft fabric, as did his snakebites—the twin silver piercings under his lip.

“Your tattoos are lovely,” the man said.

Jasper followed his gaze to his own forearm, exposed by his rolled-up sleeves. “Oh. Thank you.”

One of his arms was tattooed and the other wasn’t. The one that was had tattoos from his shoulder to his fingers, various things, all in the same heavy black style, filled out with wisps of black that looked like curls of smoke or flourishes of ink. The tattoo visible at the moment was a mongoose skull with a snake winding through it. The snake’s mouth was open just above his wrist, and its tail disappeared beneath his rolled sleeve.

“I’m Konrad. I realize I’ve neglected to introduce myself.”

Jasper picked up the needle. Clients didn’t usually introduce themselves, the paperwork did that for them. “Would you like me to count, Konrad?”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you.”

So sophisticated. Jasper was educated enough, but this man—Konrad—reminded Jasper poignantly that he was, at heart, just white trash from the backwoods of Georgia. He had taken great care to lose the accent, though. An awful Southern drawl born of moving from port to port, from the Carolinas to Georgia to Virginia. Always moving from one fishing town to another with his dad.

As polite as Konrad was being now, he looked and carried himself the same way as many of the people who would have laughed as soon as Jasper opened his mouth, when he still had the accent. Sometimes the laughter was mocking, sometimes it was gleeful, like they’d found something exotic in the wild. Both were insulting.

Konrad didn’t flinch when the needle went through. Not that Jasper expected much of a reaction, since the earlobe was one of the least painful places to have pierced. He secured the jewelry and leaned back into his own chair. “There we go,” Jasper said, handing him the mirror again.

Konrad held it up to check his reflection and appeared satisfied. “Perfect.” He stood up, smoothed his shirt and buttoned his jacket. He listened while Jasper told him how to care for it while it healed, accepting the trial-sized bottle of saline spray that came free with a piercing. “I got the impression you weren’t looking to take any clients, when the young lady asked. Thank you for making the time.”

Heat crept into Jasper’s face. He didn’t usually mind being blunt, but he hadn’t meant to make it so obvious. “It’s no problem, really.”

“Once I’ve fully healed, I can return to have the jewelry changed, yes?” Konrad confirmed as Jasper walked him to the door.

“Oh, you don’t have to come in for that.” Jasper stuck his hands in his pockets, rocking back onto the heels of his boots. “Just make sure your hands are clean and just…” He took his own hands back out and made a vague screwing motion that was meant to look like changing an earring.

Konrad smiled. “If it’s quite alright, I think I’d like to come back in for that. Your hands are far steadier than mine. This earring is quite valuable to me, I would hate to lose it.”

“Yeah. That’s fine. You can make an appointment online, but it won’t take a minute to change that out, so you can also just stop by if you’re in the area.”

“I will nearly always be in the area, going forward. I’m opening a restaurant just down the block from this fine establishment.”

Jasper knew all the businesses on their block. There was only one vacancy, and it was on the corner, maybe four doors down from the tattoo shop. “You’re the one who bought the old Dogwood Building.”

“Indeed.” Konrad offered his hand. “I’ll see you soon, then, Jasper.”

Jasper shook it. He’d discarded his gloves, so the touch was skin to skin, something he wasn’t used to since he always wore gloves to tattoo. “Not too soon,” he warned.

Konrad smiled again, or maybe he hadn’t stopped. He inclined his head to Jasper and walked out, the bell chiming in his wake, the light catching the gold stud in his ear as he stepped out into the afternoon sunshine. The door swung shut and the heavily tinted glass separated Jasper from the daylight once more. All the windows and glass in the shop were tinted almost black, partly for aesthetics but mostly for privacy and to keep them from roasting in the summer.