Page 210 of Across His Line

“So people have to get close to read it,” she says.

I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how many people have been close enough. I don’t like the answer either way.

“When’d you get it?”

“Seventeen.”

“Who took you?”

“Nobody. I took myself.” She says it like it’s obvious. “There was a place by the bus station that didn’t check IDs very hard. I paid cash.”

And I can see her at seventeen, alone, sitting in some chair by a bus station with some guy she doesn’t know holding her wrist under a lamp the way I’m holding it now. Her counting out the money on a counter. Her walking back out onto the street by herself with it wrapped in plastic, and nobody waiting outside, and nobody asking her later what it was.

“Why that quote?” I ask.

She’s quiet a while. When she talks, it comes out slow, like she’s never said it out loud before.

“I needed proof,” she says. “That it ends. Whatever it is. That the worst hour of your life, eventually, it’s just an hour you used to have.” She stops. “People kept trying to make me feel better. It never lasted. Mostly they just wanted me to hurry up, so they didn't have to watch anymore. I wanted something that couldn’t lie to me.”

“So everything passes,” I say.

“Eventually.”

“That’s depressing as fuck.”

She tips her head back on my shoulder and looks up at me in the lamplight, and there’s a little smile on her mouth that doesn’t go anywhere near her eyes.

“It kept me alive,” she says.

That shuts me up.

I look at the words and do the math without wanting to. Seventeen. I knew her at seventeen. I walked past her in hallways at seventeen. Whatever she needed proof she’d make it through, I was in there somewhere. Her life was bigger and worse than anything I ever did to her, but I was one more thing she had to sit through and wait out.

“I hate it,” I say.

She goes stiff against me. “The tattoo?”

“No.” I don’t know how to say it. My jaw’s tight. I want to hit something. “That you needed it.”

She doesn’t answer. I run my thumb over the words. Back and forth, the same way she does it. The skin there is soft.

I keep holding her wrist longer than I need to. I'm not even reading it anymore.

“Rafe,” she says.

“What?”

“You can let go.”

I don’t. I keep turning that word over and it keeps landing wrong, like a puck I took in the ribs. Some part of me wants to argue with four words on a wrist like they said something to my face. I don’t know why it bothers me that much.

I reach back with my free hand and turn off the lamp.

But I keep her wrist. I put it back down on my chest, over my heart, and leave my hand around it in the dark with my thumb over the words, like if I hold them down long enough, they'll stop being true.

A Three-Fifty Cookie Tin