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Conor
The campus was quiet. The hallways dark. The rooms empty. Chairs on desks. Blinds turned down. Easels stacked against the walls. With Aurnia’s hand in mine, I paused to try a random door handle. It relented and I pushed the door in.
“Are we supposed to be here?” Aurnia whispered.
The academic building with its old wood floors and stained-glass windows intimidated her. It once intimidated me, too. But then I met my little thief.
“Absolutely not,” I told her with a devilish grin before tugging her inside after me.
I closed the door. Drew the lock. I limped to the professor’s desk at the front of the room. Aurnia watched, one arm across her stomach, clutching an elbow, as I opened the top drawer and collected everything atop the desk into it.
“This was the place where I once imagined my fresh start would take place,” I explained, pausing to glance around the room.
There were still ghosts lingering. The ghost of a young artist taking diligent notes at his easel. The ghost of a boy with a woman, red hair, naked, in his mind to paint. The ghost of a student who has had dreams bigger than he should have. Those ghosts were still there, drifting like the low-hanging clouds outside as the rain fell. But they were fading to wisps. Fog to be cleared by morning light.
I grunted as I hoisted the duffle bag I’d brought up onto the desk. The painkillers I’d gotten from a late-night ER were wearing off. I had more, but I wanted to be present for this. Here. Here with her.
“For the longest time, I thought my new life—that stupid, stupid dream—had been ripped away from me. “
Aurnia was still behind me. She was watching. Listening.
I arranged the tattooing tools and ink along the edge of the desk, my fingers shaking around the tiny pots of yellow and orange and red. “And yet all these years later this is exactly where I am going to get just that: my fresh start, my new life, my stupid dream.”
I slipped out of my leather jacket. It was nothing but cold and wet anyway. I tore the t-shirt over my shoulder. “It’s not the way I expected it. Hell, it’s nothing like the way I expected it. It’s messier. Dirtier. Harder even. But it’s here. It’s been here, even when I hadn’t wanted to see it. When I’d been too afraid to see it.”
I turned to face Aurnia bare-chested. All my scars there for her to see. Her eyes met mine as I touched the empty spot on my chest. The place above the phoenix. The only untouched skin on my body. The hole that had been like a canyon over my heart.
“Come here,” I told her.
She came to me and I took her hand in mine. I placed her delicate fingertips where mine had been. I wanted her to feel my heart.
“I want you to tattoo me,” I said. “Here.”
“Conor—” Aurnia tried to protest, but I held her hand in place.
“Right here,” I insisted, splaying her hand over my skin. “Right here I want your sun.”
“I can’t,” she said.
Aurnia looked up at me from beneath those long, dark eyelashes. There were no black smudges beneath her eyes like usual. She trembled, closed her eyes, leaned into my touch as I brushed my thumb across her eyelashes. When she opened her eyes, they were embers burning in coal: my little thief.
I took the tattoo gun from the desk and tried to place it in Aurnia’s hand. She shook her head, panic in her eyes. I forced her fingers round the tool even as she tried to push it away.
“Conor,” she whispered, her voice desperate.
I said nothing as I released the gun. It was hers to either hold onto. Or watch drop.
“I’m not fighting anymore,” I told her, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
With the fever that still lingered, her skin felt cool. I kept my lips against her. Breathed in the scent of her shampoo. It was the cheap stuff they keep in tiny bottles in motels. But on her it could have been the most expensive perfume.
I inhaled deeply and then pulled away from her. Without a word, I lowered myself to the desk. My left leg shook like I was going to the electric chair. Like I was waiting for a lethal injection in the neck instead of a droplet of ink in the heart.
“Conor,” Aurnia said as she stood over me like a nurse who could do nothing for her dying patient. Her eyes trailed over my chest, my arms, my neck. She shook her head. “I’m too inexperienced. I hardly know what I’m doing. All your other tattoos… Conor, they’re beautiful. They’re art. They’re perfect. If I— I’ll ruin it. I’ll ruin you.”
My only response was to reach up and switch on the gun. Its hum competed with the patter of the rain against the windows. It relaxed me. Relaxed my body. I could almost imagine it was pouring outside. That my leg wasn’t on fire. That I was at peace.
The pain Aurnia could bring me would be a relief. A gift. A mercy. I touched my finger to my sternum like I was showing her how to insert a knife between two ribs.
