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Conor
Of course she picked that exact moment. Of fucking course.
I had seen it coming. How could I not have seen it coming, like a goddamn freight train down the line? I had seen the way Aurnia eyed me from across the parlour. A confrontation was building. I knew it. Every time I raised my voice at her I was adding fuel to the fire. I knew this, too.
What else could I do? How else was there to push her away? To keep her at arm’s length, didn’t I have to extend my arm? Didn’t I have to raise my fist?
After the night I’d taken her to my apartment, I had avoided her all day. I had waited till I expected her to be gone to come into the shop. I had cursed that she was still there. But I did what I had to do: I yelled at her. Scared her, probably. Scared her a little. She had been expecting a change between us, I supposed. A new kindness from me. A gentleness. A tenderness…
For the first week or so it was that kind of shocked, confused look that she gave me when she thought I couldn’t see her. Eyes wide, even more childlike than usual. Her head tilted slightly. Hair falling over her eye, even after she tucked it behind her ear.
Aurnia must have known that I was an unhappy man, an irritable, moody, slightly violent man. I don’t think she quite understood the depths of my unhappiness. It was frightening to her that I wasn’t just irritable, but erratic. Not just moody, but hateful. Not, as it turned out, a slightly violent man. If I threw something in anger and frustration across the room, it was, during those days, fear with which she looked up at me from her place on the floor, kneeling beside a dustpan amongst shards of broken glass.
I should have known that fear would not last long in my little thief. She was too stubborn for fear. Too clever. Too thick-headed as well. She’d spent her whole childhood learning to chase it off. A girl like her in a house like hers never had the luxury of fear. If she’d given into fear, the world would have swallowed her whole. I knew this, because it was the same for me.
I watched the fear burning off in her eyes like a frost in the sun, the paralysing crystals melting as her gaze grew brighter, bolder. I saw this and I knew what was coming. It was inevitable.
My little thief was going to pick a fight with me. She was going to make her demands. She was going to stomp her little foot and huff hot air from her little chest and cross her little arms in a little sign of defiance. Any other day I would have been ready for it.
Aurnia didn’t pick any other day. Aurnia picked that day.
I could see it the second she hesitated at the front door. The night was black and rain rattled noisily on the windows.
The street outside was empty. I’d been staring at it for hours while my nails dug deeper into the woodgrain of my drawing desk. A car hadn’t come by in exactly one hour and nineteen minutes. I knew because the ticking of the clock was pulsing in my fiery veins as I waited for everyone to leave. Rian wandered out with his notepad and no umbrella thirty-six minutes ago. Mason got into a cab twenty-two minutes ago. And Aurnia had walked to the door nineteen seconds ago.
She had no reason to hesitate at the door. Her bus, as I knew all too well, was pulling up to the stop down the street in less than a minute, just enough time to run through the rain to make it as the doors hissed closed.
Her umbrella, a gift from Mason from the lost and found bin, was in her hand. Her rain jacket was on over her black jean jacket. There was no reason to hesitate. And yet she did and I knew. Through a haze of pain and a fog of pain medication, I knew.
I watched her little hand fall away from where she had reached for the doorknob. It came to rest at her side. I watched her back rise and fall and I prayed—prayed—that she was just trying to remember whether she forgot her key. I willed her to lift her hand back up, to dash into the pouring rain, to make her bus. I would have dragged her there myself if it was taking everything in me to stay upright as the pain in my leg made my knees shake behind the desk.
Go, I silently urged her with clenched teeth. Go, go. Aurnia, please. If I’ve ever been deserving of a kindness, please, please for the love of God, go!
Of course she didn’t. Of course she didn’t because I was at my weakest. My absolute weakest. And she chose now.
Maybe the drugs made my eyes sluggish, but Aurnia seemed to move with a superhuman speed after turning away from the door. The umbrella went rattling away into the corner by the front door. The Open sign blinked off as she yanked the cord from the outlet. She slipped out of her raincoat and it went soaring across the room to land on the back of the old couch. I tried to follow her movements as she gathered up an armful of instruments from Mason and Rian’s workstations.
It was all happening too quickly. I couldn’t think. The pain was making me dull. The painkillers duller. Panic grew in my chest. Tightened and constricted my breathing. What was I going to do? What was I going to do?
It felt like it wasn’t the woodgrain of the desk that was splintering anymore, but my nails themselves. I dug them in even deeper, even harder. I was hoping that focusing on a different kind of pain would focus me. It didn’t.
Aurnia came to stand in front of me and her eyes flashed like the light off the silver tools she held in her arms. I was helpless before her. I was sure of it.
“I think that’s been quite enough,” she said.
I could do nothing but force air in through my nose, force air out through my nose.
“You promised to teach me to tattoo and you’re going to do just that. And you’re going to do it now.”
I let my chin fall to my chest. The only reason my arms could support me against the desk was because I’d locked them out completely. There was no strength left in me. Only pain.
A drop of sweat from my forehead plopped onto my sketchbook. I watched it spread over the empty page. I hadn’t been able to draw a single thing. I hadn’t even managed to put pencil to page.
“Aurnia,” I said in a low voice that I struggled to keep even, “can we please do this another time?”
Perhaps if I hadn’t pushed her so far, she could have seen that I was in no state to fight. But she was pissed. It rolled off her in waves, like arrows in her glare, in her biting tone. I knew more than most how blinding anger could be.
If she saw me quiver, she must have assumed it was in frustration. If she saw at all the sweat on my brow, she must have taken it for some drunkard’s sweat, the aftereffects of some bender. And if she saw me look away from her, she never would think it was because I couldn’t see straight; it would have to be that I was disdainful of her. How was I really to argue otherwise?
