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“No,” I said too quickly, as the warmth that had been flooding my body left like a spooked animal.
“Please don’t,” I repeated, eyes watchful on his. “Not yet.”
There were still his tattoos to draw. They were the reason I wanted him to remove his shirt. They were what I wanted to see: a glimpse, I was sure, into his locked-up soul. My pencil hung suspended above the page as I followed from one to the other. All in the same black and white style, they covered completely both his arms. A complete mosaic. His neck was consumed. The art dripped across his shoulders, swept down his sides, covered his lower stomach.
But it wasn’t the painted skin that drew my utmost attention, it was the one patch of skin that was not. On the very centre of his chest, above a rising phoenix, was a blank space that served like a black hole for my eyes. Everything raged around it, but that one place alone was all I could see, all I could focus on.
As if reading my mind, Conor spoke into the silence. “I haven’t seemed able to find the right one. For the empty spot.”
His voice seemed far away. Full of…something painful.
I remained silent and the steady scratch of my pencil as I drew out the tattoos he did have. Conor kept his eyes closed, but I saw his hands, curled into tight balls at his side, relax. I noticed his breathing deepen as if before he had been holding all the air he could muster inside his lungs. The set of his lips relaxed, the tenseness of his jaw eased.
“What have you tried?” I asked after several quiet minutes with just the noise of pencil on paper.
Conor laughed sadly.
“What haven’t I tried is a better question.”
“Well then,” I said, tilting my head to study if I’d gotten his rising phoenix right, “what haven’t you tried?”
Despite the fact that Conor had suggested the question, he seemed surprised by it. He opened his eyes and looked at me as I drew. I glanced at him briefly.
“Well?” I prodded.
Conor shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “What’s left after everything?”
I frowned as I blurred the lines of one of the phoenix’s wings.
“Surely you haven’t tried everything.”
I was smiling, but when I saw the distress on Conor’s face, I stopped. Conor was looking down at his fingers which he had laid in his lap. The fingers which had drawn beautiful art for all over his body. Beautiful art for everywhere save one central spot. Did he think the problem lay with them? Did he blame them for not creating the perfect final piece? Or did the issue lie elsewhere? Perhaps in the very place he intended to fill?
“You want something perfect,” I said softly, watching him as my pencil stalled.
“No,” he said, again shaking his head, brows furrowed in perplexity. “No, I don’t know if perfect is the right word. I… I…”
Silence descended on the room like a wave. Not a car passed outside. The neighbours above and below, if they were home, were completely still. My pencil might as well have been an opposing magnet to the page; I could get it no nearer than it was.
A diagonal of light from the blinds fell perfectly across Conor’s beautiful face as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, dragging his hands through his hair. He sighed. When he lifted his eyes to me, they caught the light. I watched as his pupils disappeared in a sea of green.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “It’s like I don’t have it in me. I feel empty. Like I pulled all these from my very soul and there’s nothing left.”
I watched as he ran his fingertips over his biceps, along his chest, trailing down past the empty space to his phoenix on his lower abdomen.
“I don’t know, I just feel like I’m grasping at air when I try to draw,” he said. “Like I keep reaching and reaching, but there’s nothing more. It’s all gone. It’s… I’m a pit. I’ve dug and dug and I’ve hit rock bottom. And there’s…there’s just nothing left.”
The silence felt deafening. More than deafening. It felt oppressive. A force against my chest. I could hear the pain in Conor’s words. The desperation even. He’d never let me see this side of him. I almost wished he hadn’t. For in that moment I felt small and helpless. How could I ever try to fill such a void?
Conor cleared his throat suddenly and sat back, the light from the blinds falling from his face.
“Anyway,” he said in that gruff voice I was so used to, “it’s just tattoos, right?”
I stirred myself and put the pencil to the paper if only just to make some noise.
I nodded, but I didn’t agree. It wasn’t just tattoos. Especially not for Conor, who had centred his life around tattoos. It was more. I knew it meant the world to him, this void, this emptiness. I could see it meant more to him than just ink and flesh.
