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Conor
It seemed to me that if I was already in inescapable pain, I might as well add some more pain on top. And if anything was as painful as my leg in the rain, it was trying to draw up the perfect tattoo for the one remaining spot on my chest and failing again and again and again…
The rest of my tattoos were years old. I had drawn them all, drawn them all in a flurry of inspiration, a few minutes of a furiously scratching pencil and they had been done. I had never doubted a single one of them. The shavings had still been there on the page, fresh as the morning dew, when I’d turned them over to Mason or Rian or a few (a rare few) other artists I trusted. It wasn’t long before there had been only one spot left, the spot just above my most favoured tattoo: a rising phoenix. Just one more tattoo to complete.
And yet the spot, or the hole, the gaping hole as it often seemed, had remained unfilled for years and years.
I’d wasted hours upon hours attempting to draw up the perfect tattoo. The hole in my chest only seemed to grow larger, only became harder to fill. I’d gone through dozens of sketchbooks, rejected page after page, filled wastebasket after wastebasket, snapped off the tips of hundreds of pencils, stabbed so hard onto the sketchbook when it wasn’t working that it tore through at least five pages beneath. Sometimes I would fly into such a fury that I’d work till morning rearranging everything in the shop so that when Mason came downstairs with whatever woman on his arm and Rian returned bleary-eyed from whatever late-night drug-infused “artistic journey” he’d come from, the only proof of me completely and utterly losing it was a dent or two in the wall half hidden by Mason’s grandmother’s dying ficus.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I drew perfectly fine things for our clients (which, admittedly, were few and far between, but still). If Mason or Rian asked for something, I never failed to produce artwork they were happy to have forever on their bodies. But nothing I drew for that hole in me, that fucking hole in me, ever seemed to be…enough.
And so it was again that night.
The wastebasket beside my drawing table was rising like foamy flood waters and the pencils were going down like a forest of downed trees. The familiar anger, anger at myself, was growing painfully in my chest. I was halfway through a lotus, a symbol for self-regeneration, and I already knew it was wrong. Wrong. It was perfectly lovely, of course. I knew the extent of my artistic talent. I knew it was beautiful, some of my finest work in a while even. But was beautiful and it was wrong.
I was in the process of tearing it from the sketchbook when the bell at the front door interrupted my tormented thoughts.
It might have been Mason, though it was early still. When he went hunting, he liked the chase just as much as the final success, just as much as the mutual feasting of warm flesh. Just past eleven would hardly give him time to tease the lucky lady’s inner thigh beneath the bar.
It might have been Rian. He wandered into the shop whenever he and his “inspiration” damn well pleased; his time sheet read like a bingo card of times of the day and night. It might even have been a client. Dublin Ink’s hours were technically noon to nine, but if one of us was here, we usually kept the lights on and the door unlocked. Partly because why the hell not? Partly because we weren’t exactly in a position to be imposing on whoever happened, by luck or stupidity, to want to give us money.
But when I looked up from my half-torn page, there, standing in a widening puddle of dirty rainwater just inside the shop, was my little thief.
The pale pink neon of the broken Dublin Ink sign caught the side of the girl’s face, cupped her supple cheek like a hand would. The other half of her face was hidden behind her dark hair, wet from the rain. In the lamplight through the rain-dotted front window it looked like glass, or black ice: deadly. Her lips were tinged blue, as were her fingertips just visible beneath the long sleeves of her black jean jacket, the same one she’d been wearing the day before. Her dripping clothes hung on her small frame. Their size only made her look smaller. Everything about her looked fragile, looked on the verge of breaking. Everything except the one eye with which she stared at me. In the dark, her steady gaze was like a lighted arrow arching high, well-aimed for my heart.
The girl stared at me and I stared at her.
The rain pounded on the roof, on the windows, on the slick stretch of black asphalt outside the shop. I’d never in a million years expected to see the little thief again. I’d driven her, literally, out of my head. The ride I took after letting her go, after watching her run away, had been a long one. It took miles to get the pulse of her inner wrist from the tips of my fingers. It took many more after that to feel that my heart was beating on its own accord and not because her little fist was pounding against it. It took goddamn near all night to feel like I was alone on that long, lonely stretch of road—because she had been there. Her thighs against mine. Her cheek against my back. Her arms around my waist. She had been there, her body tight, leaning with me, moving with me. I had wanted her to be there. And I had to drive till I no longer wanted that. Because I couldn’t. I couldn’t want that.
Within seconds of my little thief standing there, staring defiantly at me, it was once more what I wanted.
Before I could open my mouth to tell her to leave, the girl took a step forward and demanded, with an indignant jerk of her little chin, “Why haven’t you called the cops already?”
Her question caught me off guard. Not that I had been particularly on guard, with her there, once more before me, once more within reach.
I shook my head and managed with a tight throat to say, “Look, we’re closed.”
The girl didn’t even bother pointing to the illuminated sign in the window that read, clear as day, Open, as she took another worrying step toward me. She didn’t give one damn whether we were open or not. I was sure that I could have been dead asleep in bed, feverish with pain, bare chest covered in a glisten of sweat, and she would be there, with her ridiculous questions, by my bedside. She was a child, after all. And she was acting like one.
“Did you hear me?” I said, pointing toward the door. “We’re closed.”
I lowered my head, like that was the end of things. I focused on tearing the rest of the page from the sketchbook. It was something to do right: metal prong by metal prong, tear the page free. I needed to do something right. Before I did something wrong.
“I’d like to know when you plan on calling them,” the girl said, her voice sounding dangerously closer. “If you don’t mind.”
“I do mind,” I said as I balled the page in my fist.
The most important thing was to get the girl to leave. It was crucial that she got no closer. As long as she didn’t get any closer, I could send her away. But if she got any closer…
I looked up and drew a sharp inhale, because the little thief was already past the couch. Her fingertips were behind her, brushing the edge of the faded floral pattern, keeping contact with it like it was the only thing keeping her from a deadly fall. I knew, with certainty, that I was the deadly fall.
“Get out,” I growled, rising to my full six-foot-three height to physically intimidate the little thing, a bear rising onto its hind legs before a rabbit.
The girl fell back on her heel at the sight of me, but she did not retreat. She stared at me curiously, raised a dark, arched eyebrow.
“I’m not here to steal from you again,” she said, her words probing.
She didn’t understand my anger, didn’t understand the fear I was hiding with anger. I spit out a laugh; something I rarely did. With me between her and the cash register, the thought of her managing a dime was funny. The girl, incredibly, seemed to take this as a personal affront. Her fingertips left the safety of the couch, something I hadn’t intended, as she crossed her arms over her chest as if to say, “Shall I show you?”
