Chapter Eighteen #2
“What’s on the screen right now would make people cry.”
“People cry at tattoos fairly regularly. It’s not a reliable metric.”
“It’s a reliable metric when I say it.” He looks up from the screen. “You’ve been working all week.”
“Some of us have businesses to run.”
“And turning down media requests.”
My jaw tightens involuntarily. “News travels.”
“Mack has a Google alert.”
“Mack needs a hobby.”
“He’d tell you the alerts are the hobby.” Reece shifts his weight, and something in his posture changes, like it changes on the mound when the chips are down, and he’s decided to stop calculating and start throwing. “I went to the gala Thursday night.”
“I heard.”
“From who?”
“Zoe, who heard from her cousin. Who apparently follows three separate sports gossip accounts. It’s a whole ecosystem.” I keep my voice neutral. “She told me you spoke to Lena.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“She admitted it. The footage from the Ring camera, the blogs, all of it.” His eyes stay steady on mine. “She’s agreed to stop. The throwback post came down Friday morning.”
Something shifts in my chest. Not relief exactly, more the particular sensation of a tension you’ve carried so long you forgot it was there, suddenly loosening.
“Good,” I say.
“I should have dealt with it months ago. Before it touched you.” He doesn’t break eye contact. “I’m sorry, Ava. Not a partial apology with context around it. Fully, directly, sorry. You took damage from something that was my unfinished business, and you deserved better.”
I let the words sit for a moment. Let them mean what they mean without immediately processing them into something smaller.
“She would have found a reason regardless,” I say finally.
“Maybe. But I gave her a longer window than she needed.” He takes one step closer, not crowding or pushing, just closing the distance slightly.
“I watched you take on the fallout of something I could have prevented, and you didn’t call me, text me, or go public with any of it. You came in here and did your work.”
“What else would I do?”
“Most people would’ve done something with it. Talked to someone. Made noise.” His voice drops slightly. “You turned down a SportsCenter producer.”
“She wanted my ‘perspective.’ ”
“I know.”
“My perspective is that I am a tattoo artist in a studio across the street from a baseball stadium, and my personal life is not content.” I hold his gaze. “I don’t owe anyone my story. I especially don’t owe it to someone with a recording device and four hundred thousand followers.”
The expression on his face shifts into something I haven’t seen before. Not the focused intensity from the mound, not the easy charm he carries through public spaces, not even the particular tenderness from the late nights, the truck tailgate, the kitchen counter, and the string-light bedroom.
Something that looks like awe.
“You’re not even angry,” he says quietly.
“I was angry.”
“Past tense?”
“I moved through it.” I lean back in my chair, crossing my arms. Not as armor, more as the posture of someone who has thought through what they want to say and is taking their time getting there.
“Anger at Lena is a waste of energy I’d rather spend on work I care about.
And anger at the situation doesn’t change the situation. ”
“What does change it?”
“The person who created it is coming in here and taking responsibility for it.” I let that land for a moment. “Which you’ve done. So.”
“So?”
“So, I accept the apology.” His eyebrows rise slightly, and I hold up a hand. “I’m not finished. I accept it because it was real, specific, and you didn’t once try to soften it with an excuse. But I need you to understand something in return.”
“Tell me.”
“What broke wasn’t the photos, the blogs, or even Lena specifically.
” I find his eyes and stay there. “What broke was me looking at the fallout and thinking, this is it. The other shoe. The thing I’d been bracing for since you walked into this studio on a dare.
The part where the outside world gets loud enough to make something good go wrong.
” I take a breath. “I pulled back because I was afraid, and I’d rather have you know that clearly than have you think I left because I stopped caring. ”
The studio is very quiet.
“You didn’t stop caring?” he asks.
“No.”
“Neither did I.”
“I know.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then, with the careful deliberateness of someone making a choice rather than a move, he asks, “Can I stay? I’m not asking for a conversation or an answer to anything.
I’ll sit in that chair and read the back of a shampoo bottle while you finish your transfer. I’d just like to be in the same room.”
The corner of my mouth moves before I can stop it. “You’d read the back of a shampoo bottle?”
“I’d read literally anything. I’ve been in this lobby for sixty seconds, and I’ve already memorized your price list.”
“The sleeve consultation rate went up in February.”
“Noted. Very reasonable for the caliber of work.” He glances at the waiting chair near my station. “Can I stay?”
I look at the screen. The wing commission waits, half transferred, feathers precise and patient in the program grid. My three o’clock is coming in two hours. Zoe is eating something aggressively healthy at the café down the street, probably composing a full debrief of this interaction in her head.
The studio is mine.
My space.
My territory.
And for the first time in two weeks, it doesn’t feel diminished by the noise outside it.
“There’s water in the fridge under the front desk,” I say, turning back to the screen. “Don’t touch the ink bottles.”
“I would never.”
“You touched one in October. You moved it six inches to the left.”
“I was looking at the label.”
“Put them back exactly where they are.”
“There’s nothing near the ink bottles.”
“Preventatively. As a policy.”
He laughs, and the sound fills the studio the way it always has, rough-edged and warm, nothing performed about it.
I hear him cross to the front desk, hear the soft sound of the mini refrigerator, hear him settle into the waiting chair with the comfortable ease of someone who has made peace with exactly where he is.
I turn back to the wing.
My hand finds the stylus.
The line picks up where it left off.
Outside, somewhere across the street, Wildcat Stadium sits empty on this Saturday afternoon. The city goes about its business around us, indifferent and enormous, and in here, the program hums, the lines go down clean, and the silence between two people is the kind that doesn’t need filling.
I work through the primary feathers, then the secondary, and then the delicate trailing edge that gives the whole composition its sense of motion, a wing mid-lift, caught between earth and air, committed to neither and both at once.
At some point, Reece stops pretending to look at his phone and watches me work. I feel his eyes on my hands, my face, the screen, moving between them with the patient attention he usually reserves for strike zones and batters. I don’t tell him to stop looking.
After forty minutes, I sit back and assess the transfer.
It’s right—everything I wanted it to be, maybe more.
“Done?” Reece asks.
“With this part.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then, carefully, “Ava.”
“Mm…”
“You are the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.”
I keep my eyes on the screen. The wing looks back at me, perfect, still, and ready to become permanent.
“Don’t oversell it,” I say.
“I’m genuinely—”
“Reece.”
“Yeah.”
“I know.” I save the file, close the program, and turn around in my chair and look at him sitting in my waiting room, six-foot-something of professional athlete folded into a chair designed for clients half his size, water bottle in hand, looking at me like I’m the most interesting thing in any room he’s ever been in. “I know.”
The clock on the wall reads two fifty.
“My three o’clock will be here soon,” I say.
“I’ll go.”
“You don’t have to.”
“You have work.” He stands, and the movement is easy, unhurried. He sets the water bottle on the desk. “But, Ava.” He stops. “When you’re ready. Not on my timeline… yours.”
“When I’m ready for what?”
He picks up his jacket from the arm of the chair. The expression on his face is the same one I’ve been cataloging since the bleachers, since the stuck roller door, since the kitchen counter, the truck tailgate, the tattoo chair with the machine humming, and my hand steady against his ribs.
“For whatever comes next,” he says.
The bell chimes as he pulls open the door.
“Reece.”
He stops without turning around.
“The memorial piece,” I say. “It’s going to be the best thing I’ve ever made.”
He turns his head slightly, not fully, just enough for me to catch the edge of a smile.
“I know it will be.”
He walks out.
I sit in my chair in my studio in my world for a full minute after he’s gone, hands resting on my knees, the wing commission saved and ready on the screen, the ink bottles exactly where I left them, the silence mine again.
Then I pull out my sketchbook and add one more page to the three I filled on Friday.
My three o’clock arrives seven minutes later and finds me already at my station, focused, prepared, and completely in my element.
Which is, as it turns out, exactly where I’ve always been.