Untitled #2
They’re a blue-grey. The kind that holds you in the eye of the storm, and you’re afraid to look away because it’s beautiful being trapped in them.
It takes a gargantuan effort to look away and keep studying her.
Her arms are covered in ink, the mesh doesn’t hide them, but it does make it harder to work out details.
One side is dark botanicals like nightshade and foxglove.
Perfect replicas of the plants themselves.
She knows her stuff. I want to see the other side, and as Lady Luck would have it, she twists her body, revealing the other sleeve.
Moths.
Arguably my favorite insects. Five of them, climbing up her arm, staring at her elbow and ending just above her shoulder.
I have a moth on my neck. I did it myself three years ago, freehand, in the mirror at the shop because I didn’t trust anyone else to do it just right. It’s the one tattoo that no one ever mentions in my comments because no one ever pays attention to me from the shoulders up.
It’s my most personal piece, basically invisible to everyone but me.
She has five of them.
My feet move before my brain has made the conscious decision, as if drawn to her. A moth to light, if you will.
I don’t have a plan, or a pick-up line, or anything coherent to say to this woman who has somehow caught my attention five minutes before I wanted to leave to go home. She senses me coming and turns, those grey eyes tracking me across the last of the space between us.
She holds eye contact as she takes a sip of her drink, refusing to look away. She left the straw in his one and her lips close over it, her cheeks hollowing as she sucks. Her eyes flick down my body and back up.
I stop next to her, right next to her. She smells like soft florals and I fight the urge to rip this mask off and bury my face in her hair.
She doesn’t move back.
“Scream, right?” She nods at my mask. “Classic choice, if a bit predictable.”
“What can I say? I’m a predictable man.”
“Are you?” She smiles. “Sounds boring, if you ask me.”
“Your boots are quite the statement piece. Almost as tall as me in them.”
Her head tilts to the side. “Does that bother you?”
“No… no. No it doesn’t bother me. Just… trying to make conversation.”
“You’re an awkward one aren’t you?”
A sound comes out of me, a rumble of a laugh. She wasn’t afraid to pull punches and that was refreshing. Most women groveled at my feet, but not her. If she kept going like this, I’d be on my knees licking her boots and begging her to let me call her mommy.
I am no better than my comments section.
“Anyway, yeah, they’re great boots. Cost a kidney and I’ve been breaking them in for over two weeks, and my pinky toes are dead. Funeral was Tuesday, beautiful service. My remaining toes gave lovely eulogies.”
I chuckle. She’s funny.
Her eyes drop to my neck. “Hold still.” She leans in and I freeze as she pulls the mask cover to the side, revealing my moth. Her finger ghosts over the wings and goosebumps erupt on my skin.
“Luna moth. You did that yourself, didn’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
She taps the back of my knuckle. “Your hands are a different style, and you’ve got some variation on the wings. The angle fought you. Did you do this freehand?”
No one has ever guessed that and I’m shell-shocked.
“Interesting observations. Yes, I did it myself. Are you also a tattoo artist?”
“I’m a lot of things, but unfortunately that isn’t one of them. I just have some friends who are and I’ve watched them do their own. Got familiar with the process.”
Now that she’s fully facing me, I study her moths. Each one is a different species, different wing positions, all different sizes. The one near her elbow is the largest, a luna moth, wings open, detailed and intricate as fuck.
Same moth as mine.
“Luna is my favorite. Do you know what makes them special?”
I could listen to her talk for hours. Her voice is raspy and it makes me want to swallow it just to see how it tasted. “Tell me.”
“They don’t eat. Well, they can’t eat. No mouth or stomach. They hatch as adults and have about a week to find a mate and then they die. Their entire adult life is just… wanting. Pure desire. They exist to want something they may never find and then they just… die.” She says it so casually.
I do know this about luna’s which is why I picked it.
“Anyway, why’d you pick it?” She continues.
“The wanting.”
She looks at me over the glass, her lips wrapped around that straw as she sucks up the last of her drink. “Yeah?”
“Drawn to the light, die for it, same reasons as you just said. Some never find their other half and they die in a state of loneliness…” I trail off.
I don’t talk about anything this deep with anyone.
Not Iz, or my mom, not anyone, but this woman somehow pulled out something that has been a lifelong struggle for me in thirty seconds. “Yeah, anyway, they’re just relatable.”
She stares at me for three seconds, then throws her head back and laughs at full volume. No hand over her mouth, no trying to be cute, just a straight up laugh that comes from her chest, causing two people at the bar to turn and look, and she doesn’t give a single fuck.
“Relatable?” She wipes her eye under the mask.
“You put a dying insect on your throat because you think yearning for love and dying is relatable. That’s either the most honest self-reflection I’ve ever heard or the biggest red flag I fully intend to ignore, and trust me, I’ve ignored some BIIIIG red flags. ”
“Which one are you going with?”
“Both, obviously. I just said I can ignore red flags.” She flags the bartender. “Another one of these, and whatever he’s having. Actually, wait…” She turns to me. “What are you drinking?”
“Gin and tonic.”
“Gin and tonic.” Her eyebrows raise underneath her mask. “You come to a goth masquerade dressed in a plain black t-shirt, and you drink gin and tonic. What are you, an accountant?”
“I own a tattoo studio.”
“Damn. You’re the most boring tattoo artist I’ve ever met. You bought the personality of a tax return to a fetish party.”
I chuckle at her barbs. She’s quick. I like that. “It’s not a fetish party, it’s a mask party.”
“And yet theres a man in full latex doing rope work on a woman wearing nothing but nipple tassels and a mask. It’s at the very least, HALF a fetish party.” She turns back to the bartender, “Gin and tonic for the accountant, please. On my tab.”
I don’t bother looking at what she says is going on behind me, I don’t want to take my eyes off of her. “Listen, the mask is the effort. That’s why I even bothered to wear one.”
“The mask is a crutch and you hide behind it.”
That hits different than how she probably meant it to, but maybe it’s exactly how she meant it to be.
She’s more astute than a lot of people I come into contact with.
She looks at me with her chin tilted up and her mouth full and perfect.
Her eyes stare into mine and I’m transfixed.
She doesn’t hold punches and she means every word she says, she won’t soften the edges for me and is waiting to see if I’ll sink or swim.
I have every intention of swimming.
“You’re wearing a mask, too, might I remind you.”
“Yeah, but mine’s pretty. It shows my lips, and my eyes to a degree. Yours looks like you’re about to chase me down and pin me to a wall.”
She’s not wrong. That’s exactly what I want to do to her, but I don’t have to reply because the bartender puts the drinks down. She picks them up, hands me mine and clinks her glass against mine.
“To dying bugs and men who dress like accountants.”
“To dying bugs and women who insult strangers that are taller than them.”
“Hardly.” She eyes me. “What are you? Six-one? Two?”
“Six-one.”
“Yeah, I’m five-nine, but the boots make me almost eye-level. You’re not that much taller.”
“I’m taller enough.”
Her eyes narrow behind the mask. “Taller enough for what?”
I take a sip of my mask and dab at the spill with a napkin. She watches her with her lips pressed together, and I can see she wants to say something.
“Say it.”
“I want to say many things, right now.”
“I got time.”
“Your drinking method isn’t very efficient. Why didn’t you just ask for a straw?”
I can’t hold back my laugh. “Good point.”
“Yeah, been known to have those.” Her eyes drop to where my mouth would be. “You can’t do other things in that mask either.” Her voice is a husk, more dangerous than it was before.
“No… I can’t.”
Her grin fades, morphs into something else. She puts her drink down, and the tension is so thick, I could choke on it. Neither of us has moved, but the distance feels like it’s halved from a moment ago.
She clears her throat. “My friend dragged me here tonight.” she says. “This isn’t my normal scene, but she said I was being a gremlin and needed to put on real clothes and leave my apartment.”
“Mine said the same except he called me a hermit weirdo.”
“Well… looks like our friends are smarter than we are.”
“Fortunately for us.”
She picks up her drink and takes a long sip before putting it down and looking at me.
She makes a split-second decision, her blue eyes trying to search mine, but unable to see that inside this mask, I am sweating, studying her just as hard as she’s trying to study me.
She turns and puts her hands flat on the bar counter before whirling around.
“The bathrooms here are single-occupancy.”
“Are they?”
“And the locks work.”
“That’s probably a good thing.”
She is rambling now, but it’s so adorable I do nothing to interrupt.
I just want to hear her talk. “I don’t do this, just to be clear.
Like crystal clear, okay? I don’t hook up with strangers, I definitely don’t fuck men in bathrooms, but you’re wearing a mask, I’m wearing a mask, we don’t know each other.
Hell, I don’t even know your eye color, and I think just for tonight, I want to be someone else other than the responsible one. Just for fifteen minutes. Just once.”