25. Kit
KIT
I wake up to a scratching sound.
“Huh?” I mumble, head fully under my pillow because I sleep like a psychopath. “Who’s there?”
No answer. Just another soft scrtch scrtch scrtch.
I push halfway up. “Fox?”
Nothing. Silence. A snore. He’s out cold.
Scrtch scrtch—
“Coming,” I rasp. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”
I heave myself out of bed, grab my glasses, and stumble to the door to find…Nana.
The dog.
“Oh,” I say, as she lowers her little paw to the floor. “Good morning to you too.”
She wags her tail.
I cough, squinting even in the dim light of the hallway. “I…guess you want to go out.”
She bounces up and down on her front paws, her giant eyes bright with delight in an expression so goofy I almost want to laugh.
“Yeah, yeah.” I glance down to the rest of the loft, but no signs of life, so I just head for the stairs myself.
Outside the shop, Nana obediently trots out to the strip of dirt that separates the sidewalk from the street and daintily does her business, while I yawn and stare at the brownish-pink horizon and the dark loops of neon that spell out LIVE MERMAIDS across the street.
When she’s finished, she scampers back to my side and just kind of… leans against me.
“Uh, hey,” I say, and scratch her behind the ears. “How about some coffee?” I ask on a yawn.
Nana bops her nose into my fingers.
I’m not a morning person. But maybe I could be a dog person.
Back inside, I head for the kitchen for a double shot in the only clean-ish cup I can find, Nana bouncing at the doorway the whole time.
“What do you—oh,” I realize, as she bounds toward the spiral stairs. “Food, huh?”
She does a little circle and sprints up to the loft.
Fair enough. I follow her, a little more slowly, and I’m just wondering if I even know where the kibble is when I crest to the second floor and see I’m not alone.
“Oh, hey.” Tink, in a hoodie and shorts, straightens up from beside the counter, where he’s pouring a mountain of little brown dog pellets into a dish.
“Hey,” I say. “She wake you up too?” I gesture with my coffee at Nana, who’s now doing a frenzied back-and-forth dance from paw to paw, eyes intent on her prey.
“Hah. Yeah.” Tink rolls up the top of the bag and drops it back on the counter. “Thought she’d just run off downstairs, but…”
“I took her out. At her insistence,” I add, eyeing her slim little doggy face now intent on Tink.
“Go,” he says to her. “You’re good.”
Nana rockets forward to the bowl and snarfs with gusto.
I chuckle a little as I sink onto a bar stool, yawning—again.
“Big day,” Tink says.
I nod.
“You got work, or—”
I shake my head. “Nah,” I say. “I push my bookings since Pan’s hosting tonight. I don’t wanna deal with running late or cleanup or anything. Besides,” I joke, rolling my shoulders side to side, “my arms are all sore.”
A beat of silence passes between us. I feel like I should say something. About last night.
“Uh, look,” I say, pushing my glasses up my nose. “Just so we’re clear, you one hundred percent do not have to go through with this. Like, it makes no difference to me. I have no dog in this race.” I glance down at Nana on the floor. “Uh, so to speak. It was just a dumb push-up contest, and—”
Tink doesn’t meet my eyes. “Yeah, no, I know,” he says. “Still pretty fucking embarrassing to lose, though.”
I lift a shoulder. “I guess. You are not talking to someone who ever crushed the Presidential Fitness Test or anything.”
Tink gives a short laugh.
There’s a beat of silence between us. And in it, I do glance at him. Fingertips, palms, wrist. Forearm. Biceps, to where it disappears into his T-shirt sleeve.
I touch people all day. I don’t think of it that way, but that really is a core part of what the job is: my hands on their skin. Professional, obviously, but still intimate. It kind of can’t not be. And to be somebody’s first…
I swallow.
Fuck, I didn’t mean for this train of thought to get all perverted, but—
But at the same time, it does mean something, doesn’t it?
“You really don’t have any?” I ask, nodding at him. I’m not sure if he could tell I was staring or not, but it seems like the right move to break the silence. “Tattoos, I mean.”
“What?” Tink says. “Oh, uh…” He scratches the back of his neck and now really avoids my gaze. For what feels like ten full seconds.
“Nothing I really want to talk about,” he mumbles at last. The words come out stuttering and odd, like he wasn’t expecting to answer the question.
I do a palms-up smile, way too broadly. “Hey, no, like I said, none of my business. And again, I am not going to put a single mark on you unless you—”
“Tink!” There’s a stampede of footsteps as Wendy barrels into the loft. “I finished! Do you want to see?”
“Uh…” Tink’s eyebrows go up, his mouth slightly open. Full lips, I notice. And he looks down at Wendy. “See what?”
“Well, actually…” Wendy slams the sketchbook—the one I gave her—to her chest and bites her lip. She glances at me. “I’m gonna show it to Kit first, if that’s okay?” She says it like it’s a question.
Tink blinks and then nods. “Sure, be my guest.” He gestures for her.
“Okay.” Wendy lets out a breath and flips open the sketchbook, presenting me with her drawing. “You can redo it,” she says quickly. “I mean, you should, obviously. I don’t think mine’s that good, but like, maybe you can kind of see the idea.” And her words are tumbling out a mile a minute.
And I run my fingers through my hair and adjust my glasses again to get a good look. “Oh,” I say, feeling my brow furrow as I take it in. “Wow, Wendy, this is… it’s…”
Well, I wouldn’t know how to categorize the inspiration.
Probably Kit-inspired, if anything. But it’s a kind of fairy girl, a lot like the ones I draw.
But instead of flowers and vines, she’s trailing stars gleaming out from her hands.
And one right in the center of her forehead, like a crown.
Her feet are bare, pointed like the ends of a Barbie doll, and her hair is flowing but short, a bit of a bob flowing behind her as she lifts her arms to catch or throw or just point to, maybe, the brilliant, pointed star that dominates the image like cut glass. Like a diamond.
“That’s really good, Wendy,” I say, and I mean it.
Sure, there is a lot of technical skill for her to brush up on.
Her anatomy is pretty wonky. I can tell she probably either traced it or drew it right from a reference.
But the idea is good, the concept is good, the vision—if you can say ten-year-olds have a vision—is there.
And what am I saying? Of course they can. I did, and now, maybe this kid does too.
“You really think so?” Wendy says, her voice a little husky.
“Yeah,” I say, and I mean it, “absolutely. I might have to…” I squint, tip my head to the side, “…a little, make some adjustments just to make sure the lines don’t fade.
Like here,” I indicate the trail of sparkle stars after the fairy.
“We might have to make those lines a little thicker, unless you wanted to do a kind of watercolor there. But, I feel like with this,” I trace my finger over to the star, “you’re going for something bolder overall. So…”
“Oh, yeah,” Wendy says, nodding definitively. “That’s a good idea.”
“Cool,” I smile. It’s fun to talk to her about craft like this, even if she’s, well, whatever’s below even an apprenticeship. So far below she’s not even legally allowed in the shop. Not that I’m going to narc. “Were you thinking full color or…?”
Now Wendy glances at Tink. “Um, I’ll let him decide,” she says quickly, “if he likes it.”
Tink’s face is blank. “Can I see?” he asks.
Wendy looks at me first. I give her a small nod and hand her the sketchbook back. “Go for it.”
Wendy swivels the page around and hands it to Tink.
“It’s the star,” she says, “like, from the other night. I don’t know, I just thought it was cool, how you can always find your way by it.
And then I was thinking it would look really cool with this fairy girl, and that maybe you would like it in particular. And—”
“Wow,” a single syllable falls from Tink’s lips. Husky and a little awed, he rubs his jaw with one hand, angling the page with the other. “You drew this for me?”
“Well, yeah,” Wendy says and laughs a little bit. “I mean, I am not allowed to get a tattoo yet, so…” She glances at me.
And I give a little sigh. “Yeah, there are some laws I have to follow,” I say. Half sarcastic, half short.
“If you hate it, that’s okay too,” Wendy says hurriedly, her eyes searching Tink’s face. “Kit can probably do something better or you don’t have to—”
“No,” Tink says. “I’ll do it. Just let me…” He glances down at his sweatshirt. “Be right back.”
When he leaves, Wendy wastes no time plopping her sketchbook onto the counter—and mine, I notice.
“Hey,” I say. “Where’d you get that?”
“Downstairs,” she says, like it’s obvious. “Can you do your version now?”
“Uh, sure.” I take the pencil she’s offering, gulp the rest of my coffee so my artistic brain can come online, and set Wendy’s drawing out a bit in front of me as I flip through my pages in search of some blank real estate.
Wendy peers over my shoulder the whole time. And as I much as I hate being watched, I don’t really mind if it’s just her.
“Wait,” she says, as I turn pages, and grabs my elbow. “Hang on. Is that from the other day?”
She lets me go and nods at the page in front of me: my sleeve design from the other day: Joan of Arc, the crest, the lion and dog.
“Oh, yeah.” I hold it up a bit so she could see. “I finished it after you left.” I glance back for her reaction. “You like?”
Wendy considers.
“I thought it was supposed to be a girl.”
I look back at my drawing. “It is a girl,” I say. “Joan of Arc, remember? Don’t you have one of those Girls Who Kicked Butt books about her?”
“Yeah, but like…” Wendy looks up at me. “Why’d you draw her as Tink?”
“I…” The question takes a moment to register. “What?”
My ears ring, sudden and sharp. Wordless, I take the sketchbook from Wendy, look at the design.