Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
Forty-five minutes later and thirty blocks from the apartment, Miles and I stand out front of our destination.
“Okay,” he says. “Just checking one last time. There’s really nothing else you want to do? Anything at all? Maybe something that doesn’t involve eternity? Why don’t we do something on the list?”
“I’m pretty sure all that’s left on the list are sex positions.” (Not true and he knows it.) “And besides, I want to do this because it’s not on the list. I’m sick of trying to Live Again TM. Today we’re doing Bad Stuff TM and we’re doing it in style.”
I tug him into the tattoo parlor.
“Are you taking walk-ins?” I ask the kid behind the register.
He looks up from his phone. “Lemme go check.”
He disappears into the back of the shop and Miles and I stare wide-eyed at the wall of photographs of other people’s tattoos.
“I’m so scared!” I laugh, clapping my hands to my cheeks.
“We can always leave,” Miles mumbles.
“ Or we can stay and get a tattoo.”
He leans forward and studies a photograph of a tattoo on someone’s asscheek. “Do they have to match?” he asks, sighing deeply.
I blink at him. “Does what have to match?”
“Our tattoos.”
Sound fades as I momentarily stop processing information. “I’m sorry…are you telling me…that you’re getting one too?”
He scratches his head. “Isn’t that why you dragged us here? To do something we’ll regret?” He shrugs. “I told you I was in.”
I’m still staring at him, trying to catch up, when the kid reemerges. “Yup. We’ve actually got two chairs open now. As long as you’re not getting something too complicated it should be fine. They’ve got about two hours.”
He leads Miles and me to the back of the shop. I was expecting a sort of dungeonlike situation with ghoulishly repurposed dentist chairs or something? But this is more like a fancy massage place. Padded tables, wide windows to a small back patio, and flowers in jars on a far countertop. Two tattoo artists are leaning against a counter and chatting, but they straighten up when we come in.
“Hey there!” one of them chirps. She’s short, my height, with a shaved head and everything from her collarbones to her chin tattooed in intricate florals. “I’m Iris.”
“Hakim,” the other artist says, introducing himself. He’s wearing long sleeves and I can’t see any tattoos, but he has a bar through his nose and in both eyebrows, and there’s pretty much no available real estate on his ears. He comes over to me and leans down, inspecting my eyebrow piercing. “I like your hardware.”
“Thanks!” He’s so handsome I lose a little time. Maybe Hakim and I will hike the Appalachian Trail together one day. We’ll stop to nap in the sun and soak our feet in a river and he’ll feed me granola bars.
Miles sighs and takes me by the shoulders, leading me to one of the padded tables and tapping it until I hop up.
“So what’re you thinking? Did you bring any pictures or drawings?” Hakim asks Miles as he follows him back to the other side of the room.
“She’s gonna decide,” Miles says, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at me. “Whatever she wants.”
Hakim and Iris glance at one another but don’t say anything else. Iris and I spend about ten minutes chatting about the design while she sketches and shows me some examples. We talk about placement and then make a few amendments to the design. When I happily hold up the paper to show to Miles across the room, he gives me a closed-mouth smile and two thumbs up.
“Miles,” I say, and lower the paper. “You really don’t need to get one too. Just come stand by me while I get mine.”
He sighs and pulls the back of his shirt up over his head, stopping when it gets down to his elbows. My eyes get stuck on his stomach, the bit of chest hair I can see. This is probably obvious by now, but there’s a lot of man on that man. He looks up at me, all bare shoulders and tousled hair, a wry expression on his face. “We came for matching tattoos.”
I shrug and lie down on the table. He’s a big boy and I gave him ample opportunity to back out.
The tattoo artists fiddle around for a bit, printing out the design, drawing, planning, sterilizing.
I’m getting my tattoo on my side and he’s getting his on his back. We’re lying on parallel tables; I’m facing him and he’s got his head tipped toward me, so we’re actually face to face. He’s lying there, eyes closed as usual.
When the buzzing starts, his eyes pop open. We catch one another’s eyes and start laughing. But the laugh dissolves when Iris starts working on me. I slam my eyes closed and get used to the feeling. It’s not unbearable, and after a while, the scratchy-prickling sensation sort of dissolves into a cloud of general discomfort. I don’t mind it.
As I finally open my eyes, I realize that Miles has been studying me. When my eyes catch his, I expect him to glance away, but he doesn’t. The eye contact stretches out and there’s a moment when it becomes uncomfortable and I almost look away, but then we’re past that moment and it feels weirdly…lovely. We stare into one another’s eyes absently, almost the same way that two people hold hands as they stroll along. I can see that he’s lost in thought and so am I. Time rolls and gathers and picks up speed. Iris hits a tender spot and I wince, wrinkling my nose, and Miles unconsciously mirrors my expression. I smile and so does he.
“How long have you two been together?” Iris asks.
The spell is broken and I look away, my eyes tracking down to where Hakim is working on Miles. “We’re not,” I explain.
My words seem to awkwardly echo and I can almost feel the question that no one is asking. Why not?
To dispel the awkwardness, I roll my head to look at Iris. “You must hear all sorts of wild stuff from people who walk in for tattoos.”
She raises her eyebrows. “I honestly don’t think I’m capable of being surprised anymore.”
Iris and I start chatting and don’t stop until the tattoo is done. Hakim is faster than Iris, so Miles is all bandaged up and clothed, standing next to my head, when Iris finally turns off the tattoo gun. They take us through the aftercare instructions and send us on our way, and I elbow Miles away from the register to pay.
“You should’ve let me pay for mine,” Miles grumbles as we emerge back onto the street into the afternoon sunlight. “That was expensive.”
“Miles, you just involuntarily got a tattoo of a wolf howling at the moon. There’s no way in hell I would have let you pay for it.”
“I need lunch,” he says. “A lot of it. Let’s find a buffet.”
We stroll, apparently in the direction of a buffet, and I glance up at him. “I would have thought you’d have called me out on the tattoo choice,” I say, attempting casual.
His eyebrows furrow. “Why?”
“Well, you know, lone wolf howling at the moon? Pretty lonely. I thought you’d make me go for something happier.”
He frowns. “They’re not lonely.” He gestures between our two bandages. “There’s two of them.”
My throat instantly clogs up and I sniffle. I’ve cried from grief so much over the last few months that it’s disorienting and startling to cry happy tears.
He glances down at me and then pushes at the heavy bun that’s begun sliding sideways down my head. It mushes back down as soon as he takes his hand away. “You know, Lenny,” he says. “When a wolf is howling at the moon, it’s not actually because it’s lonely.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “It’s sort of a location technique, for when members of the pack get separated and they need to find one another.”
“Oh.” I brush the happy tears away.
“So when you hear a wolf call, and then in the distance, you hear another wolf call back, do you know what that can be roughly translated as?”
“What’s that?”
“The first one saying, I’m here! I’m here! And then the other one says, Me too! Me too! ”
I reach up and pull the ponytail holder out of my hair, let it all tumble, still damp, all around. Then I begin the process of packing it all away into my hood as I tuck myself into my hoodie. The scent of Miles’s shampoo surrounds me and our tattoo stings at my side.
“Thanks,” I whisper to him. “Thank you.”