Chapter 4 #2
And then, in a voice so even and quiet Ivy almost didn’t believe it had the power to undo her, Giulietta said, “Only when I want something to stay.”
The words were simple. No flourish. No drama. Just seven words, spoken without hesitation. But they hit Ivy like pressure on a bruise, like the inhale right before a wound split open again.
She didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe.
Didn’t answer.
Because in that moment, Ivy knew exactly what Giulietta meant, even if she couldn’t decide if it was mercy or cruelty because silence after sex could mean detachment, but this silence wasn’t empty.
It wasn’t passive. It was deliberate. Weighted.
A stillness laced with presence, not absence. And that made it worse.
She wanted to ask, What do you want to stay?
She wanted to say, Then fucking stay.
But she said nothing.
Because if she asked, if she pushed, she might get the truth. And Ivy wasn’t sure she wanted it.
Giulietta moved slowly now, gathering her coat with one hand, slipping her arms into it without the slightest disruption to her poise.
There was no pause for reflection, no glance in the mirror, no moment of awkward hesitation like Ivy sometimes got with other lovers who didn’t know how to come down from the high.
Giulietta didn’t descend. She reset. She became a version of herself Ivy had never fully met and probably never would, and that, somehow, made the ache worse.
Still no kiss.
Still no thank you.
Just that same soft composure, that eerie, devastating quiet, the kind that left marks deeper than nails ever could.
She walked to the door, opened it, and stepped through.
And then, she was gone.
Ivy stared at the door for a long time, longer than she meant to.
She didn’t know what she was waiting for—another knock, a return, a whisper of guilt or softness or something that would say this mattered—but nothing came.
So she let her eyes drop to her shoulder, fingers rising slowly to touch the tender skin where Giulietta had bit her. The bruise was already forming, deep and dark, aching beneath her fingertips. It throbbed like a memory, like something Ivy wasn’t ready to let go of.
She didn’t want it to fade.
She didn’t want any of it to fade.
But she also didn’t know how to ask for it to stay.
So she sat in the silence she hated, tracing the mark Giulietta had left on her skin like it was a signature she didn’t deserve.
And for the first time in years, Ivy felt the unbearable weight of wanting something she couldn’t name.
By midday, Ivy had worked on three clients, and she couldn’t remember the names of a single one.
It wasn’t like her. Normally, she anchored herself in the work: the needle’s vibration, the rhythm of breathing and pressure, the slow and sacred act of creating something permanent on skin that had already lived through so much.
She liked the intimacy of it, the silence, the way people offered their pain without flinching, trusting her to turn it into something worth wearing.
Her hands had always been steady. Her lines clean.
Even when her head was somewhere else, her body never betrayed her.
But today? Today, something was off.
The client beneath her needle—a firefighter getting a linework phoenix stretching from his collarbone to sternum—was breathing too loud, too fast, and Ivy wanted to snap at him to control his breath because he was shaking the line, but the words stayed locked behind her teeth because she knew the real issue wasn’t his breathing.
It was hers.
She was holding tension in her shoulders, in her wrists, in the corners of her jaw, and no matter how much she flexed or rolled her neck or adjusted her grip, she couldn’t get the release she needed.
Her focus kept slipping sideways. Her mind kept wandering back to the night before—not to the sex, not to the way Giulietta had bucked against her fingers with sharp, clean silence, but to the way she’d left.
To the sentence Ivy hadn’t been able to stop replaying in her head no matter how many times she told herself it didn’t matter.
Only when I want something to stay.
It looped over and over, like a song she hated but couldn’t stop humming. And she didn’t even know why it had gutted her so deeply. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t even tender. But it had felt true in a way that nothing anyone had said to her in months, maybe years, had felt.
She caught herself missing a beat in the linework, nothing the client would ever notice, but Ivy felt it, the microsecond of inconsistency, the deviation from her usual precision, and it made her blood go cold.
She finished the session, wrapped the tattoo, gave her aftercare instructions in a clipped voice that didn’t invite questions, and stepped into the hallway before the guy had even finished pulling his shirt back on.
Leah, her receptionist, was waiting at the front desk with a protein bar in one hand and her phone in the other, smirking like she’d been sitting on something for an hour and couldn’t wait to drop it.
“You’re off today,” she said, not unkindly, but with that same teasing cadence Ivy had heard since the day she hired her. “What’s her name?”
Ivy didn’t even blink. “What makes you think it’s a her?”
Leah raised one eyebrow and tossed the protein bar at her. “Because you don’t get like this over boys. And because you haven’t looked at me once since nine a.m., you’ve been staring at your phone every time your machine stops buzzing. That’s not boredom. That’s obsession.”
Ivy caught the bar, peeled the wrapper halfway, and bit into it like it had personally offended her. “You’re projecting.”
“Nope,” Leah said, popping her gum. “I’m observing. Big difference.”
Ivy rolled her eyes. She took her phone out as soon as she stepped into the back again and stared at the screen like it might offer something she hadn’t seen before. No new texts. No missed calls. Just the same unread message threads she’d scrolled through half a dozen times this morning.
She pulled up Giulietta’s thread, still just one word from the night before. Busy?
And the response: Always. Come anyway.
She didn’t type anything new. She didn’t dare.
Instead, she swiped up, closed the thread, and sat there for a long moment with her phone resting in the center of her palm like it weighed more than it should.
The rest of the day blurred.
She finished two more tattoos, both smaller, nothing complicated. She didn’t talk much and managed to keep her hands steady even though her head wasn’t. But everything felt dimmed somehow, like someone had turned the contrast down on the world and she couldn’t get the light back.
It wasn’t until late—after she’d locked the front door, swept the floor, turned off the machines, and shut down the shop for the night—that she found herself sitting in the back room, alone with the soft hum of the space around her and the flickering echo of memory behind her eyes.
She pulled her sketchbook from the bottom drawer of the old cabinet beneath the sink.
It had dust on it.
She hadn’t touched it in over a year.
Inside were half-finished designs she’d never inked, not even on fake flesh, pieces she told herself she wasn’t happy with, but the truth was she’d stopped drawing them because they felt too raw. Too much like her.
She flipped past floral patterns, mandala geometries, and an anatomical heart split open into a flock of birds.
And then, there it was.
The woman in the fire.
She was sketched in fine lines, her body standing tall in the center of a swirling inferno, flames licking at her ankles, her waist, and her hair, but never touching her. The figure was strong and upright, her arms loose at her sides like she wasn’t afraid of burning.
When Ivy had first drawn the design, it was a metaphor. A portrait of strength, of detachment. The kind of woman Ivy had always told herself she wanted to be. Untouchable. Beautiful. Alone.
But tonight, as she stared at it, something was wrong.
She picked up her pencil, pressed it to the page with more pressure than necessary, and began shading.
She shaded the mouth, made it fuller, softer. Then the jawline, sharper now, more defined. The kind of jaw that didn’t flinch.
Then the throat—long, graceful, slightly exposed like the woman didn’t care who came for it.
The cheekbones were the last thing she touched. High. Elegant. The kind that caught shadows and attention in equal measure.
She hadn’t meant to draw Giulietta. She hadn’t tried to.
But when she pulled back, the pencil loose between her fingers, her heart kicking unevenly behind her ribs, she realized that she had.
The woman in the fire still hadn’t burned.
But now she looked like someone who could make you burn instead.
And for the first time, Ivy understood that this wasn’t about being untouchable. It wasn’t about distance or metaphor or pain. It wasn’t even about wanting to feel something.
It was about wanting to be seen.
Really seen.
And Ivy had no idea how to survive that.
The shop was quiet in a way that felt both earned and unnatural, the kind of silence that arrived only after the world had been wrung out and emptied, after the last appointment was inked, the machines were cleaned, and Leah had finally locked up with a quick salute and an over-the-shoulder, “Try not to brood too hard, boss.” The metal security shutters clattered down with a finality Ivy didn’t like, and the lock clicked louder than usual in the hollow quiet of a space meant for voices.
Now, only the backroom glowed with light, a soft amber hue spilling from the standing lamp in the corner, the rest of the shop dim, retreating into shadows and stillness.
She sat alone in the leather chair she normally reserved for clients in pain, the one designed to cradle limbs while needles danced their ruthless ballet. But tonight, she wasn’t holding a machine. There was no client, no sound, just her and the slow press of hours she couldn’t fill.