Chapter 33
CONNOR
It’s been too quiet today, with only two clients in the ten hours that we were open; not counting CJ’s drop in for some lunch and to make a phone call to his daughter in Bradenton.
I’ve spent the last half of the day filling a silence that has made me want to crawl out of my body and be anywhere other than here.
Swiveling in my seat, I push myself away from my desk, stretching out my arms as I lean against the chair’s backing to crack my aching joints.
I stand, taking the few steps necessary to cross the shop to Tripp’s station, where he’s busied himself with spraying too much disinfectant on every surface around him, both ears stuffed with earbuds to keep out any unwanted sound or conversation.
“Tripp,” I call out.
Even after waiting a few beats, I get no answer from him. I tell myself that he’s just in the zone as his arm works in furious circles against his tattoo chair, but I know that it’s a lie. Carefully closing the distance between us, I reach forward to gently pluck an earbud from its place.
His head snaps in my direction, and I offer him a lopsided smile, dropping my palm onto the chair to support myself as I lean against it.
“I want a tattoo,” I tell him.
“You want to talk about my folks.”
“Yeah, and I want a tattoo.” Reaching for the sketchbook on his table, I hold it toward him. “Pick something for me.”
His eyes stay on mine for too many moments too long, his jaw hardened, as he thumbs through the pages of the sketchbook. When they finally move down and toward the pages in his hands, he offers a doubtful shake of his head.
“You don’t like the shit I draw,” he mumbles.
“Maybe not, but I like you,” I shrug. “You might be able to lie to Jules about it, because she wants you to be okay so badly that she’ll take whatever you say at face value, but you can’t lie to me. You’re not okay.”
Keeping his focus on the paper in front of him, he offers a dip of his chin, the tip of his tongue pulling his jewelry into his mouth.
“I know.”
My hands reach behind me to pull my shirt over my head, and I toss it onto the floor before pushing up the back of the chair and dropping onto it to straddle the seat. Tripp quietly rolls an arm rest into place for me to drop my forearms onto.
He disappears for a while with his book, back into the office with his computer and all of the equipment that we can’t sterilize. Returning a few minutes later, he preps his hands so he can put the stencil onto my skin.
His touch is gentle as he applies and reapplies the stencil, perfecting its position as if I care one way or the other where or what it is. When he’s satisfied with it, he drops onto his chair with a metallic clunk, heaving a sigh before offering me only one word.
“Thanks.”
As the machine makes contact with my skin, I start in with small talk. Who did you see, how’s your niece doing – innocuous questions that will let me test the waters before I dive in for anything of substance.
We’re an hour into the tattoo when I finally brave asking him, “What did they say?”
“Everything yours would never say to you,” he answers. A humorless chuckle forces its way past a wall of tangible pain. “I don’t know why I expected it to be any different than it always is.”
Carefully shifting my body between strokes of the machine, I reach behind me to rest a hand against Tripp’s knee. He rolls his chair, just a little; just enough to push himself more firmly into my grip, and I massage my fingers into his skin through the rough fabric of his jeans.
“I confronted Jeff about what he did to Nash,” he offers. “Maybe it was a dick move, I don’t know. He said a watered-down version of the same hateful shit he said back then, and when I told him about us—”
There’s nothing careful about the way that my head whips to my side, to where Tripp is perched on his chair. He lifts the machine off of my skin to wipe the area, seeming to intentionally keep his eyes off of mine.
“Tripp…”
“I knew what he would say,” he says. “I was right, and now it’s done. It’s not like he could disown me twice.”
His leg bounces against my hand as he turns to dip his cartridge into one of the small ink pots laid out on the tray next to him.
I hiss as the needle pulls across my skin, inching toward the center of my spine.
Tripp is gentle with the paper towel as he wipes away blood and ink, and before meeting my skin with the needle again, he offers a soft tap of his finger.
My ‘coming out’ wasn’t much of a coming out at all. Despite the way that everyone else around me seemed to think, my parents had never made it seem like my being straight was the expectation, or that if I wasn’t, I’d need to tell them about it.
I brought home a boyfriend on Superbowl Sunday and introduced him as such. My mom fixed him a plate and my dad asked him which team he was rooting for. When he gave the correct answer, according to my dad, that was the end of the conversation; he’d earned their approval.
I understand that my coming out experience wasn’t the same as every person’s, and that’s something that I consider myself greatly privileged to have experienced.
It makes something ache deep inside of me to know that Tripp’s parents are proving once again that they’re not real parents, and that their ‘God’ will always come above their own kids.
“I’m almost wrapped here, so if you’ve got something else to say, get it out now,” Tripp warns.
Careful not to move my body, I meet his eyes.
“I’m just sorry, Riptide,” I tell him sincerely.
“I’m not,” he says with a shake of his head. “It doesn’t change anything for us. People aren’t gonna get it and that’s fine, they don’t have to. It isn’t for them. He doesn’t matter.”
And I don’t believe you.
With another swipe of the paper towel, a splash of cool green soap hits my skin, and he cleans me up before sticking on a large adhesive patch to protect his work.
He’s finished with the tattoo and his parents are now officially off-limits for conversation.
I bring myself to a sitting position on the table as he pulls off his gloves and tosses them into the biohazard bin at his station.
When he passes a hand mirror for me to take to the floor-length one and inspect his work, I rest it on my lap, watching him as he rifles through his drawer for supplies.
“Do you want to break something?”
A soft laugh huffs out of him and he turns over his shoulder to look at me, the corner of his mouth pulling into a weak smile.
“Yeah, actually,” he says, “I think I do.”
The second that he’s done bandaging his work and not a moment sooner, I’m off on the hunt for whatever breakables exist in the shop that we can spare or that won’t be missed. The selection is limited, but it should be enough.
Not unlike when he did this for me, I walk with Tripp into the lot behind the shop, my arms loaded down with items that I carefully set onto the ground at our feet.
Picking a stoneware plate from the pile, he hefts it in his hand before raising it above his head. As he brings it down with a strong force, the plate shatters against the asphalt, sending pieces out in a wide spray.
I watch wordlessly as he destroys piece after piece, and as hurt etches itself deep into every one of his features.
Hurt from his parents’ repeated rejection, hurt from the older brother that he’s desperate for a connection to, hurt from the wasted worry that he’d given to someone who has never done anything but throw him away.
And I watch him channel every bit of that hurt into every throw and every shard that he creates against the asphalt.
“I’m not angry,” he insists through a white-knuckled grip on a drinking glass that I haven’t seen anyone use since my first day at the shop. “I’m just tired of being fucking right about them.”
A muffled crack sounds from the thin glass as it breaks in his grip, sending a large shard into the palm of his hand. He hisses as he drops the remaining pieces, pulling the shard from its place with a curse to let a streak of crimson spill from the gash that it leaves behind.
“That needs to be cleaned out,” I tell him, taking hold of his hand to press my own against the wound. “That glass has been in that cabinet collecting dust longer than Drumstick’s been alive.”
Humorless, empty laughter bubbles out of him as we walk back into the shop, and he dips his head with a half-amused shake.
“My dad would tell me that was an act of God,” he says. “A punishment from my Father in Heaven for disrespecting my father on Earth.”
“It was an act of physics,” I argue.
Dragging him behind me, I guide him toward one of the leather couches at the front of the shop.
As he settles onto the couch, resting his wounded hand on his thigh, I make for the first aid kit beneath the front desk. It’s probably older than it should be, and it’s fairly basic in its supplies, but it will be enough to get the job done. I’ve fixed up worse with less, and so has he.
Taking it over to him, I take the cushion next to his and pull his hand into my lap. I quickly get to work cleaning the gash, following with a tightly-wrapped strip of gauze to stop it from bleeding any more than it already has.
“Had to be that hand,” he says almost resentfully.
If memory serves me correctly, he tattooed a half circle into this same palm under a dirty set of bleachers when he was a teenager. A symbol of a connection he’d never made with his parents or with the God that they wanted so badly for him to believe in.
“I don’t think you’ll need stitches,” I tell him. My thumb traces the features in the face of a black-eyed demonic creature which now covers any trace of the tattoo he’d done in his youth. “It’s gonna hurt like hell tomorrow, though.”
Bringing his palm to my lips, I gently press a kiss to it before trailing my lips to his wrist and forearm.
“Things would be a lot easier for you if you didn’t bottle it up all the time,” I tease.