Being Me About It
Fuse
My daddy's arms were big like that.
The kid's line follows me the whole ride back to the shop. Loops in my head. A song I can't shake.
Five years old. No idea what she just did to me.
I should've kept moving. Should've taken the coffee and gone, same as the last six months since Ash and I have been assigned to the tattoo shop. Instead I stood there and let a five-year-old gut me in front of half the morning rush.
Worse, I liked it. Liked that she looked at me and decided I was worth a nickname. And worth saying that out loud.
The tattoo shop reeks of ink and antiseptic. Nothing like Nora’s coffee shop. A machine buzzes from the back room, steady, somebody's needle already running this early.
Ash is at the front counter, sketching on tracing paper. Doesn't look up before he starts in. "You're early."
"Same time as always."
"You usually linger." He sets the pencil down. "Months of lingering, Fuse. We've all noticed."
"Mind your own."
"I would. If you weren't making it everybody's business." He grins. "Walking around here every morning looking kicked. What's her name? The coffee girl."
"Nora."
I say it before I can stop myself. First time I've said her name out loud to another living soul.
Ash catches it. He catches everything. And he’s young enough to give me shit about it.
"Nora." He drags it out, savoring it. "She know you've been coming in every morning for months just to stand around hoping she'll talk to you?"
"I order coffee."
"You order coffee and stand there for twenty minutes doing nothing with it."
I don't have a comeback. Because it's true.
Months of telling myself it's the coffee. The shop. The convenience on the way here.
Every morning a lie.
It’s her… mostly.
The way she moves behind that counter like she built every inch of it with her own hands. Because she did. The way she laughs at her regulars. Easy. Open. Nothing like the laugh she gives me.
Careful. Closed off. Rationed.
I want the real one. I want to be the reason for it.
I've never wanted anything that gently in my life.
Everything I know how to do, I learned with my fists first. My old man made sure of that, and made sure of it with my mother more times than I bothered counting.
The kitchen in that house had yellow linoleum, cracked at the seam by the fridge. A dent in the drywall shaped like a fist, because it was one. I remember the sound more than the sight—a wet, flat crack, then the quiet after that was worse than the crack.
I used to time it. Count how many seconds of quiet before she started crying. Some nights the quiet went on long enough I thought he'd killed her, and I'd lie there behind the couch working out what I'd say to the police, twelve years old and already rehearsing it.
By the time I was big enough to step between them, the damage was old. Settled into the bones of that house like rot.
My mother left two years too late.
I look at my own hands. Scarred across two knuckles. A burn from an exhaust pipe gone wrong.
I think about Rose's fingers wrapped around a coffee cup twice the size she needs. Wonder if hands built for taking a man apart have any business near something that small.
That good.
"You're doing the thing," Ash says.
"What thing."
"The staring-at-your-own-hands thing. You do it right before you talk yourself out of something." He sets the pencil down again. "Whatever it is, do it. You're thirty-four, brother. Quit stalling."
He's not wrong.
Months of telling myself there's no rush. Nora looks at my patch like it's a loaded gun pointed at her kid. A woman like that doesn't want to be rushed.
Maybe a woman like that doesn’t want to be watched at all.
But this isn't patience. Patience doesn't feel this way—a held breath, a door I keep walking up to and never opening. This is fear, dressed nicer than it deserves.
Rose said my arms were big like her daddy's. Nora went rigid like she'd been struck. Gathered that kid up so fast you'd think the building was on fire.
That's not disgust. I know disgust. I've worn it on plenty of faces before.
That's grief. Old and raw, bleeding somewhere under a scar that never set right.
I have no idea what it takes to get close to that without tearing it back open.
But I'm done finding out from twenty feet away over a coffee counter.
"I'm going back tomorrow," I tell Ash. "Going to say something real."
"About damn time."
"Don't make it a thing."
"Brother, you made it a thing the day you started coming in every morning for a four-dollar latte you don't even drink half of." He's grinning again, but there's a steadiness under it now. "Go get your girl. Don't scare her off being you about it."
Being me about it. That's the whole problem in four words.
I don't know how to be anything except what I am. Too big. Too rough. Too much club, not enough soft.
I flex my hands once, twice. Watch the scars shift over the knuckles.
What if she doesn’t see me that way?
Maybe that's not the question.
Maybe it's whether hands like mine get to hold something that breakable.
Tomorrow I walk in, and I don't order coffee and stand there like a coward with good manners.
I tell her I've counted every one of the last hundred plus mornings.
I tell her what it does to me, the way she says my order without needing to ask.
I get close enough to find out if her careful laugh turns into the real one when it's aimed at me instead of the room.
Whatever she says back, at least it won't be more standing at a safe distance, memorizing a woman I haven't earned the right to want yet.
I grab a rag off the counter. Wipe down a station that doesn't need it. Same as she wipes down counters that don't need it either.
Ash watches me work for a minute. Says nothing. Lets me have the quiet.
The machine in back stops buzzing. Light shifts a few inches across the floor.
Tomorrow. I'll say something real.
Tomorrow.