Chapter 14 Carson
CARSON
Three hours of derby practice is followed by two hours of laughing with the freshies and stuffing my face with nachos and beer, then a forty-five minute drive home. By the time I walk in the door, the day has caught up with me.
I’m tired. I’m sweaty. I need something to eat that isn’t deep-fried.
I drop my skate bag inside the door and drag my aching body toward the kitchen, praying the fruit salad in the fridge hasn’t grown fuzzy.
It’s not until I’m in the quiet stillness of my house that I realize I smell.
Bad. Like sweat and rubber and—I sniff my arms where my pads were—a moldy old couch.
I grimace, already thinking about the bag of lavender Epsom salts underneath my sink and how good it’ll feel to slip into a bath hot enough to cook a shrimp.
But when I shuffle into the kitchen, my quads screaming, I remember that I have a roommate.
A very tall, very broody roommate.
And he’s sitting at my kitchen table, a notebook in front of him and a pencil in his hand.
Is he…is he drawing?
I freeze, because he hasn’t heard me, thanks to the headphones he’s wearing.
He’s bent over the notebook, his left arm braced against the table.
He’s concentrating, but he looks relaxed.
His shoulder muscles flex and twitch as the pencil moves across the paper, the only sound in the kitchen the soft skritch skritch skritch as the lead scrapes the paper.
I can see only a corner of the paper, but I make out a riot of flowers with thick outlines, bursting and blooming and overlapping such that they look alive.
And then all of a sudden, his pencil freezes, his muscles going taut, his shoulders creeping up to his ears. He senses me here. He turns slowly, and when he sees me standing in the kitchen, he quickly flips the notebook over.
Which is when I remember my last words to him the other day. I made a promise to stay out of his way. Out of his business.
So instead of asking any of the fifteen to twenty questions on the tip of my tongue—You draw?
What are you drawing? Can I see? Do you have more?
—I march past him, limping only slightly as my muscles scream at me.
I throw open the fridge door and pull out the fruit salad, attacking it with a fork I snag from the drawer.
I’m toying with the idea of taking this bowl of fruit salad into the bath with me when I hear the rustle of paper.
I cut my eyes back to the table and see that Dan has flipped his notebook back over.
I can see the full illustration now. It’s an upside-down horseshoe with intricate shading that makes it look like worn vintage iron.
An explosion of peonies and daisies tumbles from the bottom right side of the horseshoe.
There are curling leafy vines around the whole piece and what looks like a long string of pearls draped around the picture, dripping off the edges.
“You hang the horseshoe upside down so the luck doesn’t fall out,” he says, tapping the illustration with the eraser of his pencil.
I don’t know what surprises me more: that he drew this, or that he explained it.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Thanks.” He drops his pencil, leaning on his elbow to run his thick hand over his buzzed head. “I like to doodle.”
“That looks like a little more than a doodle,” I say.
His jaw clenches, like he’s literally chewing over his thoughts, before he speaks. “It’s, uh, actually a tattoo?”
My eyebrows shoot up. “You draw tattoos?”
He nods, shifting in his chair. “I tattoo,” he says. “On people.”
There is a very real moment when I wonder if the word tattoo means something different in finance, because the notion that Dan McBride is a secret tattoo artist seems as likely as him being a superhero. “Are you serious? You give people tattoos? Like, real tattoos?”
He nods.
“How? I mean, when? I thought…finance?” Oh god, I sound like I’m having a stroke. But also I kind of feel like I’m having a stroke. Dan McBride is seriously an undercover tattoo artist?
Dan shrugs, and at first I think it’s a signal to walk away, that he doesn’t want to talk to me. But he doesn’t turn, doesn’t look away. He keeps those stormy blue eyes right on me.
So I try again. I lean back against the counter, stab a piece of pineapple, and ask him the first question that comes to mind.
“How does one become a tattoo artist? Like, who signs up to be someone’s very first subject?”
He visibly relaxes at the question, his shoulders dropping, his fingers unclenching from around the pencil.
“I tattooed on myself to start.”
“You can do that?”
He lifts the hem of his shorts to reveal a pale slice of skin on his upper thigh. It’s decorated with a cluster of small tattoos. It kind of looks like what happens when my kindergarteners get hold of a sticker sheet.
“Which was the first?” I ask.
He taps a little lightning bolt. “This one.”
His answers are short, but he doesn’t seem uncomfortable. After he answers each question, he brings his eyes back to mine as if to invite the next. For the first time since he moved into my house more than a week ago, the man seems like he might actually want to talk to me.
So I keep going.
“How many do you have?” I ask.
“A lot,” he replies.
“Where?”
He pauses, cocking his head. “Not in places you can see.”
The implications of that particular statement announce themselves low in my belly, curling and warm. And as I’m contemplating what exactly I’m feeling, he doubles down by reaching for his sleeve and rolling it up.
The first thing I see is a rose. Then a small snake. Small black line drawings wind up his arm. There are probably a dozen of them, each one distinct, yet placed such that they make up a full piece.
It’s at that moment that I realize he’s always wearing long sleeves. I’ve never seen any of these because he never shows them.
“I’m sorry, is that…is that a hot dog?” I ask, catching the bottom of a design that peeks out from his sleeve.
He grins. “Yeah. I always get one when I go see the Mets play.”
His sleeve stops mid-biceps, but it’s clear that’s not where the designs end.
“Are there more?” I ask.
He nods.
The way he looks at me turns my insides molten. Suddenly all those carved muscles I’ve envisioned beneath his perfectly tailored clothes are covered in ink. I didn’t think I had a thing for guys with tattoos, but I know now that I was very wrong.
Or maybe I just have a thing for broody, quiet, buttoned-up Dan McBride covered in secret tattoos.
“Why do you always keep them covered up?” I ask. His jaw clenches. “Sorry if this feels like an inquisition. I can stop.”
“I don’t mind,” he says, the words coming out quickly.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” he says, and this time there’s the barest hint of a smile on his lips.
“When I started getting tattooed in college, I stuck to places I could hide easily for internships and work. I wanted to make sure I still read as clean-cut in interviews and networking situations. People tend not to want to entrust huge chunks of their wealth to someone with knuckle tats.”
I nod. “And now?” I realize too late that we’ve tiptoed back to the question of his troubles, and I prepare for deflection. I even consider taking it back. Anything to keep him from shutting down again.
Instead he gazes back at the intricate design in his notebook, cocking his head as his eyes trace the lines.
“I don’t know. I guess I’m waiting to see if I need to be respectable anymore,” he says, then blows out a breath like it’s the first time he’s actually said that out loud.
And maybe it is. I still have no idea what’s going on with him, but this is the closest he’s ever come to telling me.
“Listen, I wanted to apologize for the other day. I totally messed that up. I’m not really very good at talking, in case you hadn’t noticed. ”
I nod, because I absolutely have noticed. “It seems like you’re doing just fine now,” I say.
“We’ll see how long I can keep this up,” he says with a rueful laugh. Then he takes a deep breath and blows it out. “What I meant to say that night was that I could use a friend. I’m pretty short on them these days.”
My heart aches at the sight of this man sitting in my kitchen, asking me to be his friend.
“I’d love to be your friend, Dan,” I tell him gently. “And I should probably apologize too. I was kind of high on this new roller derby thing that night. I was a little feistier than usual.”
He lets out a quiet laugh. “How’s that going?”
Even though I feel nervous and fizzy, I can’t help the smile that spreads across my face. Because just the thought of derby and what I accomplished today—hell, the fact that I showed up at all is a wild accomplishment—is like an ember glowing inside of me, threatening to burst into flame.
“It’s awesome,” I say, dropping into the chair across from him.
I pause and glance at him to see if I should keep going.
I don’t want to overwhelm Dan with my enthusiasm.
I’m a yapper, and he’s decidedly not, but when he leans back in his chair, his arm slung over the empty chair beside him, the corner of his lips almost twitching into a grin, I decide to talk.
“There were fourteen of us today, and we could not have been a more motley crew. Some of us had more skating skills than others, but none of us had ever played before except for this one girl named Maude Forbid who transferred from somewhere in Michigan, I think?”
“Maude Forbid?”
“Yeah. We get to pick derby names, if we want. Violet is called Violet Rage, and KO is Knockout. I actually don’t even know her real name.
It’s kind of awesome. I’ve never had a nickname before.
I’ve always just been Carson. I mean, the only real way to shorten it is to call me Cars, and that’s sort of…
I don’t know, it lacks something. So I need to do some thinking.
If you have any ideas, definitely let me know. ”
He nods, his full attention still on me. So I go on.