Chapter 19
Mark
Finley’s studio smells like disinfectant, cheap soap, and whatever they’re frying two shops down.
Today it’s chicken.
The greasy waft slips in every time the front door opens, mixing with the sharp chemical tang.
I’ve been coming here on and off for nearly fifteen years.
Long enough that the place feels exactly the way Finley does: permanently unimpressed.
The black leather chair is still cracked down one side.
The walls are still covered in framed flash sheets, old gig posters, and enough photos of healed tattoos to make first-timers either excited or reconsider all their life choices.
Finley himself still looks like a man who has spent two decades dealing with idiots and has settled on sarcasm as his primary defence mechanism.
He glances up when I walk in.
“You’re late.”
“I’m three minutes late.”
“Still late.”
“You become warmer with age.”
“I become less tolerant.”
Callum, already slouched in the battered waiting chair with a coffee in hand, snorts.
“Can confirm. I’ve been listening to him complain for ten minutes.”
I toss my jacket over the arm of the sofa. “About what?”
Finley goes back to wiping down his station.
“Apparently,” Callum says, “modern romance.”
Without looking up, Finley says, “I matched with a woman on Hinge last night.”
“That was your first mistake,” I say.
“She opened with ‘u ok hun?’”
I huff out a laugh. “Romance isn’t dead then.”
“It died years ago,” Finley mutters, peeling off one glove. “I’m forty-two, single, and letting women with ring lights ask if I’m emotionally available.”
“Are you?” Callum asks.
“No,” Finley says. “But, according to her, that’s frowned upon.”
Callum snorts into his coffee.
I drop into the sofa chair. “You really know how to sell yourself.”
Finley finally glances at me. “At this point I’d settle for someone willing to split a takeaway and ignore me in companionable silence.”
“That is grim.”
“That,” Finley says, “is realistic.”
Callum looks between us and, for once, chooses not to make it worse.
A rare and unsettling display of maturity.
Finley strips off his gloves and nods at me.
“What are we doing?”
I pull the folded printout from my pocket and hand it over.
He opens it.
Studies it.
“Coordinates,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“And a paw print.”
“Yeah.”
Callum leans forward enough to look over Finley’s shoulder.
“A paw print?”
I ignore him.
Finley holds the page out.
Simple.
Small.
Clean enough to mean nothing to anyone who doesn’t know.
Callum squints. “Where’s that?”
“Whitstable.”
There is a beat.
A quiet one.
The sort that says both men have immediately understood this is not just geography.
Finley glances up at me.
“Inside forearm?”
“Yeah.”
He gestures at the chair.
I sit and roll up my sleeve.
Finley starts cleaning the inside of my arm with alcohol, cold and sharp.
Callum says nothing for a few seconds.
Which is somehow worse than talking.
Then, “The paw print.”
I keep my eyes on the opposite wall.
“What about it?”
He nods towards the sketch.
“That for the hamster or the bloke?”
Finley snorts.
Straight in.
I drag out a breath. “Heath.”
Neither of them says anything.
I can feel the disbelief in stereo.
Finley presses the stencil against my skin.
“You know,” he says mildly, “the speed of that answer suggests there may be additional context.”
“Shocking,” Callum murmurs.
Finley peels the stencil back and checks the transfer.
“Whitstable coordinates,” he says. “Hamster paw print. Tiny memorial to a deeply specific weekend.”
“It doesn’t need a committee review.”
“No,” Callum agrees. “Because the committee has already reached its conclusion.”
I glance at him. “Have you?”
“Yes.”
Finley wheels his stool closer and switches on the machine. The familiar buzz fills the room.
“This,” Callum says, folding his arms, “is not a hamster tattoo.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No,” Finley says, adjusting my arm, “it’s a something-happened-here-and-I’m-pretending-I-can-reduce-it-to-a-rodent tattoo.”
I let my head fall back against the chair.
“Thanks for the armchair psychology.”
The first line bites into skin.
Sharp enough that I focus on that instead of the two men dissecting my life choices.
For a minute there is only the buzz of the machine, traffic outside, someone shouting near the chicken shop.
Then Callum says, too casually, “You still talking to him?”
I know exactly who he means.
“Sometimes.”
Finley makes a low noise that sounds suspiciously like bullshit.
Callum does not let it go.
“How sometimes?”
I stare at the ceiling.
There is no version of this answer that sounds detached.
“Most days.”
Silence.
Callum and Finley exchange a look.
A brief one.
Male.
Wordless.
Entirely too understanding.
I regret my words immediately.
“As we said, that tattoo,” Callum says at last, “is not about the hamster.”
I exhale.
“No.”
There.
Seems we are doing honesty now.
Finley resets his grip on my wrist.
“So what is it about?”
I should say nothing important.
I should say it was one intense weekend and everyone needs to calm down.
I should say literally anything less revealing.
Instead, before common sense can intervene, I hear myself say, “I wanted something on me that proves the weekend happened.”
The room goes quiet.
Callum’s eyebrows lift.
Finley glances at him.
Callum glances back.
It is a very specific exchange.
The heterosexual male equivalent of clutching pearls.
I close my eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Callum’s voice softens, which is frankly more alarming than the mockery.
“You’ve got it bad.”
Finley lowers the machine back to my arm.
“Deeply,” he mutters.
I stare at the ceiling and resign myself to never knowing peace again.