I stand. Breathe in, breathe out.
“Must have been short but intense,” I say.
I walk over to a table, pull a bolt of tracing paper off a roll.
Mindy just sighs.
“Was it ever,” she says.
I know I could say something. I could tell her that I, too, had a short but intense affair with Seth Loveless. That he’s also made me batshit insane sometimes. We could have camaraderie: two women, done wrong by the same man.
I don’t want it.
“As far as coverups go, we’ve got a few options,” I say. I sit again, tattoo practically staring at me. “If your main concern is rendering the text unreadable, we could use the other line work in a new design.”
“Yeah, I mostly just want the name gone,” she says. “My boyfriend won’t do it doggie style unless I’m wearing crotchless panties to cover it up.”
That’s a lot of information from a woman who called it her booty.
“That gives us more options,” I tell her.
“Marty wants me to put his name on there instead,” she offers. “And I love him and all, but I’m already getting one name removed…”
“I generally advise against names in tattoos,” I tell her, and start sticking the tracing paper to her butt, folding, carefully pressing. “For one thing, word tattoos don’t tend to age well. They get faded or stretched, and next thing you know they’re unreadable.”
“And also you might not always be with the person?” Mindy says, dryly.
No shit.
“I like to lead with the technical reasons,” I say. “For some reason, people don’t love it when you suggest they’re going to break up.”
“I wish someone’d talked me out of this one,” she says.After Mindy leaves, I clean.
I clean everything. I wipe down every surface. I practically wrench the tattoo chair apart. Scrub the floors, the walls. I autoclave everything I can find that can go into an autoclave, just for the hell of it.
As the smell of bleach rises through the air, so thick that I prop the back door despite the temperature, I think over and over again: this is why.
And I think: I’m glad he left.
This is what happens. It’s never been a butt tattoo before, but it will always be something: a lipstick in his medicine cabinet. A joke from one of his brothers. A knowing look in the grocery store.
Some reminder that I’m a name on a list. One of fifty, or sixty, or a hundred. Another notch on a bedpost riddled with them.
When there’s nothing left to clean in the back room I move to the front and get to work: vacuum, mop, wipe. I pull the cushions off the couch. I grab the Windex and painstakingly clean every inch of the big plate glass windows in the front, both arms aching by the end.
And when I’m finished I look out through them, onto the quiet streets of Sprucevale at nine o’clock on a Thursday night, and I think: Bird.
He hasn’t called me that in years, not since we were actually dating, not since before the hotels and the fuck fest weekends and the fights. Not since we were young and naïve and in the kind of wild, breathless, relentless, all-consuming love that’s only for the young and naïve.
I don’t know why he started again and I refuse to think about it tonight. I’m just going to leave the shop, get takeout on the way home, and then watch the relentless pleasantness of The Great British Bake Off until I’m numb enough to go to sleep.
I shut off the lights, close the doors, lock them behind myself. My breath fogs into the clear sky as I make the short walk to my car. Get in. Crank the heat.
Look through the windows, stars barely visible beyond the orange glow of a street light. I’ve got no idea where scorpio is, or when it’s visible, or what it looks like.
But I flip the sky off anyway, then drive home.Chapter Twenty-SevenDelilahI watch the glossy wooden planks fly by under me, scuffed with years of sneaker marks. My Nineties Girl Rock playlist is blasting from a Bluetooth speaker, though given the way that Veruca Salt is getting lost in the vast space of the middle school auditorium, I’m not sure blasting is the right word.
“Try not to hit the pads this time!” Lainey shouts.
“Right!” I shout back, and shift my weight to my left foot, dragging my right behind me at what I hope is a ninety-degree angle.
My inner thighs scream. My outer thighs scream. My quads and glutes and calves and lower back all scream as I grit my teeth and keep my core as stable as I can to keep from spinning out like last time.
About a foot before the blue pads bolted to the gymnasium wall, I come to a stop.
“Yeah, baby!” Lainey shouts.
I put both skates back on the floor and take a deep breath. I’m tempted to lean against the wall, but I’ve got wheels on my feet right now and frankly I don’t trust any angles besides straight up and down.