“Can you do something like this, with a lot of depth?”

  Depth. I’ll show you depth.

  I nod again, glancing at the picture that is his inspiration for today’s session and sending a copy to our printer in the back, asking him to wait for me to draw something up on the stencil, to figure out how I’m going to leave my mark behind but keeping it true to the picture.

  That’s the thing with tattoos—and everything else, really—you don’t really know what the final outcome’s going to be until it’s actually done.

  Oh, you can talk about color theory and curvature of the body and skin texture depending on scarring or not, you can talk until you can’t anymore about how you want it to look like, how you want it to be, but most of the time you get a different outcome.

  Not that I’m going to draw whatever I want on his skin, but what I see and what Russia sees are two very different things.

  And that’s the way it goes.

  I situate him on the bench where I’m working at today, lowering it down so I’m half-hunched over his body once we’ve talked about placement and I’ve secured the stencil on there, the image of the tattoo pinned on the inside of my forehead right between my eyes. I’m trusting my hands and my talent to make something beautiful out of this harsh creature that hurts some to draw, to tattoo.

  “Again, we stop anytime you want to. This big of a piece, it’s going to take at least a couple of sessions, depending on how it goes, all right?” I look down at the expanse of his unmarked skin.

  “You’re a virgin here, too,” I blurt out, donning my gloves and getting my stool rolled even closer to the bench where he’s lying down.

  Again, I have him horizontal and I can’t really do anything about it.

  “Excuse me?” Russia asks, turning his head towards my direction, eyebrows raised, one eye glaring at me from this angle.

  I laugh. “Your skin. Other than your forearm, that is. I’m ready to take your skin virginity.” I grin at him, patting at the skin on his back. “Ready?”

  He pulls in a deep breath, his back expanding with it, centering himself for the upcoming pain.

  “Try and relax. We stop when you need to, yeah?” Again, it sounds like I’m talking about something else, something even more intimate than what I’m doing now.

  I start up my machine, getting closer to the bench, shaking away the baby hairs that have escaped my topknot, my undercut fresh enough that I feel the cold wafting in from the humidifier next to me, getting tingles all along my scalp as I try to suppress a shiver.

  The last thing you want is a tattoo artist with shaky hands.

  Russia hums when the needle goes into his skin for the first time, and I start like I always do, with the tracing of the piece, making sure everything’s even, taking my time, trying to fall into a rhythm with his own breathing pattern, trying to be in sync while his muscles go tight under my hands.

  I keep reminding him to relax so I can see how the tattoo will look when the skin’s at rest instead of bunched, tightened over muscle and bone.

  “What made you want to get this one?” I ask, wanting him to forget about the pain for a little while, his body tensing underneath my hands. I keep pressing down into his skin as a reminder to relax, to breathe normally. His skin reddens up quickly as I continue my tracing, letting the drone of the tattoo machine be the whirring background noise of this non-conversation.

  “Was it another bet this time around?” I ask, wiping down his skin, smudging some of the ink everywhere, and continue working. I lick at my teeth, ignoring the way my lips are getting dry from this liquid lipstick from hell, and I can bet Elena’s ass that I’ll never buy from this brand again, I don’t care how affordable it is.

  Russia snorts, then winces, apologizing to me for moving. “Can I just get a couple of minutes?” he asks, and I nod, turning off the machine, sliding my stool back to give him room.

  I head over to our water cooler, grab a Styrofoam cup to fill up and bring it back to him, watching his fingers tremble as he accepts it with a small smile, sucking it back.

  Pain makes you thirsty.

  “Sorry,” he apologizes again, and I just shrug.

  “I’m used to it, you know. Everyone has different pain thresholds, it’s not a big deal.”

  “It’s like when you gave me the option to take a break, that’s all I fixated on, and the pain seemed heightened somehow? I’m not too sure if that’s the case or if my mind is playing tricks on me. Thank you for the water,” he says, sitting up fully now, hunching his shoulders in, as if he doesn’t want me to see his body.

  I’m a tattoo artist and I also used to pierce people in the oddest places. I’m used to the human body, probably just as much as a nurse or a doctor would be. I’ve seen everything.

  “You’re welcome. Like I said, you decide how many sessions you want. I’ve got another hour and a half on my slot right now, and I wasn’t going to go further than that. I’ve got a few repeat customers today, and they’re coming in after you, so we can schedule something else soon, if you feel like you need a longer break?”

  If this is the way it’s going to go, I’m going to see Russia more often than not, if he can’t take the pain.

  It’s nothing to be ashamed of, really, but I can’t help smiling at him, like he gave me the perfect gift on Christmas morning.

  “I can do another fifteen minutes, maybe,” he says, nodding to the left and right, thinking about it. I’m annoyed at how cute I find that little gesture, how my heart whines at not having someone like Russia to coo over, to want to cuddle and cover his face with a veritable rainstorm of kisses.

  I want the boring everyday stuff and sprinkle some adventures in between with my future boyfriend. I want all of that.

  But not here, not now.

  Thank you, next!

  Russia blinks at me, eyes narrowing, and it takes me a split second to double-check with my brain if I actually said any of that out loud, which would be mortifying and I’m never going to be able to come into work ever again, and I really don’t want to do that.

  If things keep going as they are, I expect Elena to move in with Beckett by next Christmas and I’m going to be left holding the bag. I need to keep working here for the foreseeable future.

  Maybe if you stop buying lipsticks in every forsaken undertone and color, you’d be able to not sweat rent every month! What about that?

  I can always go to makeup school, get a student loan from the government and learn “cosmetology,” even if most people know what to do based on YouTube beauty gurus, even if it won’t necessarily work for them.

  It’s not looking like a really promising plan B, huh?

  “What’s wrong?” Russia asks, and I let out a pained wheeze, like I’ve been sucker punched in the gut and I’m trying to decide whether to throw up or spill my lunch all over the floor in an emergency evacuation.

  Did I actually say anything out loud? Did I really do that?!

  I shake my head, waving it all off, even as he continues to look at me, and my heart thumps hard in my chest, wanting what I see in his face to be true, for it to be the interest that I’m perceiving on my end.

  But I’m not going to do that to myself, not again.

  “Nothing. I’m good. Are you...are you good?” Jesus Christ, I sound like a high schooler finally getting that conversation with her long-time crush, elated and terrified in a dizzy torrent, swinging back and forth between the two.

  Russia smiles, still holding onto the cup I gave him, swinging it back and finishing up the water, once and for all. “You’re very talented,” he says, and I nearly go and swallow my tongue.

  I love when I get compliments, love it.

  I smile at him, teeth and all. “Good. I’m glad you liked what we did for your arm. I think it really came out beautiful. It looks like it’s healing up pretty good, too. Just keep following my instructions and you should be good to go.”

  Russia nods, chest still caving in, like I’m going to hold him up and compare him to the buff gym rats that always come in to try to prove something but end up crying more often than not. It takes a lot of effort to hold pain at bay, and it usually ends in tears.

  But Russia...Russia’s calmer, steadier, like a tree planted against a howling wind, swaying in a storm, but ultimately keeping its place—bending without breaking.

  But then again, I don’t know everything about him, don’t know much about him—yet. I guess I’m just seeing what I want to see, too.

  “I showed some of my friends, actually. Sang your praises.”

  Compliments. Keep them coming, please!

  My cheeks are on fire, and if I’m not careful, I’m going to have to change gloves from trying to hide my face behind my hands, even if I’m trying to keep from being wasteful.

  “Yeah?” I ask, my voice not sounding like it belongs to me at all.

  Russia nods, catching wind of what’s going on, I’m sure of it. “You should expect to get some more clients your way. My friend just had a kid, and he wants an imprint of the baby’s feet on his bicep.” Russia glances up at the ceiling, chasing a memory.

  “Yeah, I think that’s what Alex said. And Josh will probably get something to do with The Legend of Zelda.”

  “Oh, I know that game!” I say, because I’ve heard of it, yeah, just never played it.

  We end up grinning at each other, reading between the lines.

  “I’d love to give Katie a tattoo, something really beautiful—watercolor maybe, but of something hard and unyielding,” I say, stopping myself just in time, afraid of what he’s going to see in me when I talk about my friend like that.

  “She’s strong, you know?” I say, nodding at him, as if I’m trying to get him to believe me, to agree with me in the way that two strangers might. “But delicate, like if you look at her from the right angle, she’s just this thin wisp, changing and moulding herself to a given situation.” I stop myself, appalled at what I’ve just said, at how easily it came out.

  “Well, uh, don’t tell her I said that. Or I don’t know, go ahead if you want. I’ll say it to her face any day.”

  Russia glances away, shivering for a split second, but I know his body heat’s going to skyrocket when I get back to tracing his tattoo on his back again. “You have an interesting way of looking at people,” he says, voice going a little gruff.

  I shrug again. “I can’t help it. I try to think about the tattoos that people would get if they had the chance, the money, the golden opportunity where no one is inebriated, and in sound body and mind. My favorite is trying to figure out what people who look like my grandparents would get.”

  “How come?”

  I squint at him. This is usually where I lose my first dates, but then again, they never really take me seriously because I look the way that I do, as if tattoos and piercings somehow negatively affect my IQ.

  “You sure you don’t want to get back to it?” I point back to the bench, and Russia’s mouth twists.

  He hands me back the cup, which I toss (and recycle, I’m not a monster), and I get back on my stool, twisting at the waist until something pops, making me sigh in satisfaction.

  “I’m sorry if I was being too...” Russia says, gesturing with a hand, his arms hanging over the sides as he might when he’s dead tired after a long week, a long year, and face-planting into bed, too exhausted to bring his arm back onto the mattress.

  Why do I find that cute? Why?

  “You weren’t being anything too,” I say, snapping on another pair of gloves for cleanliness purposes and sliding my stool closer to the bench. I give him a countdown to mentally (and physically) prepare himself for the next bit of tracing of his tattoo, and I try to move faster now while still trying to be diligent, knowing that if I can finish the overall outline, then we’d be good to go for the next couple of sessions.

  “Sometimes I wish I could get all of my tattoos removed and start over. I’d get better art, choose better shops and artists instead of just walking in on a whim one day,” I say, and feel him relax under my hand, as if not answering him bothered him. “It would be cool but hurt like a bitch.”

  “How many do you have?”

  I know the answer, I’ve counted them many times. It’s one of the first questions that most people ask, after do they mean anything? “I’ve got one for every year I’ve been alive,” I say, just to make him guess. “I’m twenty-six, and I need to get one more before the end of March. Well, I guess after my birthday.”

  “Yeah?”

  I nod, even though his face is turned towards me, he can’t really see me. His eyes are closed, voice going a little tight, a little strained. I stop talking and keep on working, asking him to relax every once in a while, trying to keep him calm.

  Eventually I ask him about his friends, learning about them in such detail that it’s starting to feel like I know them.

  I don’t mention Sera, and Russia doesn’t either, which I guess, yeah, it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to talk about her, not after the look I saw when Katie talked about her.

  I also know that sometimes you don’t stop loving someone, knowing the way they impacted your heart, the way they changed you as a person just by being close to them.

  But you do stop being in love with someone, or so they tell me.

  I wonder which one it is for Russia.

  But I’m not going to ask. I’m not a monster.

  The only monster that lives inside me is the one that constantly demands I buy new makeup releases.

  But that’s another story.

  SIX

  Elena’s doing a little dance in the middle of the shop, and it’s giving me a headache, but also warming me up inside so I feel like the Grinch whose heart has expanded three times too fast with it getting crushed against my ribs.

  “What do you call that? Dancing?!” I call as I finish up one of my drawings, one of the sketches I’ve been working on for one of Russia’s friends, Alex—the one who came to me explaining about his son and the health issues he was born with.

  It was a bad day yesterday, the kind that constantly made my throat close up on the verge of tears, thinking about the love the guy has for his kid, where he told me, a stranger (easier than it should be most of the time) about his hopes and fears, wanting to hold on to his son while getting a tattoo of his tiny feet.

  “DO YOU THINK THAT’S sick? That I want his feet tattooed on my body when I’m not sure if he’s going to live or not?” Alex asked me and his dark brown eyes had glittered with unshed tears. It was even more heartbreaking when his voice cracked, and he rubbed his hands over his face, struggling to keep himself together.

  I didn’t know what to do, should I have held him tight, even if we don’t know each other, give him platitudes?

  I gave him the answer he wanted, the answer that he needed. “I think it’s beautiful that you want to freeze a moment in time, his tiny feet on your skin forever. I’ve done a few of those tattoos since I’ve worked here. I can do that for you, Alex, I can do that for you. Can you get me a print of his footprints? Send it to my email?”

  I blindly searched for a business card, handed it over to him, a picture of my face on the business card with my business email right there.

  “But again, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I can’t give you the right answer. I just know I can do it for you, but you have to show up.”

  Alex had nodded, had breathed deeply through his nose, and had scratched at his trimmed beard, ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. I noticed the wrinkles around his eyes, bracketing his mouth, as if he’d been holding back tears since the kid was born two months ago, still in the NICU at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.

  I CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE the worry the guy is going through, but I hope giving him what he wants will provide him a small, tiny measure of comfort.

  So I’m drawing up the feet, trying to provide Alex some options with how big he wants them to be, trying to keep the scaling right by eye alone.

  “Let’s go grab something to eat, yeah? I’m starving. I want hot dogs. And poutine. So much poutine. I want the cheese pulls to end all cheese pulls.” Elena’s voice jars me from trying to scale the feet, deciding to make another couple of versions, wishing I got a better look at Alex’s arm to figure out what would look best and where.

  I flick up my head towards Elena, keeping my eyes pinned to the drawing, finishing up the shading of the little feetsies, wondering if I’m going to have to end up writing the birth and death dates underneath, lifting my pencil off the sketch, not even wanting to jinx it.

  Life isn’t fair most of the time, but some of the time it sucks, and it sucks hard.

  For now, I can’t do anything but sate my hunger.

  I pin my hair back, a not-so-corkscrew curl getting loose from my bun at the top of my head, and scratch at my undercut.

  I flick my finger over my upper helix piercings, letting the jewelry tinkle against one another.

  “Almost done!” I yell, finishing up the drawing and stowing it in a folder, my hands smudging the pencil a little, getting on the curl of my hand. I go to my small locker where I keep my paperwork, along with my coat, my boots, on top of my giant bag that’s big enough to hold the sketchpad I always have on me, and the small pencil case where I keep my drawings pencils.

  “Oh,” I say, stamping my feet so they’re super comfortable in my boots, almost tripping on the carpet runner we’ve set up from the entrance door that runs all the way up to the reception desk, like every (potential) client coming in would feel like they’re walking on the red carpet.

  “Hi, Russia,” I say, waving a hello, freezing for a second since I’m pretty sure, pretty sure that we weren’t scheduled for an appointment today, and I’m currently off the clock.

  “We didn’t have an appointment today, did we? Or is there something wrong with your tattoo?” I ask, thinking back to his previous tattoo of the Nordic compass, how nicely that one’s healing up as it’s kept moisturized and hydrated, especially during the cold-as-hell winter months.