Cole stands directly behind me.
He’s taller than me, and broader. I fit entirely inside his silhouette, so he forms a dark halo all around me. As if he’s already swallowed me whole, and I’m inside of him.
“Your turn,” he says.
I lock eyes with him in the mirror. “What do you mean?”
He holds up the tattoo gun silently.
“Are you serious?”
In response, he puts the gun in my hand and reaches over his own shoulder, grabbing a handful of his shirt and shucking it off over his head. He stands upright, throwing the shirt aside.
I stare at his naked torso.
In all my years of figure drawing, I’ve never seen a body like his.
The closest comparison would be a gymnast or a dancer—that level of lean, tight, fluid muscle. A coiled spring, ready for release.
Even gymnasts aren’t this aesthetic. The slabs of muscle across his chest, the perfect V of his waist, the way the ripples of muscle seem designed to draw the eye down, down, to button of his trousers . . .
His flesh is pale next to the loose, dark waves of hair that fall almost to his shoulders. There’s no hair anywhere on his body. No ink, either. His skin is smooth and unmarked.
“You want me to tattoo you?” I say.
He nods.
“Do you have other tattoos?”
“This will be the first.”
I swallow hard.
Cole’s beauty is way past intimidating—it’s fucking flawless.
I’ve never given a tattoo in my life. If I fuck this up, I’ll feel worse than if I scrawled a mustache across the Mona Lisa.
“I don’t think I should.”
Cole’s brows drop low across his eyes, narrowing them to slits.
“I don’t give a fuck what you think.”
My fingers tighten on the gun.
Now I want to write FUCK YOU in six-inch letters across his back.
“I hope you have enough ink,” I say.
“I have exactly what I need,” he replies.
I bet he does.
I grab the stool and drag it over in front of the mirror.
“Sit down,” I say.
Cole sits, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. Without discussing it, we’ve both intuited that his back is the best canvas—smooth and relatively flat. Actually, it’s as muscular as the rest of him. As soon as I hover the needle over his skin, I can see that I’ll have to navigate the scapula, the ribs, and the long sheets of muscle that radiate out from the spine—the lats, the traps, and the obliques.
“You want me to . . . sketch it out first?” I say weakly.
Cole doesn’t move. He doesn’t even turn his head.
“I trust you,” he says.
I’m a hot mess. Nobody has ever trusted me, especially not with something as irreversible as this.
But I don’t argue. Taking a deep breath, I fire up the gun.
By the time I’m finished, the first morning light is streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. It illuminates Cole’s skin, turning marble to gold.
I’ve fallen so deeply into the design that all I can see is those flowing black lines, running like a river down the right side of his back. With a little practice, I’ve even figured out the shading.
He’s bleeding in a couple of spots. He never flinched. Never asked me to stop. He hardly seemed to feel it at all.
I clean his back with the green soap, just as he did to me.
Then I say, “It’s finished.”
Cole stands with his back to the mirror. He looks over his shoulder to see the design.
Two snakes: one white, one black. Twisted and entwined with one another—their alternating coils tightly wrapped, but their mouths open to show their snarling fangs.
I branded him just as he did to me.
23
Cole
The tattoo's complete, and I feel strangely peaceful.
The sun is rising. The sky outside the window looks transparent as glass.
Mara notices the same thing, pressing her palm flat against the window, as if she could reach through and touch the clear space beyond.
“No fog today,” she says.
“Do you want to walk with me?”
She turns her head, dark hair sliding across her bare shoulder in a way that makes me want to trace my fingers over the same spot. The light illuminates her profile, a burning line down her forehead, the bridge of her nose, the indent above her upper lip . . .
“Yes,” she says. “I do.”
We leave the building together.
I tore off her top, and the overalls barely cover her tits. Mara doesn’t seem to notice. I’ve never seen someone so comfortable in their own body, or so careless of other people’s opinions.