Love & Ink

by JD Hawkins

  I let out a sad sigh.

  “Who knows? I’m sure she’s got her reasons. Maybe she tolerates it to keep her family together. Maybe she’s afraid of breaking away from him, and the paychecks. Maybe she still loves him enough to put up with it. Shit—maybe she just didn’t get the email.”

  I look up and see Jenny smiling.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing,” she says, still smiling. “I just think it’s funny how much easier it is to give the benefit of the doubt when we’re not involved. Maybe you should cut Teo that kind of slack. At least for now. You can always run away again later.”

  “That’s it,” I say playfully, standing up and putting on my jacket. “You’re paying.”

  Forty minutes later, after a quick stop at the studio to grab Carlos’ clothes, I’m at the Doubletree hotel. After telling the concierge that Mr. and Mrs. Borges are expecting me, he directs me to room thirty-seven. I make my way up to the expensive suite and knock at the door with the ‘do not disturb’ sign hanging from the handle.

  “Who is it?” I hear Candace’s voice clearly, her sharp, abrasive tones slicing through the door, impossible to insulate against.

  “It’s me, Ash.”

  “You took your sweet fucking time! Get in here already!”

  Bracing myself for the mental and emotional fatigue every interaction with Candace brings, I push open the door and enter the suite.

  If I didn’t know what they had done in this suite last night, I would have assumed a group of about twenty rock stars had spent the night partying here.

  The place is a mess. There are sheets and clothes crumpled up across the entire floor, so that I have to pick my steps carefully as I also try to wince away the smell of day-old seafood, too-strong perfume, and the strongest sex smell I’ve ever encountered. There are plates on the bed carrying a smashed lobster shell and a series of sugary treats—all tasted, none finished. I accidentally kick over a bottle of wine and look down to find a dark stain on the hotel carpet.

  “Careful!” Candace scolds from the corner of the room, where I see that she’s applying make-up with the focus of a safecracker, pausing only to swig quickly from yet another wine bottle.

  I shriek suddenly at the sight of the tall, half-naked man approaching me from the side in a hurry. I look, see that it’s Carlos, shower water flinging off him like a shaking dog as he ruffles himself with his towel, knowing his cock is hanging there just a few feet away from me, then look away, suddenly fascinated by the pattern of the rug. Still, I see Candace glare at me with a sense of possessiveness you wouldn’t really expect from a mistress.

  “Those my clothes?” Carlos says.

  “Uh…yeah,” I say, holding them out to him while looking the other way still.

  “Great,” Carlos says, over the sound of him still vigorously scrubbing himself dry with the towel.

  When he takes them from me, he says, “We’ve got a problem.”

  I look up, and finally feel comfortable enough to look at Carlos now that he’s pulling underwear on. The host of Hollywood Night might look warm on camera, but in reality he looks too clean, too creepily perfect to be human. As if he were created by aliens to emulate humans—except these particular aliens only ever saw humans in toothpaste, fake tan, and hair gel commercials.

  “What problem?” I ask.

  “Did you see a guy down there, about five-nine, brownish hair, blue suit—looks a bit like Anderson Cooper?”

  I pretend to really think about it.

  “I don’t know. There are quite a lot of people in the lobby.”

  Carlos groans with disappointment as he pulls on his shirt.

  “That’s my agent. He’s here. Nearly bumped into him when I tried to leave this morning. He already suspects something. If he catches me here now, he’s gonna find out about us for sure.”

  I nod as if I understand perfectly, though I still ask, “What’s wrong if he knows? I mean, he’s your agent. What does he care?”

  Candace groans this time from the peanut gallery and I hear her mutter to herself in the mirror, still applying make-up.

  “Just when you think one of them has a brain, they always prove you wrong.”

  “Anne,” Carlos says, calling me by the wrong name as usual, leaning forward now and holding his palms together like he’s explaining something to a child, “I’m Carlos King.”

  He says his name as if it’s supposed to explain everything, and though I wait for more, there’s nothing but an uncomfortable silence. Just as I open my mouth to say something, however, he continues.

  “I guarantee you a certain demographic wherever you put me—a Broadway musical, a game show, a primetime sitcom, and you know why that is?”

  Again the uncomfortably long silence that he only breaks when I open my mouth to say something.

  “Because I’m clean. Straight. Pure as a priest. No skeletons in the closet, no blemishes on my record. I’m Teflon. My clothes don’t crease; my shit don’t smell. I’m a family man. I don’t curse, I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t get angry. I always stop for fans, I reply to every letter with a signed photo. I’m primetime. Mainstream. I’m the guy your mother imagines when she thinks about you getting married. What I don’t do,” Carlos says, getting a little more aggressive now, “is fuck around on my pregnant wife. You getting the picture now, Anne?”

  “Ash.”

  “Huh?”

  “My name’s Ash.”

  Carlos sighs heavily and continues pulling his pants on.

  “Whatever,” he says. “Point is, I need you to find out where my agent is and keep a lookout so I can get the hell out of this place without him noticing. Can you do that, Ash?”

  I nod.

  “You staying here, Candy?”

  Candace turns around and smiles at him, and suddenly it feels like I’m not even in the room.

  “I suppose I’ll have to,” she says slowly, as he approaches her. “Still need to recover.”

  “Planning next time, more like,” Carlos says as he takes her around the waist and pulls her to him.

  I try not to look as they kiss, in case I cringe so hard I develop a skin condition. But there’s something almost horrific about seeing these two together—something that could make a person a very successful horror director if they could figure out what it was.

  “I’m not gonna forget last night for a while,” Candace gurgles in a creepy, babyish tone.

  “Neither am I, considering those nails of yours left marks all over my body. If my wife sees them…”

  Candace tries what I think is meant as a childish giggle, but comes out more as a throaty cackle.

  “Better keep yourself away from her then.”

  I knew they were having sex, but now that they’ve got their hands on each other, and are puckering up to each other’s lips noisily, the actual imagery of it forces itself into my mind. I’m gonna need the mental equivalent of bleach to feel clean again. Candace with the icy stiffness of a prototype waxwork, and Carlos with his hard vanity that ensures he’s never less than three feet away from anything which could mess up his hair, and never more than three feet away from a reflective surface. I’ve seen shop mannequins placed too close together that had more natural chemistry between them than these two.

  “So…should I go look for the agent?” I say, if only to halt the possibility of them fucking right there in front of me.

  “Yeah, hold up and I’ll show you a picture of him,” Carlos says, breaking away to grab his phone and show me. Candace glares at me like I’ve just spoiled her party.

  About a half hour later I’ve successfully led Carlos out to a waiting cab, away from the agent who I discovered having a business meeting in the hotel restaurant. Now I’m standing beside Candace as we wait for a car ourselves, feeling so uncomfortable around her I genuinely wonder if she emits toxic radiation.

  “You know,” I begin, feeling like if I can’t make this work now, I never will, “I’m not su
pposed to be doing stuff like this.”

  Candace looks me up and down like I just emerged from a hole and asked her for a dollar.

  “You’re a producer—it’s your job to make things run smoothly.”

  “Yeah, with the show.”

  “Honey, Carlos and I are the show.”

  “Still,” I say, “I work really hard. I mean…all this. I don’t complain about it. But it sometimes feel like I have so much responsibility without any of the freedom.”

  “Are you trying to blackmail me?” Candace says, her voice suddenly a directed hiss.

  “What? No!”

  “You’re talking about your segment, right?”

  “Yeah. I mean, sure… But I’m not trying to… I’m just saying I think I deserve at least a chance—just a chance. I’ve been working for you for years now, and—”

  “Listen, sugar,” Candace says, with fully patronizing dismissiveness. “You don’t need a segment—you need a man, clear and simple. Look at you. Perky tits, tight little body. That annoyingly straight nose, ugh. You make me sick! You know how many divorces and lies and years of hard work it took to look this good? And there you are completely oblivious to how quickly you’re gonna get old, and all you can fucking talk about is a ten-minute segment on a dumb gossip show. Don’t you dare get all self-righteous on me. You’re just sexually repressed.”

  “My personal life has nothing to do—”

  “Oh Christ, you’re annoying,” Candace says, turning away to show she’s not listening. “The only way I can tolerate you is thinking of what you’ll be like a decade from now—God, that’s funny!”

  The car stops neatly in front of us, Candace moving toward it with perfect timing.

  “Do us both a favor, Ash,” she says, as she slides into the back seat, “get laid.”

  I move to follow her but Candace shuts the door before I can get close. I’m surprised for just long enough that she can tell the driver to go, leaving me standing there without a ride.

  I hate Candace with the force of an entire social media mob, the kind of hatred most people reserve for politicians and rival football teams. But when both your enemy and your friends are telling you that you need to get a man, it gets pretty hard to keep on assuming that they’re all wrong.

  8

  Teo

  Mandala’s already lively when I turn up at ten AM. I move past the curtain toward the blaring metal music, where Ginger and Hideo are working on a couple of customers. I grunt a hello—not wanting to distract them—and move on to the back room. A couple of girls, both dressed like goths, are lounging on a sofa, one of them flipping through a flash book while the other takes pictures of herself on her phone. Kayla’s sitting at the work desk, drawing.

  I move beside her, picking up the bundle of unopened mail and working through it.

  “You done with those girl troubles then?” she says, without looking up.

  I pause, mid letter opening.

  “Girl troubles?”

  Kayla stops this time, turning her head slowly toward me to reveal a knowing smile.

  “That was the first day off you’ve had since I started. I doubt you even get sick.”

  I turn my eyes back to the letter, finish off opening it.

  “Yeow,” Kayla says. “That look tells me everything I need to know. Well, if you wanna talk about it—you know where to find me.”

  I pull out the bill, study it for a while, then realize I’m still in no state to focus. This thing’s gonna bug me for days until I let it out. I sit down next to the drawing desk, watching Kayla sketch a bird in flight for a while. It’s a departure from her usual repertoire but it looks incredible all the same, and I tell her so. Meanwhile I zone out to the sound of the buzzing coming from the tattooing chairs, the girls erupting into a conspiratorial laugh over something on their phones.

  She’s a good kid. Barely into her twenties, but far wiser than she ought to be. Having a kid young will force a person to do that. She’s a survivor. Decided soon after her ex walked out on her and little Ellie that her bad neighborhood in Atlanta wasn’t any place to raise her daughter by herself, and left it all behind. She was a mess when she first came here. An emotional wreck, full of crippling self-doubt, but I could see there was something in her eyes, something that said she’d give it her all if she had just half a chance. I was right. For the past three years she’s worked harder, learned faster, and improved quicker than anyone I’ve ever known. She’s already one of the best, and she’s already thinking of starting up her own place. By the time she’s thirty she’ll have given Ellie everything she ever dreamed of.

  “You know what’s funny?” I say, after a while. Kayla stops and glances up at me. “My dad’s getting out of prison soon. Five year stretch this time.”

  “Shit,” Kayla says, putting her pen down to show she’s giving me her full attention now. “Seriously?”

  “Called me last month. Asked me to come pick him up.”

  “Are you going to?”

  I shrug and look over at the girls. Suddenly they seem so young, so innocent, so oblivious. They laugh again, and it seems like it’s in a different language somehow.

  “Even if I don’t, I’ll probably be the first person he comes to see. No idea how he even got my number.”

  “You probably put tattoos on half the people he’s in with.”

  I laugh heavily and let the joke linger in the air a while.

  “Feels like my entire past is coming back this week.”

  Kayla looks at me keenly for what feels like a minute, as if reading my mind and trying to figure me out.

  Eventually, she says, “Why don’t you deal with it then?”

  I snort a little.

  “Ain’t no dealing with a past like mine.”

  Both of us turn to look as a lanky teenager comes into the back, greets the girls, and sits down next to them. Kayla turns back to look at me forlornly.

  “This girl…” she says. “She’s really got a hold on something in you.”

  “Just an ex,” I say, not believing it myself. “I’ve got a lot of them.”

  “And none of the other ones make you do those puppy dog eyes.”

  I shrug, trying to act casual. “I’ll never understand why people go digging up the past, looking for answers to things already settled.”

  Kayla smirks. “Sounds like it hasn’t settled for her, though. You either.”

  “She thinks knowing what went wrong between us will help. If anything, it’ll only hurt more.”

  I smile at Kayla, but it fades quickly, and only makes the sadness a little heavier.

  “Why don’t you let her decide that? Just tell her what she wants to know if that’s what she’s really after. Lay those demons to rest, for both of you.”

  I shake my head.

  “Because she wants to know why I left—and I swore I wouldn’t tell. She wouldn’t like it. In fact, it might ruin her. Maybe it’s healthier for her to just hate me. God knows, I’m used to it.”

  The girls laugh again and Kayla waits for them to stop before speaking again.

  “Maybe not. Maybe that’s just a detail,” Kayla says. “Maybe she needs to know if it was real, that what you had was genuine. That you really loved her. Maybe that’s enough. You did love her, right?”

  Of course I loved her. I never stopped.

  I think it, but I don’t say it. Still, Kayla sees it in my eyes, in my silence, her face going soft and sympathetic.

  “Look, Teo, you’re like a brother to me. I respect you so much. And I don’t want to tell you what to do. All I know is, it ain’t healthy to live with a bunch of loose ends. You either tie them up, or cut them off altogether. Otherwise they’ll bug you forever.”

  It’s amazing what words can do. Ever since Kayla said that, I keep picturing that nagging, unresolved feeling as a dangling thread in the back of my mind, something that’s just gonna stay there until I figure out how to handle it.

  The day’s busy enough t
o pass quickly, even with four of us in the shop. I spend most of the afternoon working on someone’s neck tatt; hard, exhausting work that needs a lot of concentration, and a lot of making the customer feel comfortable.

  Ginger and Kayla playfully fight over the choice of music all day, more people drop by to hang out in the back room. By evening it’s clear that this is going to be one of those nights where the back room gets so packed that people end up standing around like it’s a house party. Folks start bringing crates of beers, and soon there’s a perpetual, changing circle of people by the back exit smoking. It’s a night where Ginger gets louder and friendlier because there are a lot of friendly faces around, and where even more people come around because Ginger’s in a loud, friendly mood.

  I like these kinds of nights, even when they get rowdy enough to destroy my stuff, even when they end with fights and people regretting that they drank so much. More intimate than a bar, more spontaneous and unpredictable than a party. It feels like a place where people can relax, say dumb things and not be judged for it. A place where it doesn’t matter who you are, because if you’re here now, you’re cool. Even with the swearing and the boozing it feels compassionate, brotherly.

  It feels like family—or what I presume most families feel like. A dysfunctional group of people that I didn’t necessarily choose to be here, but who I know and care deeply about anyway. But tonight—family or not—I’m just not in the mood. That hanging thread keeps me from laughing as hard as I normally would, keeps me from truly experiencing the present moment.

  A song comes on the stereo—one everybody knows the words to—and even those who hate it sing along, bonded together by the sound of their own voices. That’s when I drain the rest of my beer and slip out the back.

  I take a few steps away from the smokers’ group and pull out my phone. Unconsciously I navigate to Ash’s number, and just stare at it on the screen.

  It’s hard to face the past. It’s hard to navigate the emotional confusion of hurting someone. It’s hard to condense seven years of baggage into words. But I tell myself I’m not doing any of that. I’m just hitting a little green button on my phone, and seeing what happens.