His to Own: 50 Loving States, Arkansas

by Theodora Taylor

  As she nears the table, she notices her most prized possession is flipped open to a new page…a page that’s covered in handwriting. June lifts the pad to get a better look. It’s a note, she realizes. Hastily scrawled with a ton of misspelled words. “Poorly written,” her father would have said in that other lifetime, when she was the daughter of a high school English teacher with exacting standards. But in spite of the bad spelling, she gets the gist of it.

  Mason has gone to a meeting. Read: another gun sale. She and Jordan are to stay here. Get some sleep. And he’ll be back with breakfast tomorrow morning.

  So he’s on another gun run. For the night.

  She and Jordan should plan a run of their own. Away from the cabin. Away from Mason the biker. Now, while they have the chance. The thought beats inside June’s head for a few hopeful seconds, only to lose momentum when she looks up from the note toward the beds.

  The sight of Jordan, sleeping peacefully, kills the plan before it’s even fully formed.

  It’s completely dark out. And June honestly has no idea where they are. Maybe Beaver Lake like it says on her t-shirt, but really, they could be anywhere. Also, there’s still their money problem. As in: they don’t have any.

  Going to a shelter is out of the question. They’d tried that in the early days after their mothers died, and had immediately been flagged to meet with a social worker. She and Jordan had snuck out before the woman arrived. Because June had promised Jordan, promised him, that she wouldn’t let anyone split them up. That she’d do everything in her power to make sure they stayed together.

  June sets the sketch pad back down on the table.

  No, she can’t pull Jordan out from beneath his warm covers to drag him off into the cold night. Not without a plan. A good plan that will allow her to keep the promise she made to him six years ago.

  Rest, she thinks. Rest and think about how to get them out of this.

  She ends up doing exactly that. No solutions come, but there are also no nightmares. Just the complete blank of a much needed, surprisingly deep sleep.

  When June wakes the next morning, she feels refreshed and even a little, dare she say it, at peace. It’s as if her subconscious mind has decided to take Mason at his word, even if her waking one hasn’t—

  Her blood stops cold. Not because he’s opened the door and all the windows again, but because he’s now seated at the table…flipping through her sketch pad.

  She sits up in the bed, mouth opening then shutting over a protest. The seal on her lips won’t budge, so she can’t tell the huge man to stop looking at her sketches. What he’s doing feels like trespassing in its worst form. As if he’s reading her diary right in front of her. June feels violated, even as she sits there in silence, not daring to say or do anything as he casually glances at sketch after sketch.

  “How much?” he suddenly asks. Even though he hasn’t looked up once from the drawings, he somehow knows she’s awake.

  June shakes her head, not understanding the question.

  “How much? For one of your tattoos, I mean,” he clarifies, flipping to yet another page.

  She shakes her head again, still not understanding. And he keeps looking through her pad. It feels like he’s staring at her soul. Turning it this way and that under his curious blue gaze, before going on to the next page, and the next.

  As if granting her silent wish, he finally stops. Only to ask, “You did Razo’s tattoos, right?”

  Not all of them, she thinks.

  “Not all of them, right?” he says, seemingly pulling the words out of her mind. “Just the good ones.”

  His grin is truly shocking. It changes his entire face. Lighting up his eyes, almost to the point that he doesn’t look completely terrifying. Almost.

  He opens the pad again, and flips forward to a specific sketch, holding it up for her to see the raven motorcycle she drew the night before. Her visual interpretation of that new feeling in her stomach.

  “This one,” he says, tapping it with a huge index finger. “How much to get this one on the inside of my arm?”

  I…she starts to think. Only to realize she actually has the words for this topic. It’s her favorite subject, after all. The only thing she ever really speaks comfortably about with anyone.

  “I’ve never charged anyone before,” she admits quietly. “I’m still learning.”

  Also, Razo would never pay her. No matter how many hours she put into making his tattoo work seem like less like a prison job, and more like works of art.

  “Alright, let’s see…” Mason pulls a smart phone from his inside vest pocket. Thumbs the screen a few times before announcing, “Internet says $150 an hour. How many hours you think them crows going to take?”

  “Ravens,” she corrects without thinking. Then she rushes to paste over her small insubordination with the answer to his question. “About four. Maybe three.” June had become a pretty fast inker over the years. Razo wasn’t the world’s best sitter, and if she took too long, he tended to lash out at her, rather than tell her he needed a break.

  “So you’re okay with that number?” he asks. “One-fifty’s cool?”

  She has to try a few times before she’s can nod. The truth is, she can’t imagine actually getting paid for a tattoo, much less $450 to $600 dollars. That’s more money than she’s ever been paid for anything in her life. Enough money to run away on, maybe…

  “It’s a deal then,” he says, standing. He nods at something else on the table. A sack from Hardee’s she hadn’t noticed before. “You two eat up. I’m going to grab some shut eye. We’ll start with the raven bike after I’m rested and showered, alright?”

  He waits. Obviously expecting some kind of answer. So she gives him another nod. Confused, but unable to say no to the promise of money. To the hope of FREEDOM, written in big block letters like the ones on his jacket.

  With a nod of his own, he leaves again. But this time he doesn’t shut the windows, only the door behind him. And a few seconds later, he reappears in front of the small cabin.

  She rises up further in the bed, craning her neck so she can watch him crawl into a sleeping bag situated just a few feet from the open door. He seems more at ease outside than in, despite the increasing brightness of the rising sun and what looks like an uncomfortable sleeping arrangement on the hard ground.

  “I like him.”

  June starts and then looks over her shoulder at Jordan, who’s now sitting up in the other bed. “He messed up,” he says on a yawning stretch. “And maybe he bad. But he got you talkin’. I like him.”

  God…

  June doesn’t know how to feel about that. About any of this.

  He is messed up. He is truly a bad man. Just like Razo—but not like Razo, she’s starting to sense. And she can only wonder what will come next.

  Chapter 5

  The first tattoo goes well. Mason is, as it turns out, a really good sitter—or in this case, layer downer. The inner bicep can be one of the most painful places to get a tattoo, due to the especially sensitive ulnar nerve that runs below the skin and, in Mason’s case, a complete lack of cushioning fat.

  Razo hadn’t been able to bear the shading process on his bicep for more than twenty minutes or so. But Mason is a tattoo artist’s dream. No complaints or asking over and over again how long before she’s done. He’s perfectly content to lie on the bed with his face turned toward the open window while she works. The install only takes three hours over a period of two days. Followed by a few hours with gauze for healing.

  “Cool!” Jordan proclaims when June removes the bandage.

  Mason isn’t as quick to respond though.

  The flock of ravens inside June’s stomach go completely still as she watches him turn his bicep back and forth. He flexes it a few times, before saying, “Yep, let’s go’on ahead and make it a sleeve.”

  A sleeve! He likes her work so much he wants a full sleeve. Not just that, but he’s willing to pay her to do it—which, at $150 an hour,
will result in at least a thousand dollars on top of the $450 she’s just made. Maybe even more. June glows under the unspoken compliment, choosing not to think too hard about who it’s coming from.

  Mason heads out the next day for a “meeting” in Oklahoma. What she can only assume is another gun run. He tells her he’ll be gone for four days, even though she rarely, if ever, bothers to respond to anything he says to her.

  And in a very literal case of “teach a man to fish,” he’s hooked Jordan up with a pole and fishing lessons. Just enough groceries and know-how for them to survive without him. But not enough for us to leave, June thinks to herself as she walks Mason out to his delivery van. Not to be nice, but because he grunted, “Hey, walk me out to my van,” a minute ago.

  “I’ll pay you when the sleeve’s done,” he says when they reach the driver’s side door. “So let’s make sure you get your money.”

  She doesn’t respond, just glances away.

  Only to have him chase her eyes again, insisting she look at him.

  “I won’t hurt you. That’s a promise I’ll keep,” he says, voice as soft as it can get, considering its timber.

  However, his gaze darkens soon after. “But I can’t promise not to hunt you down if you try to leave. No…” He shakes his head as if it’s a fact, beyond his control. “I can’t promise that. So like I said, let’s make sure you get your money.”

  It takes June nearly a full minute of eye chasing and awkward silence to realize he’s actually expecting an answer.

  She nods, silently promising not to bolt while he’s gone. And only then does he climb into the van.

  She watches him go, not feeling so much threatened by him as she is understanding of his motivation. Men, she’d discovered over the last six years, used whatever they could get their hands on to control you. Money, food, violence—whatever tools they had available.

  Mason is a man. A bad man. And he’s probably afraid she’ll run off as soon as his back is turned if he leaves her with more than the promise of money, a kid who can fish, and a fridge full of groceries.

  Normally he’d have been exactly right. But in this case, Mason didn’t need threats, because he’d already managed to disable her with a direct hit to her biggest weak spot: the opportunity to do the thing she loves most.

  As it turns out, the prospect of designing an entire sleeve for a naked arm interests her way more than Mason scares her. June still plans to run as soon as she and Jordan have the chance and the funds, but she spends nearly every waking hour of the next four days mocking up the design for his sleeve on several precious sheets of her sketch pad.

  The final drawing, just like the raven bike, comes directly from her subconscious. A mixture of what she knows for sure about Mason (gears and engines), along with things she only suspects: a strong raven for his shoulder, a desolate but huge tree. Somewhere for the flock of ravens inside his mind to rest, she thinks. And beneath the tree, a score of skulls intertwined with its gnarled roots.

  She sketches and re-sketches while he’s gone. With so much emotion and so little “real intention,” as her mother would have called it, she is half afraid to show the final drawing to him when he returns.

  Afraid he’ll laugh at her or call her crazy. Razo had done that a few times, before June learned to only show him mock-ups with death and/or religious themes.

  It’s possible, she thinks as she hands her pad to Mason, he might even be angry at what she’s created. The tree might not be masculine enough, the huge raven too poetic.

  So she waits, her heart buzzing worse than her tattoo gun, as he studies the drawing for a full three minutes.

  And when he finally ends his examination with, “That’ll work,” it feels like an explosion of light in her chest.

  In the weeks after that moment, they fall into a routine. Cereal for breakfast. Morning tattoo sessions (in the chair this time, since she doesn’t need to get to the underside of his bicep) while Jordan fishes. Sandwiches for lunch, and depending whether or not Jordan catches anything, fish, chili, or pasta for dinner. Mason rarely stays in the room past eight or nine o’clock at night. He goes on runs or sleeps outside. Sometimes, when a nightmare wakes June in the middle of the night, she makes a cup of tea and takes it to the window. Peeks through the curtains to watch Mason sleep out there under the stars, stars she never saw back in the Cul.

  Strangely enough, watching him sleep relaxes her. Calms her pulse and lulls her back into a deep sleep.

  It only takes a couple of weeks of him keeping his promise not to touch her before she relaxes. Before the quiet between them goes from tense and fraught, to borderline nice and steady.

  Which is probably one of the reasons why Mason looks so surprised when she asks him to remove his vest on the final stretch of the sleeve she’s installing. “Your jacket vest thingy…can you take it off?”

  His rotator cuff muscles tense under the leather opening of his SFK vest, which is all he’s wearing up top today. “I thought the raven head was just going to be on my shoulder,” he says.

  “I know, but I’ve been thinking…” June takes out her sketch pad and Sharpie, editing what was supposed to be the final mock-up as she explains, “This raven isn’t big enough to do its job. It should be larger. If it’s going to guard you, it needs to extend a wing out over your heart. It should be ready to fly, to protect…”

  She trails off when she sees the look on Mason’s face. Ducks her eyes down to the sloppy edit she’s made over an otherwise precise drawing. “I know it’s not the best rendering. I can redo it, show you…”

  “Those are more words than you’ve ever said to me all at once, sweetness,” he says, interrupting her offer. “Your voice—it’s different than I expected it to sound when we first met. More…”

  He doesn’t have to say the words he’s reaching for, because she already knows. Her black classmates back in Bluebriar would have said “more white.” But the father from that other lifetime would have congratulated her for sounding like the girl he’d raised to speak proper English.

  June doesn’t fill in the blank for the huge man in the chair, just fiddles with the drawing.

  “I like it,” he says.

  She looks up at him and he answers another unspoken question. “The bigger raven and your voice. I like them both. Wish I could hear more of the voice, actually.”

  A wish not a command. So she doesn’t answer, just picks up her tattoo gun. Her unspoken signal that break time is over and she’s ready to start working again.

  “Hold up,” Mason says, glancing out the window.

  June follows his gaze over to where Jordan sits on the dock. Fishing with earbuds tucked in, soccer ball perched beside him like a faithful pet. Then he asks, “Just the shoulder? You don’t need to see my back?”

  She shakes her head, then finds she needs to add more words to the daily record she’s already broken. “And some of your neck. But…if you don’t want me to look at your back, I won’t.”

  More words, like he requested. But he still doesn’t look all that happy.

  “I don’t,” he grits out. “I don’t want you to look.”

  She wonders if this means he won’t take off his vest. But after another almost furtive glance toward the window, Mason moves from the chair to the bed. There, he pulls off his leather vest, revealing a wide and well-defined torso. Far as she can tell, there’s nothing at all to be embarrassed about on his chest. But he shifts so he’s sitting up against the headboard, his back all but plastered against the wood.

  “Okay,” he says. And this time, he’s the one averting his eyes.

  She has to shift to accommodate his new position. Climb up on the bed with him to reach the places she needs to in order to finish the raven.

  Unfortunately, this requires moving his vest aside. Actually touching the thing, in order to place it in the chair he abandoned. It’s shockingly heavy. Pounds not ounces, and all the gun and knife metal inside it winks in the light as she drapes it over t
he seat of the chair.

  Mason watches her handle the vest. Neither of them say a word.

  And then she starts back on the tattoo, her silence concreting over that slight bit of progress they made before she had to touch his disgusting piece of outerwear.

  It takes another few days to complete the tattoo. And almost as if he’s been waiting for her to finish, he announces the morning after she’s done with it that all his guns have been delivered and/or sold.

  “It’s time for me to get back home,” he says over breakfast, soon after Jordan leaves for his morning ritual of “kick the soccer ball in the direction of the forest.”

  Back to your gang, she silently fills in for him.

  She shouldn’t be surprised. The tattoo is done and it’s been over a month since they arrived. It makes perfect sense Mason needs to return to his previously scheduled life.

  “I’m going to pay you,” he tells her, picking up his bowl and carrying it over to the kitchen sink. “Every dollar. Plus a tip.”

  He promises her this, even though she hasn’t asked.

  June only stares at the back of the vest he puts on every morning like preacher’s robes. No, she still doesn’t believe he’s serious about paying her fifteen hundred dollars for the tattoo. But then again, she’s still having trouble believing Mason let her cover an entire arm with her design in the first place.

  “I got your money out in the van,” he says. “But first I need to drop you and Jordan off someplace. So go ahead and get your things. All of them.”

  She does as instructed, curious and afraid as she follows him out to his van. Especially after he calls out to Jordan, “C’mon kid, we’re heading out. Bring the pole and your goddamn soccer ball.”

  Jordan asks all the questions about where they’re going as they leave the camp. But it’s June who Mason looks sideways at when he answers, “Hold on, you’ll find out soon enough.”