One Last Time: A Second Chance Romance

by Roxie Noir

  Had to fire someone at the brewery for stealing beer? Bake some cookies.

  Younger brother threw away his whole entire life for his student? Brownies can help.

  Spent a day and a night with Delilah, only to leave before sunrise because without saying goodbye? It’s scone time, baby.

  Life is uncertain. Uneasy. Unpredictable.

  A cake, however, is very straightforward.

  I don’t even like desserts that much — I give most of it away — but baking always makes me feel better. There are explicit instructions. Expectations are clear. If I fuck up a recipe the first time, it’s easy to pinpoint where I went wrong and get it right on the second try.

  And at the end I’ve got a tangible, delicious foodstuff.

  “I’m fine,” I repeat, though my audience looks unconvinced. “It’s what I do, right? One night, no strings, no big deal. Move on. I’m good at that.”

  I lean back against the sink and try for a charming smile, though the hangover gets in the way of that.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” Charlie finally says, though she clearly doesn’t believe it. “Eli. Is there pie? We should put dessert out so we can get the kids home.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Eli answers.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Delilah

  I glance up at the clock on the wall behind the counter. It’s 4:07 on a cold, shitty afternoon, and that means my four o’clock appointment is officially officially late, and I’m allowed to be a little annoyed.

  Generally, I give people a five-minute grace period before I get annoyed with them for being late. Clocks are different, parking can be tricky, red lights exist, and God knows I’m not always precisely on time.

  Ten minutes is pushing it. Sure, sometimes disaster strikes, but ninety-nine percent of the time people who are ten minutes late just need to get their shit together.

  After fifteen I consider someone a no-show and move on with my life and appointment book.

  Deep down, I’m hoping this coverup consultation is a no-show. It’s been five days since Ava’s wedding and I still don’t feel up to my friendly-yet-bubbly-yet-professional persona. I mostly feel like sulkily making Sailor Jerry style knife-through-a-heart tattoos and telling nineteen-year-olds that the picture of an eagle ripping away their skin to reveal the American flag underneath is dumb, unoriginal, and won’t look good in five years if the sun damage they’ve already got is any indication.

  At 4:13, the front door to my shop opens and a woman with blond hair and an enormously puffy coat comes in, already talking.

  “…and I completely forgot that they’re fixing the light over on Harrison, and that intersection where it crosses Salem Church took me absolutely forever to get through. And then of course I got stuck behind the school bus coming all the way down Smith Station, and you know they stop at every single house.”

  “I hate getting stuck behind the school bus,” I agree, switching off my tablet and straightening up. “Welcome to Southern Star.”

  “Anyway, sorry I’m late,” she says, and finally finishes shoving things into her purse. “I’m Mindy, I had an appointment?”

  Then she looks around, taking everything in: brightly lit, big windows, incredibly clean. A lot of people seem surprised when they walk in, as if all tattoo shops are seedy dens of iniquity with dirty floors and walls hung with AC/DC posters from 1985.

  Sure, some are. Plenty of people like that vibe in a tattoo parlor, but since mine’s the first and only tattoo place in Sprucevale — small, Southern, socially conservative — mine’s not.

  Southern Star Tattoo Parlor is bright, cozy, and slightly kitschy. There’s a waiting area with a midcentury modern-looking couch, a natural wood coffee table, and a tall cactus that’s not doing spectacularly this winter. The floor in the front room is hardwood. There’s a teal accent wall with my logo painted on it in bright pink.

  “Of course,” I say, cheerfully, still leaning on the counter. “Coverup consultation, right?”

  Mindy comes right up to the counter where I’m standing. She looks over her shoulder, at the door, as if she’s nervous that someone else is going to come in, and she places her purse on the counter right between us. It’s got about thirty keychains hanging off one side, and they all clunk into the glass top.

  “Yes,” she says. “You did one for my brother-in-law’s brother’s cousin’s friend and it turned out good, so he referred me on back to you.”

  Excellent. I love a referral.

  “What’s his name?” I ask.

  “Jim Faulks,” Mindy says, and then leans in a little more, lowers her voice. “He just got out about six months ago? He heard about you from his parole officer.”

  Right. One of the many things I did during Dating Detox was start volunteering with INKredible Transformation, a questionably-named nonprofit that helps ex-cons get their prison tattoos covered at no cost to them.

  I think Jim had an ugly, poorly-done spider on one forearm. Now it’s a stylized motorcycle.

  “Of course I remember Jim,” I say. “How’s he doing?”

  “Back inside,” Mindy says cheerfully. “You know how people are.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  There’s a brief, awkward pause.

  “Well, at least he’s got a better tattoo now. What do you need covered up?”

  At the question, Mindy’s body language changes. She stiffens. She looks down.

  I say a quick prayer that I’m not about to cover a swastika. I’ve done it a couple of times — people in prison aren’t there because they make great decisions — but wow is it uncomfortable.

  “It’s easier to just show you,” she says. “In the back room, if that’s all right?”

  “Of course,” I say, and double down on that prayer.

  The back room of [tattoo shop name] is even more scrupulously clean than the front room, if that’s even possible. I go through buckets of sanitizer every week, and every Tuesday and Thursday night a professional disinfecting crew comes through.

  It’s got mirrors, counters, two filing cabinets. A shelf of succulents along one wall, a colorful panoramic painting of the mountains, only they’re pink and purple.

  On one side of the room there’s a reclining chair that looks like a dentist’s chair, and on the other side, I’ve got a massage table.

  Mindy hangs her purse on a hook, then looks at me apologetically.

  Mentally, I cross my fingers.

  “It’s on my,” she pauses.

  Looks away for a split second.

  “Booty,” she admits.

  I smile encouragingly. A booty tattoo I can handle.

  “Not a problem in the least,” I say, and snap on gloves. “I’m gonna have you sit in a minute, but it’s best to get a look at it while you’re standing first, if you don’t mind pulling down — thanks.”

  She’s already got her jeans over her butt, so I crouch down and study her ass. This position is always a little weird, but movement and gravity affect tattoos, so I like to get a look at them in all positions.

  It’s a script tattoo, the lines thin and wispy, so many flourishes and curlicues that it’s total nonsense at first glance. Not a bad tattoo, but not a good one, either. Some of the ink is fading, a few of the lines are a little wobbly. A solid C+.

  If she’d come to me, at the very least I’d have advised her away from that particular font. It’s almost impossible to read.

  “Well, the good news is that at first glance, I think a coverup should work pretty nicely,” I tell her, standing. “It’ll have to be a little bigger than the original tattoo, so it’ll probably be visible in swimsuits and whatnot, but I think we could pretty easily work this design into something else entirely.”

  “What’s the bad news?” Mindy asks, looking at me over her shoulder.

  “I need you face down and booty up on the table,” I say.

  “I get that all the time,” she cracks.

  She gets on the massage table, adjusts her clo
thes so I have full butt cheek access. I drape a towel across the other cheek because why be more naked than you have to with strangers?

  “How long have you had it?” I ask, sitting on my stool and pulling over my billion-watt light so I can really get up close and personal.

  “Five years, I think,” she says. “Wait, no. Six? I already had it when I went on my sister’s bachelorette weekend to Myrtle Beach because I remember drinking too many margaritas and talking to her friend Beth about it and I think her fifth anniversary was maybe last year, so…”

  I move my head around some, adjust the light while she talks. I’m tempted to ask who put this unreadable tattoo on her, but that seems rude, so instead I let her start telling me about her sister’s bachelorette party while I try to decipher it.

  “She got this really amazing beach house,” Mindy’s saying. “It had an outdoor shower, and I guess it’s for getting sand off of you but one night after a few tequila shots some of us went out there —"

  Pv… Prapiv… Property

  Good Lord.

  Property of…

  Yikes.

  Ji… Le… Leth?

  I tilt my head the other way.

  Seth

  My stomach knots. I read it again, slowly: Seth.

  I can feel my heartbeat in every part of my body, most of all the gloved fingers still touching Mindy’s butt. My lungs feel like they’re filled with aquarium gravel, but I breathe in anyway.

  The last word is easy to read, because I already know what it’s going to be.

  Property of Seth Loveless.

  I want to cry. I also want to scream. I also want to gather everyone I know into this room, point at this butt, and shout This is why, this right fucking here is exactly fucking why.

  “— anyway they said they’d give me a hundred bucks if I’d take my top off and throw it out, and you know it wasn’t even like anyone could even see into the shower because it had a wall around it, so I figured why not? And then —”

  I think of him taking the bobby pins from my hair Saturday night, in front of the mirror. Slow, gentle. The shivers down my spine. Him getting all the concealer off my chest piece. The way he looked at it for the first time and didn’t say anything.

  I wonder if he was thinking of this tattoo. I wonder if he’d rather mine said, in ugly, unreadable script, Seth Loveless fucked me up.

  “It’s fixable, right?” she says, and I suddenly look up at her head to realize that she’s watching me, her blue eyes staring down the length of her table.

  I clear my throat. I clear it again. Arrange my face.

  “You should get this removed,” I tell her.

  “I should?” she says, surprised.

  Shit. I didn’t mean to say that. I push a smile onto my face, look at the tattoo again, as if I don’t already have it memorized.

  “You’d be a good candidate for it,” I say. “Laser removal works best when you’ve got dark ink on light skin.”

  I want this tattoo gone. I know he’s not mine. This tattoo is exactly why he’s not, but jealousy already has its ugly dark tentacles wrapped around me.

  “I thought that was real expensive,” Mindy says. “Like a couple thousand dollars at least? And I’d have to go all the way into Roanoke for each session?”

  “It’s not for everyone,” I say, as lightly as I can stand. “Just wanted to let you know it’s an option. You said you’ve had it about six years?”

  “I think that’s right,” she says. “Does the exact number matter? I can go back through all the pictures in my phone and figure out when exactly I got it.”

  I have to bite my lip between my teeth to keep myself from saying yes, from asking me to show me the pictures of it when it was new and tell me who she sent pictures to and what they thought and if they liked it.

  If he fucked her harder when he looked at it.

  “I don’t need the exact date,” I say, jabbing at her butt cheek with my gloved fingers, just because I can. “It’s just helpful to have a general idea.”

  “I think it’s been about six years,” she says, and then laughs, her voice muffled by the padded table. “We didn’t even date for six weeks.”

  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 dri
ve home.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Delilah

  I 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.

  “Woo!” I shout back at her.

  “Great! Again,” she calls, and I skate back to the other side of the gym, take a deep breath, and start the drill over.

  There was a time in my life when I thought I knew how to roller skate just fine, and that time was a week ago when I impulse-bought several hundred dollars’ worth of roller derby gear so I could join the Blue Ridge Bruisers, Lainey’s team.

  Yes, buying expensive shit because you feel bad is a total rich girl move. If I were a perfect person I would’ve donated it to a children’s hospital or something, but I didn’t, because it turns out I’m deeply flawed.

  Besides, if I were one of my sisters, I’d probably have bought a car or a pet tiger or something.

  I stop before I hit the pads again, this time using my other foot. Lainey’s now skating up and down the court in a giant figure eight, shouting encouragement as I stop over and over again, thighs shaking a little harder each time.