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.
Her attention is entirely consumed by the world around her. She looks at everything we pass: the vintage mustang pulled up to the curb, top down to show off its creamy leather seats. The laurel dropping its leaves onto the street in slow, lazy drifts. A raven breaking open a snail by beating its shell against the cornice of a bank.
This is why Mara is so easy to stalk. When I’m outside, I’m constantly scanning the street. Watching for cameras, cops, anyone who might be following me. Looking for people I know, people I don’t know. Watching everyone all the time.
Mara is consumed by whatever catches her attention. Anything beautiful, anything interesting.
She points it all out to me. A rose-covered trellis on Scott Street. The stained-glass window of a church. A girl gliding down the hill on roller derby skates.
“Those are Eclipse,” Mara says. “They’re the best.”
My back burns. I bet her ribs are burning too.
I like that we’re feeling the same pain at the same time.
I like that I marked her, and she marked me.
We’re bound together now, her art on my skin and mine on hers.
“Would you let me tattoo you again?” I ask her.
She looks up at me. In the pale early light, I see there is blue in her eyes after all. Blue like a gull’s wing, like a bruise, like Roman silver with a little lead in it.
“Yes,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because the tattoo you gave me is beautiful. And because . . .” she bites the edge of her lip, her eyes dropping down to our feet, treading the pavement in sync. “Because I like when you pay attention to me. I like when you put your hands on me. The other night at the show . . . I felt like you were pushing me away. That hurt me.”
She looks up at me again, her gaze naked, uncovered. Painfully vulnerable.
My natural reaction is to recoil from her.
I despise weakness.
Neediness, too.
But this is what I’ve been trying to get from Mara all this time. She has the hardest shell I’ve ever seen—I want to peel off her armor. I want her naked. I want to know who she is, all the way down.
So I answer her honestly, even though that too is very unlike me. Though I’m only saying what she already knows, it feels dangerous . . . walking a thin wire across an unknown abyss.
“I was pushing you away,” I admit.
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t have control.”
“Over what?”
“Over how much I wanted you.”
Mara looks at me, searching my face.
Other people look at your expression to make sure it matches what they already want to believe. Mara never believes. She always checks.
“What do you see right now?” I ask her.
“I see you,” she says. “I’m just wondering . . .”
“What?”
“If it’s another mask.”
My face goes cold and still.
“And if it is?”
“Then you use the best one on me.”
My skin feels stiff like plastic.
“What if I took it off? And you didn’t like what you saw underneath?”
Mara slips her hand into mine. Her fingers interlock with mine. They fit together like links in a chain.
“I shouldn’t like you now,” she says. “But I do.”
I shouldn’t like her, either.
But I do.
I walk along beside her, holding another person’s hand for the first time in my life.
It feels outrageously public, like we’re shouting for attention. But also intensely intimate, the energy running down my arm and up into hers in a bond more powerful than sex.
Mara often makes me feel two things at once. I’m not used to that. My emotions have always been simple, easy to understand. I’ve never been confused about what I want.
We’re passing Alta Plaza Park. A woman sits on a public bench, her stroller parked beside her. She’s taken her infant out of the stroller, setting it against her breast. She nurses the baby, singing down to it softly.
Mara turns away from the sight, lips pressed together.
“You don’t think she should nurse in public?” I say, surprised by her prudishness. Usually, Mara is actively antagonistic to the concept of modesty.
“It’s not that,” she says. “It’s the singing.”
“Explain,” I say, curiosity piqued.
Mara takes a deep breath.
“My mother is a piano teacher. That’s how she makes money—when she’s working. If I was sick or hurt, she’d sing to me. It was the only thing that comforted me.”
She swallows hard, her skin pale and sickly-looking. The force of recollection nauseating her.
“Those were my best memories. When she sang to me, I thought she loved me. But later I realized . . . she just likes singing. It was never for me. Or if it was, only to shut me up.
“Randall would make me stand with my nose to the door for hours. I don’t mean it seemed like hours—I watched the time pass on the clock. If I annoyed him, if I was too loud, if I talked back to him—and talking back just meant answering any way he didn’t like—then it was an hour against the door. If I moved for even a second, if I had an itch or I just got dizzy, the hour started over again. No food. No drinks. No going to the bathroom.
“While I was standing there, I’d hear my mother singing in the house. In the kitchen, upstairs, out in the backyard . . .
“It would be two, three hours later, and I’d hear her voice drifting through the air, perfectly content. She wasn’t singing for me, to make me feel better. She forgot I was standing down there at all, legs shaking, trying not to piss myself or move my nose a millimeter from the door so the hour wouldn’t start again.”
Mara glances back toward the park bench, pale lips pressed together.
“The things she’s said to me. Always in that soft, sweet, voice . . . She poisoned it, like she poisons everything. I can’t even listen to a mom in a movie anymore. It makes me want to puke.”
We’re walking toward the marina. I can see all the way down to the water. The sun is breaking above the bay, blazing up the road, glinting on the chrome bumpers of the parked cars, flaming on glass windows.
It burns on Mara’s skin, in the tiny filaments of hair that float above the rest.
The sadness on her face doesn’t match her beauty in this moment.
And my disgust at her mother doesn’t match what I feel in my chest. I’m used to anger and repulsion. The emotion gripping me is something different. A heat in my lungs, a burning behind my eyes . . . a desire to squeeze her hand tighter in mine.
I don’t know what to call this one. I’ve never felt it before.
I look at Mara and I don’t know what to say.
My lips form the words anyway.
“I’m sorry.”
It startles her as much as me.
She turns and faces me, dropping my hand.
“What do you mean?”
“I just . . . I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head slowly, lips parted, eyebrows raised.
“You surprise me, Cole.”
I’m surprised, too.
Surprised at the sound of my name on her lips. How it rings like a bell, clear and true.
She stands on tiptoe, stretching up to kiss me. Soft and slow.
Warmer than the rising sun between us.
