Casey Whitlow

The projector booth smells like hot dust and old film, and Rodolfo Meza's knees ache the way they always ache, and none of it is yours to keep. You spun into him an hour ago, wore him down two flights of stairs to buy a torta, felt his heart do something slow and unhappy on the way back up. Fine body. Dad-bod softness, gray at the temples, dimples that make strangers trust him. But you didn't come back to the wheel for him. You came back because thirty minutes ago you were somebody else entirely — a bald firefighter in Boston, green eyes, forearms like cable — and for the forty seconds you wore him you felt, through his hands, through the paint can he was gripping on a ladder, that he has a neighbor he thinks about more than he'd say out loud. A neighbor with a nose ring and a laugh he can hear through the wall some nights. You didn't get to meet the neighbor. You only got the wanting. That was enough. You put a hand on the projector's warm housing, feel Rodolfo's tired shoulder complain, and you open the site again on your phone, the one already logged in from an hour ago, and you spin.

The power in the shop drops for two seconds. When it comes back, the arm under the needle has gone still.

You are sitting. Something is buzzing against skin that is not flinching anymore. Green soap, cold and slick, pooled in the crook of an elbow that is thinner than the one you just left, corded with muscle in a different place. A tattoo artist's face is close, focused, gloved hand steady, and you watch the needle go in and out of your own forearm the way you'd watch someone hem a pair of pants that weren't yours. There is a stool under you, hard and round. There is a shirt already off, folded somewhere out of frame. There is a nose ring, weightless, and you did not notice it until this second, when you breathe and feel the small cold place where metal sits in cartilage.

The chair's vinyl is warm under your thighs where his weight has been sitting there twenty minutes already, and that warmth is the first door: a whole morning comes through it. He got here at eleven, already running behind, laughing with the artist about the last freeze he'd had four months ago on the same arm, the portrait piece not yet finished, a face taking shape line by line since spring — his ex's face, if you want the truth of it, inked in before the breakup and finished after out of stubbornness, because Casey Whitlow does not believe in wasting good work over a bad ending. The green soap smell opens a year: nights behind the bar, the particular ache of standing eight hours on a mat that's gone thin, the reach-stretch-pour of a Tuesday close, regulars who tip in compliments instead of cash. His hands know a bottle's weight blind, know the flick that seats a lime on a glass rim without looking, and right now, even loose in someone else's care, they want to be doing something.

The shirt against your back — no, it's gone, folded on the counter, but the memory of putting it on this morning comes through the jeans instead, through the denim worn soft at the knee: he'd dressed slow today, sat on the edge of a bed that still smelled like his boyfriend's shampoo, pulled grey jeans up over legs that carry thirty-two years of standing, laced up shoes that have carried him through two kids' birthday parties this year alone, half a lifetime of custody handoffs with an ex who is, against all odds, still someone he text-jokes with on Sundays. There's a boyfriend now who doesn't love the tattoo appointments, thinks Casey spends too much on his own skin, and Casey lets him think that because it's easier than saying some of this ink is memory he's not ready to sand off yet.

The knuckles crack on their own, a old habit surfacing through fingers not currently in use, curled loose against his own thigh, and it comes with the flash of every bar top he's leaned them on, every kid he's hoisted onto a hip, every night he came home smelling like limes and somebody else's spilled beer and still climbed into bed careful not to wake anyone. Freckles prickle faintly under studio light across a nose he never thinks about until someone else's finger traces it. None of this is a story that needed telling. It is just what's left in a body when you stand still enough inside it.

You look down at the arm on the rest, the needle lifted now, the artist wiping green soap in a slow arc, and you turn the wrist you're not using, look at the palm of it like you've never seen a hand do the ordinary work of being a hand.

Then you look up, past the lamp, into whatever's watching, and you say, "Don't stop on my account."