Kalani Fonoti

The bunk in the sleeping car smells like brake dust and other men's cologne, and Garrett's birthmark itches the way it always does when the train is slowing for a stop nobody wants at 2 a.m. Eight hours and seventeen minutes you have carried him: turning down berths, apologizing for the coupling noise, standing in the vestibule while Maine goes by black and wet outside the glass. He is a good body. Athletic, easy in the knees, no complaints. That is exactly the problem. Nothing in this life is asking anything of you tonight, and you are wide awake in the middle of someone else's night shift with nothing to do but wait for the next station, and waiting, you have learned, is the one thing you can't stand to do in a stranger's skin. So you take out the phone, thumb open the site you have already spent too much on, and you spin it not because Garrett is wrong but because he is, tonight, boring — and boring, for you, has always been an emergency.

The wheel stops. The power drops for two seconds in a room eleven hundred miles south, and you are already inside it before the lights come back.

You are bent forward over a padded table, forearm braced flat, a machine buzzing an inch above your own skin, and green soap is cooling in a shallow pool at the crook of your elbow. The pain is there and then it isn't your problem — his arm stops flinching because you have not yet decided to feel it. Your jaw, which was set hard against something, comes loose. You turn your head, slow, and watch the needle go into the meat of your own forearm like it's a nature documentary, like it's happening to a table leg.

The shirt isn't a shirt — you're in a gray t-shirt gone dark at the collar with sweat, and cargo shorts, and boots you can feel through thin socks, laced too tight the way a man does when he's rushing. The boots come first, because they're pressing hardest: a driveway at dawn, new-build concrete still smelling of curing sealant, keys in his teeth while he double-knots them, late for a deposition he hadn't finished prepping. Kalani Fonoti hates these boots and wears them anyway because his mother bought them for him the year he passed the bar and it would break something in her to see him throw them out.

The tattoo machine's hum opens wider than the boots do. Under your palm — his palm, flat on the table — is the memory of the artist's first line going in eight months ago, the panther that's half-finished under the new rose, and beneath both of them the day he decided to get inked at all: the night his ex, Renata, told him lawyers who look like everybody else disappear, and he'd laughed, and two weeks later sat in this same chair for the first time out of something that wasn't quite spite and wasn't quite grief. She's not with him now. Priya is — has been, four months, steady, unbothered by the ink creeping past his sleeve at firm dinners — but Renata is the one whose voice comes up now, unbidden, riding in on the buzz of the needle like she still has a key to this arm.

The green soap smell drags up courtrooms: the steps outside the Earle Cabell building, briefcase handle worn smooth in his right hand, the particular ache behind his eyes that is not caffeine, it's the ADHD he didn't get named until he was twenty, the medication he takes every morning with black coffee standing at his kitchen counter because sitting to eat breakfast has never once worked for him. His hands — this hand, lying open and unclenched on the table for once — want to be at his mouth. He bites his nails down to nothing when nobody's watching, a habit that survived law school, survived his mother's disapproval, survived Priya taping his fingertips one bored Sunday like a joke that was also not a joke.

You feel the whole morning of these clothes arrive last, softest: this shirt off a hook in a closet that still has moving boxes stacked in the corner eight months after the new build closed, shorts because the studio doesn't care about your dress code, the two decisions — go to work first, get inked after — collapsing into the version where he texted Priya a photo of the stencil and she sent back three exclamation points and nothing else, and he'd smiled at his phone alone in the truck like an idiot. Twenty-two years old. Nothing to his name that would show up on paper — no savings worth counting, a truck with payments left on it, a body that is strong through the shoulders from nothing more than being twenty-two, and tired now, this second, in the particular unclenched way of someone who has stopped bracing.

The machine lifts. The artist says something you don't catch the front half of — "—almost got the shading, you good?" — and your mouth, his mouth, opens on its own weather.

You lift the wrist that isn't being worked on and turn it over, the fingernails bitten to the quick studying you back like they know something you don't, and past it, past the panther and the half-shaded rose, you find the lens of your own eyes in the shop mirror across the room.

"Yeah," you say, to a man who thinks the question was about the tattoo. "I'm good."