Ink
With the court stuff on hold until after Thanksgiving, I decided to go spend the holiday with Aunt Susanna and Uncle Max. I couldn’t bear to be in New York right then, with the possibility of seeing Zac or some of his family. I was fairly certain Zac himself had gone back to Tulsa to be with his other kids, but I still felt the same. That made it even worse, really. If I left New York, I could at least pretend that was the reason we weren’t spending the holiday together instead of the truth. The truth was far, far less pleasant.
It was hard not to feel out of place as the only girl at the party with a bastard child. There was no good way to explain to everyone just where the father of my baby was, but most of them had the tact not to ask. The rest of them had no doubt seen the gossip; few of those tacky sites were above mentioning me by name, and they had managed to dig up quite a bit of information about me. Whenever I walked into a room, it seemed like my own family had to rush to stop gossiping about me, too.
I hated it.
I had brought it all on myself, though, and I knew that. There was nothing I could do to change it. Trying to keep Zac away hadn’t worked and neither had trying to deny that the baby was his. There was nothing I could do but keep going and try to figure out how to live with this… even if it seemed like Zac was trying to figure out how not to live with it.
By Saturday, the festivities started to wind down and I had time to actually sit by myself, breathe and think. All I could think about was how so much had changed since the last time I was there. Aunt Sus had been to visit me since last Christmas, but this was the first time I’d made the trip up there since Layla was born. Last Christmas, Layla didn’t even have a name, and Zac had no clue she existed. She was barely something I could even conceive of as real. Now I couldn’t deny her if I tried. Now she was tabloid fodder.
It all made me sick. When I flipped through the channels and stumbled upon TMZ, replaying their earlier segment about me because that would be just my luck, I felt like screaming. It took all my strength not to throw the television remote across the room. The only thing that kept me from it was reminding myself that Aunt Sus would kill me if I broke something in her house. She might understand my motivation, but she wouldn’t let me get away with it.
But I had to do something.
I was growing antsier and antsier by the minute. My frustration started out as a general depression and throwing myself a pity party. But as the minutes and hours went by, I felt more and more like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. I couldn’t very well do that, though, so I had to find another outlet for my awful emotions.
I had a feeling I knew exactly the thing for that outlet, and so I pulled out my phone and texted an old friend who I knew had just opened his own tattoo parlor not long ago.
Once I had an answer to my text, I walked into the kitchen, where I had a feeling I would find Aunt Sus working her magic on some of the leftovers. Sure enough, there she was, standing over the stove.
“Hey, Aunt Sus?” I said. “Do you think you could watch Layla for a while? I need to go out and take care of something.”
Aunt Sus spun around and gave me a look. “Is it something important? Is something wrong?”
“Yes and no,” I replied with a sigh. “I mean, nothing is wrong. But it is kind of important. I just… need to get out. I need to do something. It’s nothing bad, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m always worried,” she shot back.
A part of me wanted to remind her that she wasn’t my mother, but I knew that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. For better or worse, Aunt Sus was as close to a mother as I had now, and she had done a good job of it. Of course she was going to worry about me. Telling her I was going out for a new tattoo wasn’t likely to absolve her of that worry, so I just assured her I was only going out to run a quick errand.
With the well-intentioned interrogation over, I was free to take Aunt Sus’s car and head downtown to Ink Inc. Even though I didn’t drive at all in the city, I felt surprisingly comfortable behind the wheel, and I remembered exactly how to get to the converted beauty parlor where Marc, who had only been an apprentice when I got my first tattoo, had set up shop a few months ago. Given that it was a holiday weekend, he wasn’t all that busy. In fact, there was no one else in the shop when I walked in.
“Colby!” He cried out, rushing across the room to scoop me up in a hug.
Even though we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, Marc had been a good friend to me. He was in the same class at Jaclyn and knew my family well enough to understand what I was going through when I came into his old shop for the tattoo dedicated to my parents. As I got more ink and he grew as an artist, we became closer.
“So, what’s it going to be today?” He asked. “Your text sounded pretty urgent.”
“It’s a spur of the moment decision, but I need it,” I replied. It might have sounded cryptic to anyone else, but to a guy who gave himself tattoos when he got bored, I was sure it made perfect sense. I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the photos until I found the one I was looking for, one that was taken more than a year ago. Finally, I found it, and I handed the phone to Marc. “I need that. Just like that, right in that spot, but there’s a quote that I want to wrap around it. I can write it down for you.”
Marc looked at the photo for a moment, then nodded and grinned. “Sounds good. Email me the pic and I’ll work my magic on it, then we’ll talk fonts.”
Only a few minutes later, I was face down with Marc tracing the tattoo design on my back. I was more than ready for the sting of the needle. It was a feeling that I always found strangely cathartic; getting tattooed almost made me understand people who self-harmed. There was a strange rush to it, the adrenaline release that tried to counteract the pain, but the long wait also gave me time to think.
Right then, of course, the only thing on my mind was Zac Hanson.
I wanted to be with him. Of that there was no question. His feelings for me were a little bit more difficult to understand. At times he seemed to love me too, or at least claim that he did, but at other times I felt like I was nothing to him. I knew that he felt torn between me and his wife, and I tried to understand that. I really did. She was the one with the claim on him. She was the one he had history with. But she was also the one he complained about and ran from… right into my arms. Who wouldn’t feel special when a gorgeous man with a seemingly perfect family clung to her and professed to be unhappy in his marriage? As time went on, though, and he kept going back to her over and over, I had to wonder if the things he confided in me about were true. When he was with me, it was wonderful, but when he left… doubt crept back in.
His face in the courtroom just a few days before wouldn’t leave my mind. He looked defeated and broken, but for the first time, it didn’t make me want to fix him. It made me wonder if he didn’t like to be that way, if he didn’t choose to be that way just to play on my sympathy. Maybe he was too deep in his problems to even think of finding a way out, but the more I saw him wallow, the more I wondered if he wasn’t doing it on purpose.
A few hours later, I was pulled from my thoughts of Zac by Marc announcing that the tattoo was done. He seemed pleased with his work as he pulled a few mirrors around so that I could see what the design looked like on my back. Between my shoulder blades, Marc had duplicated the sun and moon design Zac had drawn on me months and months ago. Wrapped around that in a swirling script were the words:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume.
I didn’t know if or when he would ever see the tattoo, but I was sure that if he did, Zac would understand my meaning. Unlike the tattoo on his left arm, though, mine wasn’t for him. It wasn’t for anyone but me—a reminder branded onto my skin of what my love for Zac had done. It had destroyed both of us, and right then, I could see no way for it to ever have a happy ending.
“It’s perfect,” I said, then sat back down to let Marc cover the tattoo so my clothes wouldn’t rub it.
After that, it was all done except for the payment. I was sure that Marc wanted to ask about the inspiration behind the tattoo, but he didn’t, and for that I was thankful. At least there were a few people left in the world who seemed to be oblivious to all the drama in my life. Maybe I was exaggerating, but even this little taste of the spotlight was too much for me. It wasn’t as though I were famous or anything—closer to infamous—but being a part of Hanson’s first appearance in the gossip rags was making me paranoid. If actually being famous was anything like this, I wasn’t so sure I wanted it.
When I finally made it outside, I saw that it had started to snow. The short drive back to Aunt Sus and Uncle Max’s house was lengthened considerably, and I was sure that Aunt Sus was already worried about me given how long I had been. Finally, I made it back to the house and was greeted by the smell of fresh hot cocoa as soon as I opened the door.
Aunt Sus was standing in the kitchen with a cup when I walked in. She gave me a knowing smile. “There’s some left, but you may need to reheat it.”
“Thank you,” I replied, and poured myself a mug.
“Did your… errand go okay?” She asked softly.
“Yeah,” I said. “I got a new tattoo.”
Aunt Sus nodded knowingly, even though I wasn’t so sure that she did. She always reminded me that she didn’t understand the body art thing at all, but she never lectured me for it, either. After a moment, and a long sip of her cocoa, she asked, “Are you alright, Colby?”
“No,” I replied honestly. “I’m really not. But maybe… maybe I will be eventually. I don’t know. I just can’t see how… any of this will ever get better.”
“You don’t have to be able to see it. Just because you can’t predict how, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
“Have you ever known me to be wrong?” She asked, grinning.
“No,” I said, giving her a weak grin of my own. “I suppose not.”