Page 97 of Dirty Ink

There was no answer on his phone. The only time I stopped searching was to try Mason’s number again. And the only time I stopped praying on each and every ring was when I heard his voice, distant, unreachable at the very end, “It’s Mason. If you know me, leave a message. If you don’t, fuck off.”

I never left a message. I could never quite convince myself that I knew him. At least not anymore. I’d been able to believe that there was no one else I knew better in the entire world. But I’d also been able to believe that he would be there when I returned. Like he said. Like he promised. So what the fuck did it matter what I believed or didn’t?

As I sat there on the floor, in the mess, unblinking, unseeing, the bands of light from the blinds travelled across my face. Across my body. Hours passed like that. Nothing moving but those bars. Nothing changing but their shade as sunset painted them red and the flickering on of the streetlamps doused them with yellow.

Only the itch of my skin beneath the bandage at the small of my back stirred me. It was healing, this wound I hadn’t even known I’d received. The pieces were stitching back together and yet I couldn’t even remember getting torn in two.

My body was stiff as I pushed myself up from the floor, down feathers stuck to my palms. I gathered them on the bottom of my feet as I padded toward the darkened mirror. My stiff muscles protested as I twisted to see around behind me. I pulled at the bandage. I hadn’t realised how numb I’d become till I felt the tape peeling off the fine hair there at the base of my spine.

It was a tattoo. A tattoo of a feather. The kind that topped my headdresses. The kind that extended out from the back of my corset like old-fashioned bustles. It lay across the top of the cheeks of my ass like it had floated down there naturally. Like my clothes had been torn from my body and it came loose and fell, fell, fell. It followed my curves seductively. It was somehow raunchy and tender and beautiful. It was somehow fully Mason. Somehow fully me.

This tattoo was evidence.

He knew me.

He would never just…leave.

My fingers trembled as I dialled Mason’s number again in the dark. I prepared myself for the rings. Long and anguishing rings. The terrible space between them. The little catches in the noise where I was positive for a second that it was the sound of him picking up, only for another ring to come. I was ready for all that.

What I wasn’t ready for was a robotic voice to declare before any of that that the line had been disconnected. The caller no longer available.

I didn’t cry. Crying is for when you lose hope.

There was no hope to ever be had. I had been wrong. This was as definite an answer as I would ever get: Mason had left. He intended to leave. And what’s more, he intended not to be found.

That was it.

I couldn’t go on in Vegas after that. It felt like a rotten dream. A spoiled fantasy. It was the place where I’d had everything and lost everything. There was nothing more to do there. I’d finally been accepted as myself, only to be rejected completely, as myself.

It was time for a new place. A new start. A new role for me.

New York City wasn’t kind. The jostling on the subway, the shouting on the streets, the rats and the piss and the smells from the steaming sewer drains. But there was a tiny tattoo parlour tucked between two skyscrapers and they were open late.

I showed the artist the feather. He looked shocked when I told him I wanted to cover it.

“But it’s beautiful.”

“It’s not me,” I told him.

He eyed me warily.

“And who are you then?”

I avoided the reflection of the feather in the mirror.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What can you make it into?”

The artist ran his thumb over the tattoo at the small of my back as he sighed.

“Well,” he said at last, “I think I could make it into a pair of dove wings pretty easily.”

And so I went from a fallen angel to dove.

Mason

Maybe Rachel was always meant to be a flash. A moment of brilliance so blinding she left an impression on the back of my eyelids so fierce, I didn’t even realise she was gone until she was impossibly out of reach. A shooting star, a comet, a siren’s call toward the rocks.

Day 30 of our “marriage” was fast approaching. With each day closer Rachel became more distant. I feared Day 30 she would be gone. I’d be left blinking at the burned image she left behind.

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