Page 14 of Jackson
I propped myself on my elbow and looked at her. She stretched her arms above her head, and her t-shirt rose showing her stomach. My heart lurched in my chest at her pose. I reached over and gently touched just below hernavel.
“You need a tattoo here,” I saidquietly.
She opened her eyes to look at me. “I might just do that, what should I get? And does ithurt?”
As much as I didn’t want to, I removed my fingers. “Would you let me designsomething?”
“I’d love that. How amazing to have a piece of your art on my body. Let’s do it,” she replied, there was excitement in her voice, again something I hadn’t heard in awhile.
“It can be step one on my ‘getting my shit together’ list,” sheadded.
“You’ll end up with piercingsnext.”
“I might get my belly button pierced, or mynipples.”
“Your…”
“I’m kidding, that must fuckinghurt!”
“Maybe, you get yours done and I’ll get mine,” I said, not for once believing shewould.
“Is this our mid-life crisis, do youthink?”
“If it is, I hit mine fucking years ago,” I said with a laugh, pointing at myarm.
“When did you get your first tattoo and why?” She had turned on her side to faceme.
“I think I was about fourteen. I lied about my age, I imagine. It was this one,” I pointed to a small skull just below my shoulder. “As for why, that’s a longstory.”
“One you don’t want to talkabout?”
I smiled at her. “Shall we get back? I need to shower off thispaint.”
No, I didn’t want to talk about it. She’d never understand the compulsion to cover my skin. To cover the scars from the razor blade or the imaginary scars from the psychological abuse. People expressed their pain in many ways; mine was to transform myself, to cover every inch of the skin he, or I, had fucked with. When I was younger it became a choice; I could cut myself or I could draw art. I combined the two. The sting of the needle as it etched over my scars was pleasurable, as pleasurable as the slice of the rusty razorblade.
I still had the blade; it was wrapped in some tissue paper and stored in a small cardboard box. I often took it out and looked at it. It was a reminder of who I had been and a reminder of how far I’d come from those days. From a life no one knew about. And it was for that reason that I couldn’t tell her. Like her husband, I’d lived a lie for many years. But it wasn’t that which kept me from wanting a relationship with her. That was something far worse. A familiar feeling began to wash over me, a feeling of needing to control. It sickened me in one way, and I swallowed down the bile that rose to mythroat.
I stood and reached down for her. I needed to shower, not just to remove the paint but the nastiness that had started to creep over mybody.
