Page 94 of Dirty Ink

Mason

I’d never enjoyed blue balls so fucking much.

Next to me on the hard metal bench Rachel looked like a mess. Her hair was knotted, her wild curls practically feral at that point. Static made it climb up the corkboard above our heads like ivy up a brick wall. Her cheeks were still flushed, her pupils still dilated, her nipples still hard through the sweater she’d buttoned up all wrong. I think she’d managed to get her underwear back on. But I couldn’t be entirely sure it wasn’t still on the floor of the dressing room where we’d vacated rather…hastily.

Not that I could say that I looked much better. For one I was squirming around like a horny teenage boy with a boner in fifth period math. For another I’d somehow lost a shoe. It had maybe ended up in one of the stalls next to ours. In a pile of some housewife’s pyjamas. There was a possibility that I’d thrown it somewhere. Again, I couldn’t be sure.

I remembered locking the door, seeing Rachel there with her legs spread. The rest was just a race to get rid of as much clothes as possible. Then there was, perhaps most damning of all, the long, angry red scratches down my upper chest that Rachel had managed to gift me before the security guard not so politely banged on the dressing room door.

Rachel giggled suddenly and immediately clamped her hand over her mouth.

“Don’t you start,” I whispered, keeping my attention straight ahead at the security guard’s office as he filled out paperwork. “If you start, I’ll start and if I start, I won’t be able to stop.”

“Sorry,” Rachel whispered back, the word bouncing with laughter. She leaned forward to bury her head in her lap.

“Rachel,” I hissed, sinking my teeth into my lower lip.

“Sorry, sorry,” came Rachel’s words buried in her lap.

Seconds later she was giggling. Back bouncing as she laughed. I forced myself not to laugh as the security guard looked up from his desk and narrowed his eyes at us through the glass.

“She’s just really overcome with guilt!” I shouted to the security guard as I patted Rachel’s back. This only made me buck more with uncontrollable laughter. “She never does stuff like this,” I added. “Always such a good girl. Really, sir, it’s eating her up inside.”

Rachel elbowed me in the side and I bit back a grin. The security guard rolled his eyes and returned with a bored sigh to his paperwork. There’d be a fine, of course. And a stern talking to. Thankfully no charges were being pressed. The only other people in the dressing room at the time had been creeps with ears pressed against the walls.

Rachel lifted her head, tears streaming down her face. She wiped at them with the back of her hand and hiccupped. Our eyes met and she had to turn away instantly, cupping her hand over her mouth as she began giggling all over again.

I smiled because it was so obvious that she was happy. That the weight she’d been carrying around like a chip on her shoulders had been lifted, at least for a little while. It was almost the Rachel I remembered from Vegas: full of life, daring and bold, eager to grab every chance at happiness that she could get. I smiled because it was obvious that I was happy, too.

I’d searched for happiness for so long. Tried to convince myself that I’d found it, that I had it, more times than I could count. But when you were truly happy you didn’t have to wonder if you were. You didn’t ask yourself, “Is this it? Is this happiness?” You didn’t feel that sinking disappointment when you tell yourself, “I guess this is it…this is it?” True happiness just was.

And this was it. Sitting there next to Rachel. In trouble for trying to fuck like horny teenagers in the dressing room at Jervis mall. Attempting to appear remorseful for our actions for a security guard who probably couldn’t give a fuck. Knees brushing. Eyes avoiding one another’s but only because we knew we wouldn’t be able to hold it in if we caught hold of one another. Our laughter. Our happiness.

Rachel composed herself, managing to let out a long, shaky breath as she leaned her head back against the corkboard. It was covered with pinned pictures of shoplifters. Like a wall of shame. Our pictures would be up there. There was no avoiding that. Rachel with her wild hair, her sex-flushed cheeks, her teary eyes from laughing so fucking hard.

And me, with my eyes not on the camera, but on her standing behind the security guard as he took the photo. Biting at her lower lip. Toes on top of one another. Fidgeting with the wrongly done-up buttons of her thin cashmere sweater.

I’d wondered for a moment if you could see her reflection in my pupils still dilated from the image of her spread legs.

I’d like that picture. I wanted to hold onto that. The way she had looked at me in that moment. It was the way she had looked at me all those years ago.

“I can’t believe I did that,” Rachel whispered, her words still interrupted by soft giggles.

Her fingers were playing at her lips as she stared forward. When she glanced over at me, she found me looking at her. She smiled but this time did not laugh.

“I think that’s a lie,” I said.

Rachel’s smile faltered a little. I hadn’t meant to sound so serious when I said that. I didn’t want to do anything to take away her laughter, to steal her happiness. Not ever. But the words came out and it was the truth of them that made them sound different. Because our truth, Rachel’s and mine, it wasn’t happy.

Rachel shook her head. She tried back on the laughter, but it was like a shirt that shrank in the wash: it no longer quite fit.

“I’m not that person anymore, Mason,” she said.

She busied herself with fixing the buttons on her sweater. Her eyes remained focused on the task. Remained away from me.

“Because of this new role?” I asked.

Rachel looked up at me.

---