Page 34 of Dark Ink

Conor adjusted himself in the armchair.

I avoided his gaze and stared up at the ceiling through an exhale of smoke.

“Is this girl even real?” Conor asked.

I snorted. “Is any of this even real?”

“Rian…”

I clenched my fists. Wasn’t it just my luck that Aurnia came into Conor’s life and went about this nasty business of making him a better man and all that bullshite just when I needed the old Conor? The distant, moody, impersonal Conor? The Conor who let another someone else handle it when things got…sensitive? The Conor who shared nothing except the occasional angry scowl? Why couldn’t he just drop this? Why couldn’t he just leave this the fuck alone?

Damn, and now my joint was burned down.

I lifted my hips to reach the papers and the little baggy of weed in my back pocket. Conor let out a low grunt of discontent. I rolled another joint on the little coffee table in front of the couch, nestled like an island amongst the black leather tattoo chairs. I drew my tongue slowly along the thin paper, aware the whole time of Conor’s eyes on me. My fingers began to tremble when I remembered what I could have been drawing my tongue across instead, what I should have been attending to with my tongue. I masked the shaking with the flicker of a match’s flame. Smoke rose between Conor and me, another divider amongst many, as I waved the spent match.

Conor waited till I’d taken my first long drag, waited till I’d held it deep in my lungs, waited till I exhaled and sank back, completely unarmed, completely at his mercy, before attacking.

“Rian…”

It wasn’t his voice I wanted to hear say my name. It was hers. As the pot made everything hazy, it was all I could think about. My name on her tongue, the tongue that had held my cockhead, hollowed out for the length of my shaft. My name from her lips, wet or trembling or moaning, it didn’t matter. My name from the back of her throat, from the depths of her lungs, from where smoke swirled in mine making my head light and my heart heavy.

“What?”

“Is she real?”

I attempted to pass Conor the joint, but he shook his head. I guess his concern had just intensified; to me that’s exactly when you need a good hit, but to each their own.

“Yes. No…” I said, words twisting in the air above me just like the smoke had as I watched. “Every time I try to reach for her, she slips away. Every time I try to get closer, she disappears. Every time I see her in my dreams, I wake and I’m alone, terribly alone.”

I inhaled and the end of the joint flared red.

“Maybe I’m just making her up to torment myself,” I went on, vision hazy, words growing vague, distant even as I spoke them aloud. “She’ll always be almost real. I’ll always want her, but I’ll never be able to have her. She’ll consume me and I’ll die insisting that it was real. That she was mine. That we had something. But it won’t be true. It’ll all be in my head.”

Conor had gone silent. I might have worried if I’d been sober. But I was far from that.

“I don’t even care if she’s real,” I said in a half whisper. “I’ll chase her to the ends of the earth. I’ll lose my sanity for her even if she’s the thing that’s driving me insane.”

A car passed. Its lights illuminated the unmoving interior of Dublin Ink. Conor and I squinted against its light before we were plunged back into darkness. A darkness that seemed deeper now, having seen for just a moment something brighter.

“So to answer your question,” I said with a wry smile. “She’s real. Or not. I don’t fucking care.”

I pushed myself to standing. Conor flinched when I rocked unsteadily.

“I’m fine,” I said, laughing. “Really, I just need some air.”

“Who keeps calling?” Conor said.

I shrugged again. “Not her.”

I moved toward the door. Conor stood and blocked my path. At his full height he had nearly a head on me. And I’d say fifty pounds. Of muscle. I reminded myself to politely ask Aurnia to stop whatever voodoo she was doing on my friend. I really didn’t have time for his newfound sincerity. This new caring-ness.

“Rian, I’m worried about you,” he said.

“This will help,” I said, offering again the joint.

“I’m serious.”

Conor met my gaze and I could see he was remembering a time…a dark time. I sighed and patted his arm.

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