Page 82 of There Are No Saints

“Your turn,” he says.

I lock eyes with him in the mirror. “What do you mean?”

He holds up the tattoo gun silently.

“Are you serious?”

In response, he puts the gun in my hand and reaches over his own shoulder, grabbing a handful of his shirt and shucking it off over his head. He stands upright, throwing the shirt aside.

I stare at his naked torso.

In all my years of figure drawing, I’ve never seen a body like his.

The closest comparison would be a gymnast or a dancer—that level of lean, tight, fluid muscle. A coiled spring, ready for release.

Even gymnasts aren’t this aesthetic. The slabs of muscle across his chest, the perfect V of his waist, the way the ripples of muscle seem designed to draw the eye down, down, to button of his trousers . . .

His flesh is pale next to the loose, dark waves of hair that fall almost to his shoulders. There’s no hair anywhere on his body. No ink, either. His skin is smooth and unmarked.

“You want me to tattoo you?” I say.

He nods.

“Do you have other tattoos?”

“This will be the first.”

I swallow hard.

Cole’s beauty is way past intimidating—it’s fucking flawless.

I’ve never given a tattoo in my life. If I fuck this up, I’ll feel worse than if I scrawled a mustache across the Mona Lisa.

“I don’t think I should.”

Cole’s brows drop low across his eyes, narrowing them to slits.

“I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

My fingers tighten on the gun.

Now I want to write FUCK YOU in six-inch letters across his back.

“I hope you have enough ink,” I say.

“I have exactly what I need,” he replies.

I bet he does.

I grab the stool and drag it over in front of the mirror.

“Sit down,” I say.

Cole sits, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. Without discussing it, we’ve both intuited that his back is the best canvas—smooth and relatively flat. Actually, it’s as muscular as the rest of him. As soon as I hover the needle over his skin, I can see that I’ll have to navigate the scapula, the ribs, and the long sheets of muscle that radiate out from the spine—the lats, the traps, and the obliques.

“You want me to . . . sketch it out first?” I say weakly.

Cole doesn’t move. He doesn’t even turn his head.

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