Raine’s chest rises and falls as she tries to catch her breath. Her cheeks are flushed. She looks so very alive.

Lately, I feel as if I’m on autopilot. The intrusive thoughts come more frequently, taking up so much of my time and attention that I feel like an observer of my life. This moment with Raine is a brief reprieve, one I don’t want to waste. I have so little time with her. No one, not even Raine, can keep me safe from my own head. But today, being around her is like sitting in the sunshine on a cold day. It makes the winter tolerable, almost nice.

She leans against the sign beside the statue and groans. “I don’t think I can take another step. You’ll have to carry me back to the pub.”

She looks at me as if this is a challenge. She’s poking at the boundaries of my professionalism, and I am too weak to hold the line. I mentally nudge the boundaries an inch further. “Oh, all right,” I say, and turn my back to her.

“Really?”

“Come on,” I say, “before I change my mind.”

She jumps onto my back and wraps her arms loosely around my neck. I start in the direction of the pub. When I heft her higher onto my back, her laugh warms my cheek, and I tighten my grip on her. This is the closest we’ve ever been. The most we’ve touched.

I try not to think about it.

“Not sure how you conned me into this,” I say. “Can’t say this is very professional.”

“I told you I didn’t have a professional bone in my body.” She rests her chin on my shoulder, and her hair presses against my cheek. The smell of her shampoo, something light and floral, wafts over me.

I must be a masochist. There’s no other explanation for why I would torture myself like this. Why else would I have her so close? Why else would I willingly drown myself in her when I know I won’t—can’t—do anything about it?

Raine is quiet as we cross the street. It’s a quiet evening in the town center too, but the few people who are milling about cast us odd glances. I don’t care. A lifetime of ridiculous thoughts dulled my capacity for embarrassment years ago.

We pass by the Cobh Tourist Office, and it reminds me of Raine’s question. Where would I go if I could go anywhere? I don’t like to think about things like that. I’d love to see new places. Have adventures. New experiences. Meet all sorts of people. But traveling means uncertainty. It means unfamiliar places and situations, new triggers, no routine to rely on. It’s easier to pretend I don’t like traveling than to admit that this is one more thing OCD has taken from me.

“Tokyo,” I say.

“Hmm?”

“That’s where I’d go.”

I can hear the smile in her voice. “Why Tokyo?”

I turn right, taking the shortcut to the pub so I don’t have to carryher uphill the entire way. “There are some great tattoo artists there I’d love to work with. Before I left Dublin, I was thinking about seeing if I could get a guest spot at a tattoo shop somewhere. Not Tokyo. I was thinking closer to home, maybe London. But I hoped that one day I could work my way up to something like that.”

“A traveling musician and a traveling tattoo artist walk into a bar,” Raine says.

I wait for the punchline.

“That’s all I’ve got, but it sounds like the start of a great joke.”

“The joke is the idea of me ever becoming a traveling tattoo artist.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t travel, and I don’t tattoo anymore.”

“I bet you could find a few clients here if you wanted.”

“I didn’t quit because I moved here. For a while, I’d head up to Dublin now and then to do bookings.”

“What happened? Oh, you don’t have to answer that, sorry.”

“I don’t mind telling you.” Part of me evenwantsto tell her, but I’m also nervous. What if it makes her pity me? Or worse, what if she thinks I’m crazy?

She wouldn’t think that. At least, I don’t think she would.

“My OCD got in the way,” I say. “I started getting new intrusive thoughts. What if I didn’t sterilize my equipment well enough and someone went septic? I went through gloves like you wouldn’t believe. I was on edge constantly because I was convinced that if I had a bad thought while tattooing someone, the tattoo would be unlucky. If I had a bad thought when I was drawing, I could just throw it away and start over, but with tattooing, that wasn’t possible.”