Page 6 of For a Goode Time Call…
She frowned, swallowing hard. “Why is it so fucking obvious, Ink?”
“Well, you damn near walking off the pier into the channel was the first clue.”
She didn’t answer for a minute or two. “And you’re offering to be that friend, are you?”
Against my better judgment, I wanted to do just that. This girl was high octane, high maintenance. All fire and fury one minute, and then acting like everything was fine the next. Made me dizzy.
But there was something about her that intrigued me. The intensity in her changeable, hazel eyes…stormy gray one minute, and then fiery green the next, and then a muted roiling brown another, depending on her mood, which seemed to change with every breath—they drew me in, made me curious. Curious about her as a person, about how she got here, to Ketchikan, curious about the emotional reasons behind the blinding pain that nearly caused her to walk off the pier and into a channel which would still, even at this time of year, be so cold as to induce hypothermia if you stayed in too long.
I realized I’d been staring at her for a while without answering her question. I just nodded and said, “Yes, I am.”
“And if I don’t tell you what happened, you’re not going to ask?” She sounded outright disbelieving.
I nodded. “Ain’t my business unless you make it my business.”
“You’re weird.” She said this without looking at me, tossing back her third or fourth beer in half an hour.
“Been called worse,” I said, and then finished off my burger and my beer.
“Like?”
I wiped my hands on a napkin. Hesitated. “Jumbo. Dumb ass. Fat ass. Filthy Eskimo. Stinky Inky. Useless. Illiterate.”
“Illiterate?”
I snorted. “Figured you’d fix on that one.”
“Are you?”
I rolled a shoulder. “No, I can read alright. Just…not super well. I grew up in the bush, off-grid. Homeschooled, by which I mean if we finished our chores around the homestead, we wereallowedto do schoolwork, which was ratty old textbooks that were probably outdated in the seventies. I mostly taught myself to read, write, and add and subtract.” I sighed. “My family is just weird, reclusive, distrustful, and backward.”
She gazed at me. “And you taught yourself how to do tattoos, too?”
“More or less. I was always drawing on myself. As a little baby, just learning to crawl, I’d get my hands on anything that would mark my skin and just go to town. Pens, pencils, food, pieces of ash from the fireplace. Ketchup was my favorite. They couldn’t stop me. They’d lock up everything and anything, but I’d find something. Shit, if I couldn’t find anything else, I’d just go outside and make mud and use that to mark up my skin.”
“But your name, Ink, was what they named you when you were born? It’s not a nickname?”
I nodded. “My folks’ve been asked about my name as often as you’d imagine, and all my dad’ll say is, ‘sounded like an interesting name at the time.’ No deeper meaning or reason behind it than he thought it sounded cool, I guess. Never heard him or Mom say anything different my whole life. So did my name inform what I do? Maybe. I didn’t know what ink was as a kid. I just knew I liked how my skin looked when I made marks on it.”
“It’s just a compulsion for you, then?”
I shrugged, nodded. “Started off that way. Just me, and Juneau, who lived near me and was my best and only friend. She was the same way. We’d steal pens and hide them in our secret fort in the woods behind our trailers, and we’d sneak out there and draw on each other for hours.”
“So she’s a tattoo artist, too?”
“She is now, but it was a bit of a journey for her to get there.” I ran a thumbnail along a groove in the bar top. “That’s her story, though, so you’ll have to get her to tell it.”
“Fair enough.”
“Eventually my folks realized there was no stopping me from drawing, from art, from tattooing. So they stopped trying to make me be something else. They didn’t like it, but I didn’t know how to be anything other than who and what I am. Eventually, I connected with John Thomas and he was the first person to let me do a real tattoo on him. I was hooked then, boy, let me tell you. A hell of a rush. Like, when you finally do something for the first time that you’ve been dreaming of for forever, and when you do, it’s like…you’rehome, you know? Something just clicks in your soul, and youknowthis isit, this is what you’re supposed to do, forever. This one thing—”
I glanced at Cassie, and she was silent, unblinking, staring down at the top of the bar. Her posture was turtled—shoulders hunched, head drawn down on her neck, chin tucked in, breathing hard and fast. Biting her lip so hard I was worried she’d bite straight through it.
“Cassie?” I said, my voice low and hesitant.
She shook her head, all she seemed capable of.
“Hit a nerve, huh?” I turned away, giving her privacy to gather herself.
