Page 53 of Four Tattoos

When the show lets out, I’m at my post in the lobby, ready to answer questions and sell future show tickets to audience members as they’re leaving. I get a few odd looks, no doubt because my eyes look like I outlined them with a red marker, but I’m proud that I manage to keep myself together and do my job.

Callie offers to come over and stay the night with me, and I’m very tempted, but I tell her that I’ll be okay.

I have to be okay.

I let myself fall apart earlier when I got the test results, but now I need to be strong and face my problems head on.

At my apartment, I manage to fall asleep from sheer emotional exhaustion, and I feel marginally better in the morning, though a fresh, but smaller wave of panic hits me when I first wake up and remember that I’m pregnant.

There’s a baby growing inside me.

With the clarity of a decent night’s sleep, I realize I need to tell the men about this, whether they want to hear it or not. I didn’t get into this situation by myself, and hopefully, I won’t have to go through it by myself. Even if they don’t want to be fathers, they deserve to know.

But I don’t want them to feel obligated to me. They’ve made it clear that they don’t want to be with me, and I don’t want a baby to change their minds. I don’t want them to feel like they’re being forced to be with me.

I have this fear that they’ll somehow think I got pregnant to try to trap them, but I have to trust that they know me well enough to know I wouldn’t do something like that. With condoms as our birth control, it’s not even something Icoulddo. It’s not as if I was on the pill and decided to stop taking it without telling them.

Since it’s still the weekend, I have another day off from the coffee shop, and I definitely need the time to think things through and do some planning.

It’s not like I can just send a text message.Hey, I’m pregnant. Call me later.That would go over really well.

While I sort through a couple of my still-unpacked boxes, I think about the best way to tell the men. As I imagine different scenarios, I also envision how they’ll take the news, but I have to tell myself not to speculate about it, because picturing their reactions only makes me more stressed than I already am.

I believe they’ll offer to help me because they’re decent men, but I have no way to predict how involved they might want to be with decision making or with a baby, if they even want to be involved at all.

Mace plans to move away someday, so I can’t imagine that he’d want to be saddled with a child. This leads me to wonder, for probably the millionth time, whose baby it is.

I don’t really want to think about it belonging to only one of them, because I always think of them together, but will they want to take a paternity test to find out which of them is the father? I don’t even know how that works; would we have to wait until the baby is born before knowing who the father is? What if they fight amongst themselves about it? They often don’t see eye to eye on things, and this is a major, life-changing thing.

What a mess.

What would my mom tell me to do if she were still here? We had a good relationship before she died, and I’d like to think that I could have been open with her about everything going on in my life, but maybe an affair with four tattoo artists would’ve been too much for her to handle.

My father didn’t stick around when she needed him, so I’m guessing she’d tell me not to rely on men. She talked with me plenty about being careful not to get pregnant, but I thought Iwasbeing careful. Would she be ashamed of me?

I’m wiping away a couple of tears when my phone buzzes with a text. It’s Brittany asking how I am, and it warms my heart that she really seems to care, even when she doesn’t really know me all that well.

“I have someone who can cover if you want to take the night off,” she tells me.

I step into the bathroom and evaluate my face in the mirror. I’m not sure any amount of makeup will disguise my puffy, red eyes.

“I’d appreciate that,” I tell her. “I’ll definitely be there tomorrow.”

“Sounds good,” she says. “Let us know if you need anything.”

I’ll give myself a little more time to wallow and cry tonight, and then I’ll pull myself together for good. I’m clinging to what Brittany told me last night.Everything will be okay.

Somehow. Eventually.

Right?

41

MACE

My client, a twenty-year-old man, is asking me question after question about what it takes to become a tattoo artist, and twice now, I’ve nearly put the wrong color in the wrong section of the skateboarding rabbit I’m inking on his leg.

I’ve been distracted like this for the past couple of days, and it’s really getting on my nerves.

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