Ink and Bone(17)

“Hold still,” he said now.

As he spoke, the hint of movement in the dark corner of the shop caught her eye. She wasn’t surprised to see Abigail leaning against the wall. Rainer pulled his cart over, unwrapped a new needle, put on surgical gloves. He was a professional; he did things right even when it was just the two of them. He arranged the pile of gauze, which he’d use to mop away the blood and ink. Abigail walked over until she was standing behind Rainer, who held the tattoo gun.

“How about here?” he asked, laying a hand on her lower back, close to her hip.

“That’s fine,” she said. He pressed the paper there with a crinkle, then peeled it back. She knew it was just a starting point, all the magic would happen with his freehand work.

Rainer pressed his foot on the round pedal, making the machine hum with its electric sizzle. Finley breathed deep in anticipation of the needle, the heat, the pain. It was a hurt that brought with it a kind of relief. Eloise had expressed concern that Finley’s “tattoo addiction” was a form of masochism. Maybe.

She released a low moan as the needle pierced her skin, close to the hipbone. The closer to the bone, the worse the pain. There was no denying that it hurt, but Finley could sink into the pain, embrace it. Fighting, bracing against it only made it worse.

Rainer had his head bent over, totally focused on the task before him. Abigail walked across the room and stood beside Rainer. To Finley, Abigail had real substance—the fall of her hair, the swoosh of her dress, the sound of her shoes on the floor. Finley watched Abigail watching Rainer. She looked at him with such naked longing that Finley finally averted her eyes.





FOUR


Merri let herself into the apartment. Wolf had insisted she take the key. If it’s Jackson’s home, it’s your home, too, he’d said. He wasn’t ready to end the marriage.

“We can’t split up,” he’d urged. “Not now, not like this. Think about Jackson, Merri. How much more can a kid take?”

She wasn’t one of those people who subscribed to the idea that kids were better off in a miserable but intact marriage than they were in a broken one. Not anymore. In fact, if she’d left Wolf years ago when she first knew it was over, none of the horrible things that came later ever would have happened. Why do people cling to these old ideas about family and marriage? Why do they stagnate, forcing the universe to deliver ever more severe lessons? Fear. It was fear of change that had kept her marriage together. Now that the worst possible thing had happened, Merri found that she was free from fear. She was untethered from what people thought, her terror of failure, the desire for stability. Rather than the joyous release she had always imagined, instead she had a sense of being unmoored in her life. She was drifting, unable to settle, emotionally homeless.

She dropped her coat and bag by the door. The lights were low, the big (enormous, a truly ridiculous sixty-five inches; God, he was such a child) screen television tuned to a soccer game. Wolf was hunched over his keyboard, his eternal posture. The tall windows of the TriBeCa loft looked out onto a field of lights. There was money. His. Hers. Not a fortune, but enough. That had never been one of their problems. They had never struggled to make ends meet. They’d always f*cked like rock stars. No, it wasn’t one of the big three—money, sex, infidelity (though he’d never been faithful)—that split them apart. What was it then—other than the enormous, unthinkable tragedy that ultimately blew them to smithereens? Nothing. Everything. She still wasn’t sure. The worst part about it was that she’d never stopped loving him. Even after everything, the sight of him still thrilled her.

“Hey,” she said, keeping her voice low so as not to wake Jackson.

He leapt up as if she’d Tasered him, then put a hand over his heart.

“Merri,” he said. “Christ.”

His relief, his happiness at seeing her was palpable. She glanced at the screen out of habit. She didn’t see any images of enormous breasts, or girls kissing, or wild porn sex—just an open Word document. She knew he was on deadline.

Not that she cared about his deviant sexual appetites anymore.

Porn isn’t so bad, he’d childishly insisted more than once. Lots of guys look at porn. It doesn’t mean anything.

It means you’re a man-baby. That’s what it means. And no working mother wants a man-baby as a partner in her life, just FYI.

She sank into the plush couch they’d purchased together at Jensen-Lewis. She remembered paying for it and thinking that people who didn’t love each other anymore had no business buying furniture together. Now she felt comforted by its butter-soft leather, by the solidity of the thing. It wasn’t going anywhere. Everything had changed around it, but it was still there.

“Where have you been?” Wolf asked.

“I talked to Jackson before bed,” she said, a little defensive. She was unhinged, obsessed, yes. But she was still there for Jackson; she hadn’t abandoned him in her grief. In fact, he was the only thing keeping her from going over the edge completely.

“He said you FaceTimed from your car,” said Wolf. “Helped with his essay.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Where were you?” he asked again.

She wasn’t sure how to approach the subject, how he was going to take it.

“I found some help,” she said.