Say it Louder

by Heidi Joy Tretheway

  I fiddle with the paper placemat on the Formica tabletop, tearing off little bits and rolling them into thin cylinders. I’ve amassed a pile when someone slides into the cracked vinyl booth across from me.

  “Quite an art project you’ve got going there.”

  I frown at Willa, but she ignores me and waves at the waitress for coffee.

  “You done with your pity party yet?”

  “No.” My voice is sullen, and I know I’m acting about six years old. But, God, don’t I deserve a few minutes to wallow in my misery?

  Never mind. What happened last night was wallowing enough.

  “Fine, then, don’t let me interrupt.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “First client bailed. Ran out of coffee filters at the shop.” The waitress sets down a mug and pours coffee. Willa drinks hers black, same as me. “So what are you doing here? Besides breakfast and the poor-me routine?”

  “Would you come off it, Willa? I’ve got serious problems. Stop acting like somebody just forgot my birthday.”

  Instead of checking her attitude, she lays it on thicker. “Oh, big-boy problems? Tell mama all about them. Did somebody take your toys?”

  “Fuck you. I don’t need this shit.” I move to stand and then realize I don’t have the check yet. That keeps my butt on the seat for another minute as I try to get the waitress’s attention, but fail.

  “Her name’s Charlene. Don’t leave her a crappy tip or she’ll take it out on me next time.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I mutter. I tear off another piece of placemat and roll it between my thumb and forefinger, perfecting the roundness of the little white cylinder before I place it on the stack I’ve made, like a Lincoln Log cabin.

  “So what do you need, Dave?”

  “A new life?”

  “Done and done. I’ll trade you.” Willa grins, revealing slightly crooked eyeteeth and a dimple. “I can’t wait to swap bank accounts.”

  “You know what I mean. I need a do-over.”

  “Doesn’t look like you need to do last night over.”

  I groan and shake my head. “It was a bad idea.”

  “Yeah. Unless you’re aiming to get laid, alcohol doesn’t help much.”

  “Even then, it’s a pretty crap wingman.” I smile at my dumb joke, and she smiles back. How did I go from telling her to fuck off to smiling in six-point-four seconds?

  Willa’s distracting me. But maybe that’s the point. I drop a twenty on the check the moment Charlene deposits it on the table, and I rise even though Willa’s not even half finished with her coffee.

  “Where to now?” she asks, not budging from her seat.

  “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

  “You feel better yet?” She sips her coffee and looks at me thoughtfully, an appraisal of sorts.

  Weirdly, I do feel better. “Yeah.”

  “I’m magic like that.”

  I laugh a little. “You got any other tricks up your sleeve?”

  Her pierced brow arches and I drop my gaze to her hands cradling her coffee mug. Her short nails are rimmed in paint, her forearms saturated with color, and I’m sure her curved biceps can lift some heavy shit.

  The design on her left arm, bees pollinating delicately shaded flowers, continues beneath the hem of her sleeve and I see hints of another curling design at the edge of her chest.

  She clears her throat, a gotcha for staring. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  I snap my mouth shut, realizing it was hanging open as I blatantly checked her out. “Sorry. I meant—I just—”

  “Forget it, Dave. Just messing with you.” Willa takes another long swig of coffee and leaves the mug, standing. “You’ve got nowhere to go and I’ve got somewhere to be, so we’re going to get along fine.”

  “I don’t think so.” How many times have we bitched at each other now?

  “I know so.” She sweeps her hand and I find myself falling into step with her as we leave the diner. “I’ve got just the thing to give you some perspective.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Sit there, don’t touch anything, and don’t be a pain in the ass.”

  Dave gives me a kicked-puppy look but obeys, taking a seat on the empty chair adjacent to my station. I tray up my tools and ignore him. It’s kind of a test to see how he handles silence.

  He passes. Good. He’s not just running his mouth to fill the quiet.

  Nancy walks in the door right on time, her short, spiky salt-and-pepper hair even wilder than usual.

  She wraps me in a big hug, still oblivious to the fact that I’m not a hugger. I’m not a toucher at all, really. I need a good, safe distance from people to stand back and see what they’re about. When you’re physically wrapped up in a person, you lose all perspective, like sticking your nose too close to a map.

  I squirm and Nancy takes the hint, finally releasing me. Her penciled-in eyebrows make every expression more animated.

  “I’m so ready for this,” she says, rubbing her hands together. She’s psyching herself up, like a football coach talking to his team. “I mean, recovering from surgery was worse. Getting my tonsils out was way worse.”

  “You’re doing a great job selling it.” I give her a wry grin. “Maybe I could get that quote on one of our flyers?”

  “Girl, you do beautiful work. It speaks for itself.” Nancy’s gaze travels to Dave, who still looks a little green. Dark circles haunt his eyes. “Who’s this?”

  “Sorry, I should have introduced you. Dave, this is my client Nancy. Nancy, this is the pain in my ass. You can send him away, but I thought he could use a little education today.”

  Nancy’s penciled brow rises. “You’re teaching him to tattoo?”

  I snort. “I don’t think he can be trusted with ink, or even with crayons in his state.”

  “That’s not fair.” Dave frowns.

  I point to the counter where my drawing pad lies open. “Then you go over there and draw me a perfect circle. I’ll bet my next commission your hand’s all shaky.”

  Dave looks at his hand like he’s only just realized it’s attached to his body. It trembles. “Shit.”

  “Exactly.” I turn to Nancy. This is her third tattoo, and her bravest so far. “I know this is a really personal tattoo, but I still thought it would be worth asking if Dave could sit in. Maybe you could tell him about Ivy?”

  Nancy looks at him, back to me, and shrugs. “Why not? The last time a guy looked at my breasts, I was Willa’s age.” She laughs—a warm, embracing sound like she doesn’t have a care in the world.

  That’s a total lie, though. She’s in her late forties or early fifties, and when I first met her she walked in my shop straight from her partner’s funeral. I tattooed a pink ribbon on her inner wrist, and she cried and told me about her life with Ivy.

  Now, as I prepare Nancy for her third mark, she hoists a pant leg to show Dave her second tattoo: a winding wreath of flowers and ivy leaves. Each flower was in the garden she and Ivy grew, Nancy explains as I prepare the transfer paper for today’s design. Each flower symbolizes one of their eleven years together.

  Dave listens and nods, asking a few gentle questions. Nancy’s eyes glisten with tears but they don’t fall.

  “Time to get naked,” I say with a grin, and Dave’s eyes bug out. I tip my head toward him and ask Nancy, “You want me to tell the pain in my ass to get lost?”

  Nancy shakes her head. “He can stay. We’re good.”

  She removes her shirt and bra, and I drape her left breast with a sterile sheet. A curved pink scar arcs across her chest where her right breast used to be.

  “If Ivy hadn’t forced me to get a mammogram before she passed, I would have never known about the lump,” Nancy tells Dave. “She saved my life even though it cost her hers.”

  I place the transfer paper over Nancy’s scar, an original design of curling ivy and birds that I created for her. I give Nancy a hand mirror and we fiddle with the angle of the design be
fore she tells me it’s just right.

  I’m ready to begin and I look up at Dave. He still looks rough, but I think Nancy got through to him the way I’d hoped: the pity party is officially over.

  “You staying?” My question is a challenge.

  “I’m here for as long as you’ll have me.”

  ***

  Four hours and two clients later, Dave’s still hanging around my shop. I’m spent—physically, tattooing is hard work because it requires such concentrated focus and physical precision.

  I stand and stretch, feeling a cord in my neck pull down past my shoulder blades. I’m too tight, but I’ll work it out in the shower unless the hot water’s off again.

  At my apartment, there’s a good chance of that. That’s not too bad in the summer, but it sucks balls in the winter.

  “Go home, Dave.”

  He frowns. That kicked-puppy look is back. “Do you have any more clients today?”

  “No. Just going to hang around and draw in case we get a walk-in.” The lead artist for Righteous Ink, Thomas, is at the Sturgis rally this week, so I’m stuck here. “Seriously, go home. You got sober, you got some perspective, and now you’ve got to sort out your shit. No time like the present.”

  “I could help you—”

  “No.” It comes out harsher than I intend, but seriously, if he volunteers to do one more thing, like picking up the break room in back or fetching us more coffee filters or sweeping, I’m going to scream. That man’s hovering like a mosquito, and I’m hyperaware of his presence.

  I backtrack. “Sorry. It’s not that I don’t appreciate your help. But I want to draw. And I can’t do that with you just … here.”

  That’s half the truth. The other half is that he watches me in a way I’m entirely unaccustomed to. He looks at me like he really sees me, like I matter. When you spend your whole life trying to be anything but invisible, that kind of attention is arresting.

  It’s also exhausting. I run my hand through my short hair, the pink strands sticking up at odd angles. My art is a drama-free zone, and Dave’s got a truckload of drama following him.

  “OK, I’m going.” Dave pulls out his phone and glances it, but clicks the screen off immediately. I know that look. No messages.

  Dave slouches to the front door, pulling it open so the entry bell tinkles. He turns to me. “Thanks for today. Seriously.”

  I lift my chin in acknowledgement. “Looks like it worked.”

  “What?”

  “Gave you some perspective, didn’t it? Stop feeling sorry for yourself?”

  Dave nods. “That part worked.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I can’t put it off any longer. The cab takes me home too fast and I don’t know if she’s waiting for me there.

  Will Kristina pretend it never happened? Believe we’re through? Or weave another threat into the tangled web of leverage she’s had over me and the band for years?

  The sight of a police cruiser parked on my block stops me in my tracks before I climb the steps of my brownstone.

  I’m not ready to go to jail.

  I don’t know if a cop’s here for me—maybe Kristina’s got them waiting inside—but I’m not ready to find out. I spin and sprint away from my house, my lungs on fire as I cover three blocks, then ten, until I double over by a park bench, hands on my knees.

  Cold sweat prickles my back.

  I hail another cab cruising past me and give them the only name I can think of right now: Righteous Ink. I don’t care if Willa kicked me out. I only know that it’s my one safe space.

  If they don’t find me at home, they’ll go to Gavin’s place. Or Tyler’s. He texted me today while I was at Willa’s shop to say that band practice was canceled and Jayce was taking Violet to Colorado for the weekend to escape the media craziness that her naked pictures stirred up.

  So, for the moment, I’m alone in a city of eight million.

  I exit the cab half a block from Righteous Ink and slink up to the window, careful to stay out of Willa’s sightline. She’s drawing at the counter again, absorbed in her work.

  I watch her. Shove my hands in my pockets and lean on the side of the building, trying to not look like a creep as the minutes tick by toward five o’clock.

  Willa’s face is pinched in concentration, as if drawing out her ideas causes some discomfort in birthing them. She squints, erases, and then puts pencil to paper again.

  Fuck it. I’ve got nothing to lose.

  I pull open the door to the tinkle of bells and try to ignore the way her expression falls when she sees me. I’m an idiot. She doesn’t want me here at all.

  “Forget something?”

  I shove my hands in my pockets, hating what I have to ask. “I need a favor.”

  “Shoot.”

  “There’s a cot in your break room. Any chance I can use it?”

  “Why don’t you just go home and take a nap?”

  I approach the counter, flick my thumbnail against a chip in it. “It’s complicated.”

  “Your girlfriend there?”

  “I have no idea. But right now, I can’t be there. Seriously can’t. So I’m wondering if I could stay here for a little bit.”

  Willa straightens and closes her sketchpad. She glances at the clock—it’s a few minutes ’til closing. “No.”

  God. Do I have to fucking beg? I could pull out my credit card and book a hotel room, but I’m afraid they’d find me there, too.

  Willa shoves her sketchpad in a battered messenger bag and hoists it over her head. She’s leaving. My one last chance is out of here. “Are you going to tell me why?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t stay here. I don’t know what you want, but my job’s on the line if I let you stay here. And I can’t afford to lose it.”

  I stare at her as she walks through the tattoo shop and flicks off lights, then pulls the chain beneath the neon OPEN sign to turn it off. She opens the door and pulls out a ring of keys to lock up.

  “Willa, have you ever needed someone to just help you? No questions asked?” We’re just a few inches apart as she pulls the door closed behind us, but I don’t back away. I can feel her body heat pull at me like a campfire’s warmth. “That’s what I need today. Tonight. I have nowhere I can go right now. No one I can trust. Except you.”

  She clicks the lock into place and straightens, her pale blue eyes challenging me. This time, the staring contest isn’t about power—it’s about raw assessment. I’m willing her to understand how much it takes to simply admit that I need some help.

  I need her.

  “Follow me.”

  ***

  Compared to my house, most people’s homes are pretty basic. Kristina bought four-thousand-dollar leather couches, thick rugs and fancy decorator stuff that I can’t even name. She went apeshit in Williams-Sonoma decking out our kitchen, and then I went kind of crazy with the electronics.

  Even compared to my childhood addresses, a series of run-down rental houses and marginally better apartments, Willa’s apartment is a slum.

  We climb four flights of creaking stairs, pass several discarded pizza boxes piled up by a garbage chute, and scuttle beneath a lone bare bulb in the hallway. Willa unlocks the door—just one lock, and that worries me.

  “It’s safe, if that’s what you’re wondering,” she says. “Some of my neighbors are working girls and dealers, but some of them are just regular folks scraping by.” The challenge in her voice tells me she knows I’m judging her.

  I can’t help it. Even when our band first moved to New York, we lived in a better place than this.

  She drops her messenger bag on a table that’s splashed with several colors of paint, and that’s the first thing I notice—paint is everywhere, splatters and drips across the floor and color swatches painted on the walls. A rusted metal shelf bears mismatched quarts, brushes, turpentine, and dozens of cans of spray paint.

  The apartment is one big room, with windows along two walls. One win
dow is covered with cardboard and another has a star-shaped crack that looks like a bullet hit it.

  Maybe it did.

  I’m drawn to the stacks of canvases propped along the floor and I walk toward them, but Willa reels me back to her. “Don’t look, and don’t touch.”

  “Why not?”

  She blows out an exasperated breath. “Look, I took you home with me against my better judgment. Don’t make me regret it.”

  So I back off—I sit on the couch and mess with my phone while she putters around her place and the sounds of the city at night take over. She makes ramen and my stomach growls in anticipation.

  We slurp from our bowls in silence.

  When her eyes flick up to meet mine, I’m tongue-tied by the heavy lashes that fringe her stormy, pale blue eyes. They’re the color of a Caribbean shore, but they carry the feeling of being lost at sea.

  I open and close my mouth like a fish, squirming under her direct gaze. I have a million questions but I don’t feel like I have permission to ask any of them.

  She stares me down, like she’s deciding something. Whatever’s happening behind those clear, intelligent eyes, she doesn’t share it with me.

  I break her gaze and rest my bowl on the makeshift coffee table, turning to anchor my elbows on my knees and run my hands through my hair. I’ve been humbled every way a man could be humbled—Kristina’s deception, the threat of arrest, and watching my options slip through my fingers like sand.

  Yet Willa seems to see me so clearly that it takes me down another peg.

  She doesn’t see a rock star or a rich guy. She doesn’t see a kickass manager or a half-ass drummer. She just sees … me. And it cuts too close.

  It’s my last layer of skin, my final defense, and feeling it penetrated is more than I can take tonight. I lurch up from the couch. “Where do you want me to sleep?”

  She pats the couch. “You’re looking at it.”

  I nod in thanks and haul myself to the bathroom, feeling the weight of the day drag down my limbs. Just before I reach the bathroom, I hear her soft, strong voice.