I drop my skate bag inside the door and drag my aching body toward the kitchen, praying the fruit salad in the fridge hasn’t grown fuzzy.
It’s not until I’m in the quiet stillness of my house that I realize I smell. Bad. Like sweat and rubber and—I sniff my arms where my pads were—a moldy old couch. I grimace, already thinking about the bag of lavender Epsom salts underneath my sink and how good it’ll feel to slip into a bath hot enough to cook a shrimp.
But when I shuffle into the kitchen, my quads screaming, I remember that I have a roommate.
A very tall, very broody roommate.
And he’s sitting at my kitchen table, a notebook in front of him and a pencil in his hand.
Is he…is hedrawing?
I freeze, because he hasn’t heard me, thanks to the headphoneshe’s wearing. He’s bent over the notebook, his left arm braced against the table. He’s concentrating, but he looks relaxed. His shoulder muscles flex and twitch as the pencil moves across the paper, the only sound in the kitchen the softskritch skritch skritchas the lead scrapes the paper. I can see only a corner of the paper, but I make out a riot of flowers with thick outlines, bursting and blooming and overlapping such that they look alive.
And then all of a sudden, his pencil freezes, his muscles going taut, his shoulders creeping up to his ears. He senses me here. He turns slowly, and when he sees me standing in the kitchen, he quickly flips the notebook over.
Which is when I remember my last words to him the other day. I made a promise to stay out of his way. Out of his business.
So instead of asking any of the fifteen to twenty questions on the tip of my tongue—You draw? What are you drawing? Can I see? Do you have more?—I march past him, limping only slightly as my muscles scream at me. I throw open the fridge door and pull out the fruit salad, attacking it with a fork I snag from the drawer.
I’m toying with the idea of taking this bowl of fruit salad into the bath with me when I hear the rustle of paper. I cut my eyes back to the table and see that Dan has flipped his notebook back over. I can see the full illustration now. It’s an upside-down horseshoe with intricate shading that makes it look like worn vintage iron. An explosion of peonies and daisies tumbles from the bottom right side of the horseshoe. There are curling leafy vines around the whole piece and what looks like a long string of pearls draped around the picture, dripping off the edges.
“You hang the horseshoe upside down so the luck doesn’t fall out,” he says, tapping the illustration with the eraser of his pencil.
I don’t know what surprises me more: that he drew this, or that he explained it.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Thanks.” He drops his pencil, leaning on his elbow to run his thick hand over his buzzed head. “I like to doodle.”
“That looks like a little more than a doodle,” I say.
His jaw clenches, like he’s literally chewing over his thoughts, before he speaks. “It’s, uh, actually a tattoo?”
My eyebrows shoot up. “You draw tattoos?”
He nods, shifting in his chair. “I tattoo,” he says. “On people.”
There is a very real moment when I wonder if the wordtattoomeans something different in finance, because the notion that Dan McBride is a secret tattoo artist seems as likely as him being a superhero. “Are you serious? You give people tattoos? Like, real tattoos?”
He nods.
“How? I mean, when? I thought…finance?” Oh god, I sound like I’m having a stroke. But also I kind of feel like I’m having a stroke. Dan McBride is seriously an undercovertattoo artist?
Dan shrugs, and at first I think it’s a signal to walk away, that he doesn’t want to talk to me. But he doesn’t turn, doesn’t look away. He keeps those stormy blue eyes right on me.
So I try again. I lean back against the counter, stab a piece of pineapple, and ask him the first question that comes to mind.
“How does one become a tattoo artist? Like, who signs up to be someone’s very first subject?”
He visibly relaxes at the question, his shoulders dropping, his fingers unclenching from around the pencil.
“I tattooed on myself to start.”
“You can do that?”
He lifts the hem of his shorts to reveal a pale slice of skin on his upper thigh. It’s decorated with a cluster of small tattoos. It kind of looks like what happens when my kindergarteners get hold of a sticker sheet.
“Which was the first?” I ask.
