The shirt rides up on her thigh and I put my hand on her bare skin without thinking about it.
"You want to put something on me?"
"Yeah."
"What?"
"My name. On the inside of your wrist where the world can see it."
She closes her eyes for a second. "You've been thinking about this."
"For a while."
"How long?"
"Does it matter?"
She opens her eyes and looks at me. "You sure, Spur?"
"I've never been more sure of anything in my life, Dakota."
"How long does it take?"
"An hour. Maybe less."
"Will it hurt?"
"Yes."
"Good."
She holds out her left wrist between us. "Spell it out, cowboy. I want the world to know whose I am."
I clean her wrist with the green soap. Pat it dry with a fresh gauze pad. Run the razor over the soft skin where her veins run blue under the surface—there's nothing to shave but I do it anyway because Ernesto taught me to.
She watches me work.
"You're nervous," she says.
"No, I’m not."
"Yeah, you are."
"I'm focused, Dakota."
"You're nervous, Spur. Your jaw's tight."
I look up at her. "I've put ink on five men, baby. I've never put ink on a woman. I've never put my name on a person's body. So yeah. I'm focused."
She smiles—the crooked one. "Okay, cowboy."
I draw the stencil on with a thin transfer marker—Spur in my own handwriting, lowercase, small, the way I've been writing it for as long as I've had the name.
The letters run down the inside of her wrist along the line of her vein.
Two and a half inches. Black.
She looks at the stencil. "That's pretty, cowboy."
