"But I'm not walking away from it either. Not yet."
Shay looks at me for a long moment, then nods once. Like that's the first thing I've said all night that makes sense.
Knox
I’m halfway through shading a koi fish on a girl’s shoulder blade when I realize the scales I just drew look exactly like a cluster of freckles.
Fuck.
“You okay?” she asks, craning her neck to look back at me.
“Great,” I say. I adjust the line before she can see where my hand was going. The scales go back to being scales, and the fish goes back to being a fish. I finish the piece, wrap it, run through the aftercare instructions, and she’s out the door happy. Which is a miracle, honestly, because for the last few clients I’ve been running on pure autopilot. One of them actually asked me twice if I was listening.
Mars hasn’t said anything yet. That just means he’s about to. He has this fun little pattern where he goes completely silent for a few days and then drops a sentence on you like a cinder block. We’re past due.
I wipe down my station, toss the used needles in the sharps container, and check my phone. It’s been lighting up all day with messages I’m absolutely not waiting for. The thread with Benji isright there at the top. His latest message came through an hour ago, and I read it again even though I already have it memorized.
Benji: Stop texting me while I'm trying to work.
I sent him a photo of a flash design earlier. A dagger with roses. Nothing to do with him, except the handle had the kind of intricate linework I knew he’d have an opinion about, because he’s a designer and he literally can’t help himself. He responded in under a minute, then followed up with thestop texting memessage. Which he wouldn’t have needed to send if he’d actually put his phone down.
I scroll up, wincing at the gap from this morning. He’d sent something at 9:14, and I didn’t see it until 11:47 because I was elbow-deep in ink. When I’m in the zone, my phone might as well not exist. I go tunnel-vision on whatever’s in front of me, and the rest of the world just stops being real for a while. Usually, by the time I surface, people have stopped waiting.
Me: You replied in forty seconds. Very convincing.
Benji: I keep my phone close for important things. You're not one of them.
Me: And yet.
Benji: I'm procrastinating. You're the equivalent of a crossword puzzle. Mildly entertaining, ultimately pointless.
Me: That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.
The thread’s been going like this for days. It’s not the same as it was before the catfish incident. He’s still sharp, still mean, but the mean has a rhythm to it now. A back-and-forth that feels more like a game than a war. He roasts me, I take it, and I throw something back that makes him reply faster than he should. We’re both pretending this is nothing. We’re also both clearly checking our phones between every single thing we do.
Between walk-ins, I flip open my sketchbook. The last few pages are... yeah. His face again. The sharp jaw, the constellation of freckles, the nose ring. I did a profile view during lunchthat has more detail than anything else in the book. I’ve drawn the line of his neck twice. I know what this looks like from the outside, but from the inside, it’s just my hand following whatever shape interests it. The shape that interests it just happens to have been the exact same one every day for a week.
I snap the book shut and rub the back of my neck. I’ve been doing that all week too, like there’s a knot in the muscle I can’t work out. My body’s been completely fucked since that night in his apartment. I’m not sick. I’m not tired. I’m just tuned to a frequency I can’t shut off. I keep catching his scent on my skin even though I’ve showered enough times that it’s physically impossible for it to still be there. My sleep is shit. Twice this week I walked past his apartment building on a route that makes zero geographical sense, and my legs just took me there without asking.
I’m not thinking about why. I’m just annoyed about it.
Mars picks his moment. “You’ve been useless,” he grunts, not looking up from the piercing tray he’s prepping.
“I’ve been great.”
“You put the wrong needles in the autoclave yesterday, and you drew a lily when the client asked for a lotus.”
“Those are basically the same flower.”
He just looks at me. I go back to wiping down my perfectly clean counter.
My phone buzzes. The DMs keep evolving. The first day after the apartment was pure combat—Benji testing whether I’d pretend nothing happened, me refusing to pretend. The second day, he sent me a meme about bad KnotMe profiles that was genuinely hilarious. I laughed out loud at work, and Mars gave me a look that could kill. By day three, the explicit shit started creeping back in. Not the anonymous pre-catfish sexting, but something heavier. References to his hallway. To my mouth. To the sounds he made.
Benji: You seem very proud of yourself for someone who came in his jeans twice in one night.
Me: I notice you're counting my orgasms. Keeping track?
Benji: I keep records on all underwhelming experiences.
