Page 5 of Shipwrecked

I hesitate. I didn’t expect to be propositioned so early in the night, and I don’t have a gentle-turndown script ready. I’m attracted to assertive, outgoing women. I’ve dated straight-A students, team captains, college society chairpersons, and business-savvy sharks. You’re a similar type, except that you’ve got a cock.

“Cillian?”

“Decent. Good. Yeah.”

“Great, I assumed you would be.”

I stare. Have I just agreed to a hand job? I can figure it out. I have a cock. It’s not like there’ll be anything surprising in Jules’s trousers. Except that he’s waxed and bleached. That’s different.

“I’m not Yasop, and I’m keeping my trousers on.” Jules sets a tray of paint jars onto the table next to me. My eyes dart up from Jules’s crotch and across the room, to where Yasop is wearing nothing but boxers and UV paint.

Jules hands me a paintbrush, too busy opening paint jars to notice me realise my stupid misunderstanding. Idiot.

“What design do you have in mind?” I ask, cheeks warm.

Jules studies my tattoos. On my arms is a collection of interlocking knots and spirals, like you find on ancient tombstones and metal objects. Jules’s attention locks on to the triskele triple spiral on the back of my left forearm. It’s faded compared to the others, not as pure a black.

“Can you paint this?”

“I can try.”

Jules wobbles as he sits on the table, then offers me his arm.

“Did you design them?” he asks.

“Nah. I showed a tattoo artist the old Celtic designs I liked, the patterns you find at Newgrange or on old crosses and metal objects like lunulas and gorgets.” I dip the brush into paint. The jars are all equally bright and gaudy. “That one is actually warped now. I was a teenager when I got it. As I filled out and muscled up, the design stretched.”

Jules makes a strange noise when the brush touches his upper arm. I stop. His cheek is indented, pinched by teeth.

“Tickles, sorry. Keep going.” Jules swings his legs, making himself a moving canvas. To counteract the squirming, I wrap my fingers around his upper arm and hold him still. I find lean, sinewy muscle.

“Which tattoo came first?”

“The one you pointed to.”

Jules leans in and studies it once more. “Where did this come from? Monument or metalwork?”

“I saw it in person on a boundary marker near where I grew up. It was carved into a standing slab of solid rock as tall as I was, over and over, so that every inch was art.” I shrug. “I liked it.”

Jules’s gaze slides across my arms, dominated by swirling patterns. “Like you.”

Our eyes meet. “I never really thought of it like that. Huh.” I suppose I have ended up modelled after that marker, unintentionally. “Think you can hold still for me now?”

Jules nods.

I continue painting.

“What age were you? And what age are you?”

“I was fifteen, and I’m twenty-three.” At fifteen, I’d finally realised that my money was just going to keep being taken. Sick of it, I took my paycheck and went straight to the tattoo parlour in the next town over and spent every cent. And I kept doing it until an older girl I met there invited me to live with her as her pet boyfriend. I’m pretty sure every bad habit I have now developed around that time. At least when Seán’s parents tracked me down and invited me to live with them, they instilled some good ones too.

“When I was fifteen, I fell off a horse and broke my collarbone. Friends signed my cast. I guess that’s not really the same.”

“It’s pretty close.”

Jules’s lips quirk up. He tips his head back and meets my eyes. He’s very good at eye contact. “I’m twenty-two. I should be twenty-one, but I’m twenty-two.”

As a rule, I dislike it when people get drunk. Angry drunk, happy drunk, mopey drunk, conquer-the-world drunk, it doesn’t matter. You can’t communicate. There’s a gap. Someone can promise you the world and forget come morning. More fool you if you believed them. I compartmentalise, so strangers don’t bother me, but I can’t help the prickle of discomfort I feel when people I’m close to are drunk. Jules is a stranger, yet discomfort prickles under my skin.