Conor
The next morning I was more than happy to exchange the old pain in my leg for a fresh new hangover. I even managed something nearing a smile at the hammers that pounded my temples, the nails that drove through the top of my skull, and the ice picks that stabbed into my eyes every time I squinted against the sun.
There was to be no rain that day. There was to be no little thief that day. There was to be a return to normalcy.
That alone somehow made the mounting business debt, the late rent notices piling up on my counter, and the general sense of doom regarding my future feel rather manageable.
I was positively beaming as I strolled into Dublin Ink; only one little old lady had flinched away from me on the sidewalk.
But Fate was a tricky bitch. I should have expected she’d have something up her sleeve for me.
I stepped inside the parlour and was greeted with the sight of the little thief manhandling an expensive tattoo gun and laughing like the money she’d pawn it for was already in her grubby little pocket.
Fuck. I’d rather have the rain.
Even worse? She was not alone. There beside her was Mason (predictable) and Rian (predictable too, I suppose, given his absolute unpredictability). Their merry little chatter masked the sound of the bell. With their backs turned to me, hunched over together like they were plotting how to once and for all drive the business into the ground, I leaned unnoticed against the closed door, arms folded against my chest, and simply watched.
Mason was explaining how the equipment worked. The girl nodded enthusiastically, as his hand creeped lower and lower down her back. He thought he was getting lucky, but I knew better. I knew the little thief.
Mason was an easy mark, after all. All she’d have to do was keep batting those dark eyes, rimmed in a smoky charcoal that made her bewitching even though it was probably makeup she hadn’t bothered to take off in days; Mason would go on telling her how loading the ink worked, how unlocking the storeroom in the back worked, how selling off all the parlour’s valuables in the middle of the night and getting away with it before anyone even had a clue worked. He thought he was going to bed with her, the poor fella; little did he know that she was going to the bank with him.
Rian would be a little more difficult for the little thief to crack, but as I watched her study him out of the corner of her eye, tucking a strand of dark hair innocently enough behind her ear, I was certain that she was more than capable. She was more of a pro than I gave her credit for. Smart. Clever. Well-aware of her…gifts. She was a child and yet I was certain she hadn’t been a child for a very long time. I knew first-hand how that paradox felt, how it looked.
She would need a minute or two to figure out how to use Rian to get what she wanted, but probably not more. She would see his eyes on her fresh young skin, just like Mason’s eyes were on her skin. But she would also see that it wasn’t just flesh for him. She would see that it was more like a pale, smooth canvas. I’d seen Rian giving the goddamn moon that same dreamy, distant look.
“You know,” the little thief said to Rian when Mason began rifling through the bottom drawer of the stand to show her another thing to steal later (and maybe to look between her legs), “you know, I’ve always wanted a tattoo.”
I rolled my eyes when Rian’s got wide.
“I have a few ideas and stuff,” the girl said, trailing her fingers up and down her forearm. “I really just haven’t had the money yet.”
Bing-fucking-go.
I could see it as clear as day: Rian would offer to do her first for free, because money was nothing more than an abstract concept that I occasionally (and more frequently) yelled at him about. The girl would ask him to draw up a few ideas, something “he thought would look good on her”. Maybe she’d lift the side of her shirt, draw her finger down her waistline. A bigger canvas meant a bigger piece of art. A bigger piece of art meant more time. Rian would disappear into his sketchbook, into that world he escaped to. His eyes would be open, but he wouldn’t see as the little thief piled up our things high into her arms. He wouldn’t as she whistled her way straight out the door.
“You know,” Rian was saying, drumming his fingers against the girl’s arm, “we’re really more about the art here than anything else and, well, I don’t see any reason why I couldn’t do your first tattoo for—”
“Morning, boys!” I announced, reaching up to smack the little bell atop the door so it jangled like an alarm. The three of them whipped around in surprise.
I had only eyes for the girl. “Morning, thief.”
I kicked open the door with my heel, held it open behind me with my palm. I gestured rather politely, I thought, through it.
“Time to go,” I said to her.
Mason and Rian both stood and came toward me.
“This is Aurnia,” Mason said.
“She’s the kid Diarmuid said he was sending,” added Rian.
I eyed the girl from between their shoulders. She was twirling the tattoo gun on her pinkie, grinning at me. Through my immense irritation, I managed to notice briefly that she was in the same clothes from the night before. I remembered days like that, and, more darkly, the reason for days like that.
Still, I said to her more than anyone else, with no warmth at all in my voice, “I know who she is.”
Mason said, “She was saying that she got caught upthe other dayand couldn’t make it when she was supposed to.”
I raised an amused eyebrow and said, still looking at the grinning girl, “She got ‘caught up’, did she?”