Aurnia
Rian flipped a page in my portfolio and said something I didn’t hear.
I really should have been more grateful for his help with my art. He was the one who mentioned looking over my portfolio in the first place.
I’d frowned and asked, “Portfolio?”
He had been kind enough not to burst out laughing.
Art for me had always been a way to escape, a way to process my emotion, a way to selfishly make someone else feel what I was feeling, to unload some of my burden, as ridiculous as it sounded. I’d never considered art as a future or a career (a poor paying one at that). Hell, I hardly even thought of it as a hobby. It was just…part of me.
But Rian explained that a portfolio was crucial in highlighting my work for the right people. He said, “If someone has fifteen seconds to give you, what would you want to show him?”
I’d took his advice one night when the house was quiet and taped some photos of my street art onto an old school notebook after tearing out three half-hearted pages about King Lear (mostly just doodles). It was embarrassing next to Rian’s, which was professional printed and bound, all glossy photos and stylish font.
Still, he took my portfolio into his hands without a trace of mockery. He lowered himself onto the stool beside where I sat perched on the edge of his desk and opened the first page with a studious eye, all business, taking me more seriously than I ever took myself.
I should have appreciated that more. I should have given him my attention as he tapped this photo or that. I should have at least tried to listen to what he had to say—the invaluable advice and critique he was offering up for free.
But I had to devote my eyes, my ears, my anger and my lust and my frustration and my desire on the asshole.
Conor was across the parlour, just about as far away as he could get. I’d never caught him in the act, but I swore day by day he was inching his tattoo station farther and farther into the corner of the living room. It was the most isolated part of the shop and the place where I had the least reason to go to except for emptying his wastebasket and sweeping the pencil shavings and eraser bits from his drawing desk at the end of the night, a time where he made absolutely sure to be anywhere else.
His back was to me as he bent over a client—a client, I might add, who was brought in to Dublin Ink because of me and my art and my social media posting (not that I’d ever in a million years get a thanks from him). This, I guessed, was also a strategic move to avoid me even further.
When I first arrived at the shop, his stool was on the opposite side of the tattoo chair, presumably so he could see the rest of the work area, greet (if a scowl and a grumbled “what?” can be considered a greeting) anyone coming through the front door, and keep an eye on Mason if there was a lady present and Rian if there was a kettle on the hotplate. But now whenever the others worked or someone entered or Mason groped or Rian, in one of his distant places, didn’t pay attention, all they saw was Conor’s wide shoulders, the ripple of his muscles beneath his thin charcoal-grey t-shirt, the little hairs at the base of his neck that wouldn’t be drawn into his daily bun, little hairs I imagined sometimes brushing my pinkie along.
Conor would deny consciously turning his back, I was sure, but I was also sure that this pointed move was absolutely because of me.
Rian was gesturing all over the page of the picture I took of my work outside the damned jewellery store and his lips were moving a mile a minute, but it was like he was on mute. I forced my attention away from Conor, dragged it away like a misbehaving child, and focused as best I could on Rian’s mouth. I even inclined my ear for a moment or two as if that was the problem. But like some sort of voodoo I blinked and found my face was turned in Conor’s direction.
I chewed at my fingernails as I watched him work.I squinted at him like I could somehow force him through the intensity of my gaze to turn around. I squirmed impatiently. I used every ounce of willpower inside of me not to get up and start pacing back and forth as he continued with a laudable effort and unwavering consistency to completely and utterly ignore me.
To put it plainly: he was driving me fucking nuts.
In the rare moments where he did give me an iota of attention it was always and without fail pure disdain. One morning I came in and found him waiting on the middle rung of a ladder. The second I walked in the door he climbed to the top and began, with his muscular arms stretched high above him, shirt riding up his tattooed back, to install a security camera.
“Subtle,” I grumbled as I snatched up the broom angrily.
Conor’s only reply was, “Crime’s gone up in the neighbourhood recently.”
If I lingered too close to his drawing desk while he was sketching out tattoos, he would raise his eyes angrily. If I didn’t back up in what he considered an appropriate amount of time, he would stalk toward me with his pencil held at his side like a spear.
A few times, after completing his Wicked Stepmother-worthy list of menial, demeaning tasks, I dared to ask him if he might have time to start teaching me to tattoo like he promised in front of Diarmuid. To these requests, Conor would get up, snatch my jacket and my bag from the hooks on the wallpapered entry, open the door, and smile unkindly as he said, “Definitely tomorrow.”
Needless to say, tomorrow never came. If anything, the violence with which he shoved my things at me by the door only increased.
I knew Conor hated me. I hadn’t thought that his hatred could actually increase with time.
He wouldn’t accept tea that I made, he wouldn’t sit on the couch if I was there, even perched on the edge with my arms around my knees as I listened to Mason’s daily conquest story, he wouldn’t even give me a nod hello in the morning unless both the other guys were there in the living room at their desks.
He wanted nothing to do with me at best. He wanted me gone, at worst. And if I’d learned anything in life it was to bet on the worst.
And yet in that moment as I watched him work, I wanted nothing more than for Conor to turn around. To glare at me. To roll his eyes at me. To give an irritated sigh in my direction. But the drone of the tattoo gun continued and his back remained solidly turned away from me. It was then that I picked up something that Rian said.
“What’s that?” I asked, turning my face a little too quickly down toward him.
He glanced up at me, just about as startled that I was there listening as I was that he’d been talking this whole time. I supposed that was some sort of consolation for my rudeness: Rian disappeared places, too. I just disappeared into people. Not people. Person. Him.