Zach
Camila double checked the time to make sure she hadn’t slept in, and then looked at the time stamp of the text again. Nope. It was much earlier than Zach usually wrote.
Camila
Zach
Camila
Zach’s response was infuriating … but also intriguing.
Zach
Camila
Zach
Making sure the covers hid her ratty sleep shirt, Camila sent the call request.
When Zach’s face filled her screen, all of Camila’s morning grumpiness flaked away.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said. His smile widened when Camila snarled.
“Where are we going? What are we doing? Why are we doing it?” Camila counted each question on her fingers, showing off her latest set of nails.
Counting with his fingers, Zach answered, “Don’t know yet, stuff we’ve never done before, and because why the hell not?”
“But, like what?”
“I don’t know, something you’ve never done before.”
“I’ve never been to space. Are you going to take me there? On a rocket shaped like a penis?”
She could hear Zach tapping his fingers on the table, could picture it so clearly having noticed how much he did it. She found it so endearing she could fucking swoon.
“No penis rockets today, unless you are very, very good.”
Knowing when to admit defeat, Camila conceded, “Fine. Pick me up in an hour.”
“What the fuck?!” she cursed once he’d hung up.
* * *
“I know what our first activity should be,” Camila said in lieu of greeting Zach at her door. “You’re getting a tattoo. I know for a fact you don’t have any.” Her smile was laced with payback and innuendo.
“Um, hi. OK, a tattoo.” Maybe it was how much he wanted to say yes to everything today to make Camila feel comfortable with getting out of her comfort zone. Maybe it was her still-sleepy eyes bewitching him again. Maybe he had lost the plot. But the words, “I’ll do it” came tumbling out of Zach’s mouth.
“You will?”
“Yup,” Zach said, even as he broke out in a cold sweat.
“Shit, I was kind of joking,” Camila said, slinging her bag over her shoulder.
On the way to the studio, Camila suggested they stop for a box of donut holes. Somehow they got into an argument over the proper spelling of the word, with Camila bemoaning that the “correct” spelling was doughnut. Zach’s monologue on how language evolves was cut short by Camila stuffing a chocolate-glazed bite in his mouth.
“So what are you going to get?”
To be honest, Zach was still sorting that out. He had a 20-minute drive to decide, or he was just going to pick anything off the wall that wasn’t a heart with the word “Mom” across it.
* * *
The shop smelled like disinfectant, and buzzed with the low hum of tattoo machines, pounding away at poor, sweet, innocent flesh like miniaturized jackhammers.
“So, fun fact about me,” Zach whispered after the receptionist went to grab an artist. “I once passed out during a flu shot. Actually, that’s happened three times. I am really, really scared of needles.”
The immediate ferocity of Camila’s concern, the warmth of her hand on his arm, made Zach feel faint for different reasons. “Zach,” she said. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“I know. And I do want to. I’ve kind of always wanted to get something. I just want you to be aware in case, you know.” He let his head droop to one side, closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue.
“Stop, I’m going to freak out!” Camila said. “Oh, hi.”
Zach turned to greet a slight woman with dark hair and a side shave. She dressed the way Zach did in the fall, in jeans and a flannel over a graphic T-shirt.
The artist introduced herself as Cindy and asked them what they were interested in getting. In just the last five minutes, the idea had come to Zach like a flash going off, instant and blinding. He explained to Cindy that he wanted a forearm tattoo of one of his travel photos, which he found on his phone to show her.
Cindy looked at the reference images and frowned. “So, I can do the outline and color today, but I’ll want you to book me for later to add more depth and detail.”
“See?” Camila said brattily. “This is why I don’t wing things. So which of your photos are you getting?”
“You’ll see. It’s got a story behind it. Why, you got a favorite?”
“What? No,” Camila huffed. “What, you think I just spend hours on your Instragram, scrolling way too far back while cringing in terror I’m accidentally going to like something from five years ago?”
“That sounds hypothetical for sure,” Zach said.
“Totally hypothetical.”
He’d almost forgotten they had company until Cindy jumped in. “So I’m going to sketch this out and see what you think,” she said, handing him her business card. “Can you send the photo to this email?”
“Yes, sorry, thank you!” Zach said.
Following Camila around the studio like he was her moon, Zach was able to soothe his nerves by admiring all the flash art on the walls and in heavy binders placed in the lobby.
“Thinking of getting something?” Zach asked, watching Camila fixate on a page of colorful birds drawn in a cutesy cartoon style.
“Maybe,” she said. “Not something this detailed though.”
“I love the ones you have already.”
The pink blooming in her cheeks made his own face warm. No doubt she was thinking of how her rose tramp stamp looked when he was hitting it from the back.
“Thanks,” Camila said.
“I never asked, what do the words on your ribcage mean?”
Flipping through the flash binder, Camila said, “Otra vez el sol. Means ‘once again the sun’ in Spanish. You know when something happens that feels like the end of the world? I like to remember that the sun comes up every day regardless of my little problems.”
“Otra vez el sol,” Zach tried, then tried again.
“That’s pretty good,” Camila said, and her praise felt like it came from the sun itself.
Cindy returned then, conferring with Zach over her sketch. It was perfect. Zero notes. She explained that she drew it so it could stay this way or have fine line detailing added, depending on what he chose.
“You ready?” Cindy asked.
Ready as he would ever be.
* * *
Now that the stencil was placed on Zach’s left forearm, Camila realized she’d seen the exact photo it referenced on his page. She scrolled through his feed and found the picture. “Is this it?”
“That’s the one,” Zach said. She didn’t think anyone who had just met him would pick up on the clipped intonation, the obvious nerves making Zach retreat into himself. It was going to be her job to distract him, to comfort him.
Camila admired the photo of the Greek church, the pristine white stucco set against the domed roof that was so blue, it looked like the sky on hallucinogens. In the background, distant sailboats dotted the water.
“It’s the church where my grandparents, my dad’s folks, got married,” Zach said. He looked at the ceiling, at the floor, anywhere that wasn’t his arm propped on the cushioned armrest where Cindy was about to do her work.
Reaching for his right hand — which squeezed hers back, tightly — Camila asked, “Will you tell me about them?”
Zach nodded then winced at the first bite of the needle. “Deep belly breaths,” Camila said, trying to soothe.
“Exactly what she said,” Cindy added. “It’s only going to feel this gnarly for a few minutes before endorphins kick in.”
“Science! Now, tell me about your grandparents and this church.”
Taking a deep breath and an even longer exhale, Zach began.
“So the story the way my yiayia told it goes like this. She and my pappous grew up together. ‘From diapers to diapers,’ she liked to joke. They were best friends, totally inseparable. But it was never romantic. Pappous was madly in love with her, had been for years it turns out, but he was too scared to tell her.”
There were so many stories like this that Camila had heard over the years, of pining and unrequited love and people who could have had their wildest dreams come true if they’d just found the courage to find the words. The way Zach talked about his grandparents was compassionate, reverent. There was a glint in his eyes. The studio’s overhead lights were harsh and cold, but to her Zach was in soft focus. He was his own gentle light.
“Well, this man whose father was in business with my great grandfather had been courting her for a while, and he’d asked for the family’s blessing to propose,” Zach said. “When Yiayia found out this very nice, handsome young man was going to propose, she had a ‘what you call a panic attack,’ and she ran all the way to the vineyard my Pappous’s family owned and proclaimed that she was in love with him and couldn’t possibly marry someone else. He told her that it had taken her long enough to figure this out, and they got married three days later, in this church.”
“That’s so romantic it’s unbearable,” Camila said.
“Your yiayia sounds dope,” Cindy said.
“She really was,” Zach agreed. “She died a couple of years ago. Pappous died a few years before her.”
“I wish I could have met them,” Camila said. “Wait, Hoult isn’t a Greek last name, though, right?”
Zach shook his head. “It’s my mom’s last name. She was mad at my dad when my birth certificate came around. And then when Irene was born, they were technically divorced.” He winced through another bit of line work. “But anyway, Yiayia would always tell me about Santorini and how beautiful it was, and how I had to see it for myself. So when I decided to take a sabbatical and go traveling, that’s where I went first. I had a photo of them from their wedding day, and the church is still there, still in perfect condition, just the way she described it. I felt so close to them that day.”
“That’s so beautiful. I’m so glad you got to go.”
“Me too. I think if I could only choose one more place to travel to, I would go back to Greece. For a million reasons, but definitely for the food.”
Cindy piped in about her love for Greek food, and then they started talking about Mediterranean food in town. Camila stroked her thumb over Zach’s fingers, noticing how his death grip had loosened and he seemed so much more calm than at the start of the tattoo.
“It’s nice being at eye level with you,” Camila said. “Usually I feel like I’m talking to a skyscraper.”
“I hope I’m a more scintillating conversationalist than a skyscraper,” he said. “You were right, this doesn’t hurt so much now. That part did sting, though, fuck.”
“I told you, endorphins!” Cindy said. “They are magic.”
Camila stroked the inside of Zach’s non-tattooed forearm, relishing the surreptitious warning in his eyes. Yes, he knew that she knew the effect her touch had on him. Yes, she could make him pop a boner on a whim, but she was merciful and wouldn’t use that power for evil. “You know, you could do a whole sleeve of your travel photos.”
“That sounds painful and expensive … but I’m not opposed.”
“That tends to be how it goes,” Cindy said, wiping excess ink off his arm before continuing down a line. “You can’t stop at one.”
“What would you get next, hypothetically?” Camila asked.
Zach chewed his lower lip. “Hypothetically, one of my favorite places I’ve been to is Table Mountain in Cape Town. It is so high up that you can see the entire city, and it feels like you’re looking at it from another planet.”
Camila started Googling. “Oh, wow,” she said. “This is beautiful. It’s tricky, though. You either do the view from it and have to represent all these buildings, or you do this really flat rock.”
“There are some spectacular plants up there that I photographed. That might be better for hypothetical tattoo purposes.”
“This cable car looks terrifying. Was it terrifying?”
After pondering, Zach said, “Kind of. It is very high up. At least it goes up slowly and it’s massive, so you don’t feel like you’re going up in something rickety.”
“I could never. I’ve never even been on the Duquesne Incline.”
As soon as Camila said the words, she knew she had made a huge mistake.
“Think you just picked our next stop.”
Cindy wiped Zach’s fresh new tattoo. “All done. Go take a look.”
For a small piece, the artist had managed to pack in quite a bit of detail. She’d captured the dreamy coastal vibe perfectly on Zach’s skin.
“It looks so good!” Camila squealed. “How does it feel?”
“Feels pretty good,” Zach said. “I’ve had worse sunburns.”
“Awesome. Let me bandage that up and get you checked out.”
After Cindy had placed the clear bandage on Zach’s arm and given him instructions, Camila asked, “Hey, do you have time before your next appointment to do something small on me?”
Looking at the clock, Cindy asked, “What do you have in mind?”
“Could you do a teeny tiny honeybee on the inside of my wrist? There’s one as a detail in one of your flash pieces that’s the style I’m going for.”
“Oh yeah, that’s like 20 minutes easy. I can do that.”
Zach scoffed. “Stalling much?”
“Listen,” Camila said. “Shut up.”