Updated Apr 7, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 5: Windows Down in October
Emma
She checks his Instagram four times on Monday, twice on Tuesday, once at eleven p.m. on Wednesday when she should be asleep, and three times on Thursday while her second-graders are doing independent reading and she is supposed to be grading phonics assessments. This is not something she will be disclosing to Sophie, who would find it exactly as funny as it deserves.
The Instagram is not even new content — he posts once every week or two, always the work, never selfies, and she has already seen all of it — but she keeps going back to the sparrow pieces. There are three of them in the feed, all different, all placed differently, all unmistakably his in the quality of the feather detail, the way the wings carry movement. She tries to be clinical about this. She tells herself she is studying the work, which is relevant because it is going on her body, which makes the interest practical rather than — other things.
This is not convincing, even to herself.
She also tells herself the reason she wears, on Saturday morning, a nicer top than she normally would is that she read somewhere that softer, more stretchy fabric makes wrap removal easier and the aftercare process simpler. She wears a cream-colored wrap shirt, silky, that ties at the side — practical, she says to herself, as she ties it in the mirror, it ties at the side so the access point is unobstructed. She does her hair in a loose knot instead of the usual bun. She puts on mascara, which she also usually does on weekends.
She arrives at Black Atlas at nine-fifty for a ten o’clock appointment. The shop is quieter than last time — just Ryder at his station, cleaning the needle assembly, and no sign of Jax yet. The music is Miles Davis this time, softer, something that pools in the corners of the room and asks nothing of you.
He looks up when she comes in. There is a pause — barely a pause, a fraction of a beat — in which his eyes move over her, briefly, in the way eyes do when someone who was expected arrives and there’s a micro-inventory between memory and reality. He has the quality, she has noticed, of looking at things properly. Not rudely, not overtly — just with the entirety of his attention before he redirects it.
He says nothing about the top. He says, “Healed well?” and she says, “Beautifully,” and he says, “Let me see.”
This is clinical. She reminds herself of this. She unties the wrap shirt and holds the fabric aside and he comes close, bends slightly, examines the healing work with the same precise attention he gives everything. His fingers — always warm, she has decided this is something specific to him rather than to people in general, because she is a person who is frequently cold — graze the edge of the healed skin, not on the ink but near it, checking for raised areas, for any uneven healing.
“Good,” he says, and the word is nothing, it’s professional, it means the healing is technically adequate, and Emma’s stomach does something she will not record.
She gets on the table. He sets up. The machine starts its low meditative buzz. The needle finds the line where it left off and the familiar burn starts up again, warmer this time than the first session, her body apparently having decided they know each other well enough for this.
She has practiced, over the last two weeks, not talking too much. She has a tendency — she knows this about herself — to fill silence, to manage it, to smooth it over with words because silence at her parents’ table was always the precursor to something uncomfortable. She has been actively working, since the first session, on resisting this.
She lasts about eleven minutes.
“I went back and watched a documentary about Japanese irezumi,” she says. “Traditional tattooing. The tebori technique. I found it somewhat alarming and also completely beautiful.”
“Irezumi is a different animal,” he says, without pausing. “The tebori needle works with the skin instead of against it, in a sense. The results age differently. No machine vibration.”
“Would you ever do it?”
“I’ve studied it. I have a friend in Kyoto who does traditional tebori. I spent two weeks there four years ago just watching her work.” A pause. “Not something I offer to clients. Too slow for most people’s patience.”
“I wouldn’t mind slow,” she says.
He says nothing. But she can feel the quality of the silence and it’s not absence.
She flirts slightly, around forty-five minutes in — an offhand comment about his taste in music, something that could be read as simple conversation or as the specific warmth underneath simple conversation, depending on whether you were paying attention, and he is always paying attention. She says his jazz choices are the exact opposite of what she’d expect from the aesthetic of the shop — which leans dark, heavy, industrial — and he says, very quietly, that people usually are, and she says, is that about me or about you, and he says, “Both, probably,” and his voice has the low, unhurried quality of someone who has considered the answer rather than reaching for it.
She is horrified by herself for approximately three seconds and then decides she is not horrified at all.
He flirts back. It is, objectively, the most oblique flirtation she has ever experienced — subtle enough that she would not have been certain of it except that she was paying attention with every available cell of her body, and at one point his thumb traces the edge of an area he’s already worked, checking the texture, a movement that lasts perhaps two seconds, and she is certain — she is entirely certain — that his hand stays a half-second longer than the checking requires.
She says nothing. She breathes.
By the time he wraps her ribs for the day the tattoo is two-thirds complete — the roses and ferns all done, the sparrow’s body filled in, the wings still waiting for their finest detail. She looks in the mirror and the piece is already extraordinary, already a thing that has gravity, already the most beautiful thing anyone has ever put on her skin.
“Next session?” she says.
He looks at the calendar. Two Saturdays out. She takes it.
She drives home with both windows down, which is irrational — it’s forty-seven degrees, the October air coming off the Sound has teeth — and she turns the heat up full so the warmth and cold fight each other around her and she drives down 15th with her hair slowly escaping its knot and the cold air on her face and she is grinning, she can feel it, a large stupid grin that she is very glad no one can see.
She calls Sophie at a red light.
“How was it,” Sophie says.
“Professional,” Emma says. “Completely professional.”
“Emma.”
“He asked if I’d healed well.”
“Emma.”
“He stayed half a second too long,” Emma says, and Sophie makes a sound like a small explosion. “I’m not making it up, Sophie. His hand stayed after the check. Just briefly. Just—”
“Oh my god.”
“I’m probably imagining it.”
“You are not imagining it,” Sophie says, with the conviction of someone who knows Emma Lawson well enough to know exactly when she’s seeing things clearly and when she’s making them smaller to be safe. “You are absolutely not imagining it.”
The light turns green. Emma accelerates and the cold air rushes through both windows and she doesn’t close them, she doesn’t close them the entire drive home, and by the time she parks her hair is a disaster and her ears ache from the cold and she is, she thinks — she is, specifically — alive.
It has been a while since she felt entirely like that. She had not noticed how much of the aliveness she had muffled, carefully, over the last two years, pressing it flat to fit a shape she thought was right.
She thinks about the sparrow on her ribs, its wings not quite open, waiting for the last session to become fully itself.
She understands, she thinks, the metaphor. She did not construct it on purpose. These are the best kind.
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