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“Do it afraid.”
“Huh?”
“Is that what it says?”
She rolls over with a groan. “What the fuck are you saying, and why are you saying it in the middle of the night?”
“Your tattoo?” She groans again.
“What, you want a tattoo tour?”
“Yes.”
“Right now?”
“No time like the present.”
She huffs, “I’m sleeping, you know.”
“You can go back to sleep afterward. I want my tour.”
She sighs but sits up cross-legged, grabbing her phone from underneath her pillow. She turns on the torch and lifts it up to shine it directly into his eyes. He flings himself backward, clapping a hand over his face with a pained yelp.
“What the fuck!”
“Yeah, fuck you for waking me up like this,” she scowls, but grudgingly lowers her phone, turning the light instead to the inside of her left bicep, where the words he woke her up with are printed as though typed on a typewriter.
“That’s one, but you’ve already seen it.”
She lifts her arms above her head one after the other, pointing the light above her left elbow, then her right.
“I have always depended,” he reads upside down, noting that the words are printed like lines from a script, “on the kindness of strangers.” He looks at her, curious.
“Streetcar Named Desire, final scene,” she says with a small smile. “Tore right into my heart the first time I heard it.”
Her knee bumps into his shoulder as she wiggles around to tug up the right side of her shirt to reveal more of the same loopy writing running down the side of her torso.
“Haply I think on thee.” He glances up at her again.
“Shakespeare, Sonnet 29,” she tells him.
She shifts, and the mattress dips with her movement as she guides the torchlight across her torso. The beam lands on her sternum, then slides down to the soft skin beneath her left breast, where a vine of small blue flowers coils along her ribs. His gaze follows the path of the light—and of her fingertips, brushing faintly over the tattoo as if retracing the lines.
There’s an intimacy to it all, not just in guiding him through the etchings on her body, but also in the sheer tactility of how she does so—the slow lift of fabric under the weight of his gaze, the gentle drag of cool fingers against warm skin. There’s a forced restraint to the sparse light of the torch. It’s a sensuality edged with cruelty in its slowness—skin revealed under torchlight only in deliberate, taunting fragments. Chiaroscuro.
“Forget-me-nots?”
“They’re my favourite flower.”
The torch drops lower, and at the bottom of her ribs, scrawled in handwriting, is: All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter.
“It’s Jeff Buckley,” she says. “My favourite lyric from my favourite song.” He hums.
She hands him the phone, then turns around, sweeping her hair over one shoulder and lifting the back of her t-shirt to reveal a sprig of rosemary down the middle of her spine.
“For my mother.”
“It’s pretty,” he manages to articulate in somewhat of a garbled mumble. She smirks as she turns back around to face him.
“Why, thank you.”
He clears his throat, like he’s trying to shove his voice back into something steady. “You catalogue your heart on your skin,” he says finally.
She snorts. “Bit soppy for you.”
“It’s true.” He shifts closer, careful this time, reverent even. “You make it look… intentional. Like you’re not afraid of how much you feel.”
She arches a brow. “I am afraid. Constantly.”
He smiles, soft and knowing. “You do it anyway.”
Her lips press together, and for a moment she looks almost shy. “Hence the tattoo.”
“Do it afraid,” he repeats, quieter this time, like he’s tasting it properly. “Is that the thesis, then?”
“It’s the point of it all,” she says. “To want things. To try. To love things even when they might leave. To live, unabashedly. Wholeheartedly.”
The phone trembles slightly in her hand, and without thinking he reaches out, steadying her wrist. His hand trails up, thumb brushing the inside of her arm, right over the ink. She inhales, sharp and quick, like she hadn’t expected that particular tenderness.
He doesn’t pull away.
“Do you want to see mine?” he asks, surprising them both.
Her eyes widen. “You have tattoos? How did I miss it!”
“Well,,” he teases, “we were a bit busy with other things.”
“You have tattoos!” She repeats, shaking her head incredulously.
“One,” he admits. “Singular. Very secret.”
She grins immediately. “I demand a tour.”
“Turnabout’s fair,” he murmurs, already tugging off his shirt. He turns, giving her his back, and she raises the torch again, light skating over pale skin until it catches just below his right shoulder blade.
The script is small. Neat. Almost painfully precise.
And indeed there will be time.
She reads it aloud, voice softer than before.
“T.S Eliot,” he says. “Got it after the war.”
Her fingers hover, then settle, tracing the words without quite touching. “I am familiar. Surprised you are, though. I shouldn’t be. It’s… very you.”
He glances over his shoulder. “Is it?”
“Yes,” she says, immediate and sure. “Stubborn. Hopeful. Reassuring.”
Something loosens in his expression at that, like a knot finally given permission to undo itself. He turns back to face her, and for a moment they’re just sitting there, knees touching, phone forgotten between them.
“Why on your back? You can’t even see it,” she asks thoughtfully examining his face.
His soft smile has no right to lodge itself into the space behind her ribs the way it does. “I can’t see it, I just have to trust it’s there. I have to remember , and have faith, that I have it. A bit like time don’t you think?”
She switches the torch off as they get back under the covers, before she curls into him, dropping a peck on his shoulder.
Darkness folds around them, warm and familiar.
“Thank you for the tour,” he says.
“Anytime,” she replies. Then, after a beat, “You didn’t wake me up just for the tattoos, did you?”
He hesitates, then shrugs. “I had a nightmare.”
Her hand finds his immediately, fingers lacing with his under the covers. “You should’ve just said so.”
He squeezes back. “Do it afraid,” he echoes.
She laughs quietly and tugs him down beside her. “Exactly.”