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aunt who lives there, and she’d left North Carolina for basically the same reasons I did. She’s a nurse, and had a ton of old college texts lying around, so I just absorbed as much as I could. She thought it was cool, taught me how to suture, and managed to squash most of my really bad ideas before they got off the ground. Anyways, I just walked in this store to try and find some jewelry for my ears, and there was this chick in there piercing this guy’s navel. She was just butchering him, had no clue whatsoever what she was doing. I said something, and for whatever reason the guy trusted me to do it instead. I got a job on the spot, stayed there for a little over a year, and then switched it up to work somewhere else. The whole thing just worked out so well. A couple of really innovative guys, Tom Brazda and Blair, were working full time in Toronto back then, and I got to work with both of them and find out why they were doing what they were doing. After a while I was burnt on Toronto and tried Detroit. That didn’t work out well, and now I’m here. You’ve got a hell of a reputation, in case you were wondering.”
    Mike felt himself blush. Her apartment building saved him the trouble of stammering some kind of reply.
    “This is my exit. You have to promise to take me out again. I haven’t done anything like this in a long time.”
    “Deal. It’s been a while for me, too.”
    Deb turned to face him, grabbed the sleeves of Mike’s jacket, pulled him close, and kissed him hard across the lips. It was a night-ending kiss, but not like one from a sister. It had weight.
    She held him like that for a few seconds, then backed away and smiled. “You going to stop by the shop tomorrow?”
    “I…yeah, probably.”
    “We’re friends. But I’d like to be better friends. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Have a safe walk.”
    A part of Mike that he’d thought long dead awoke in his mind. “I’d like that too.”
    And all at once, in that moment, Mike thought that maybe everything would be OK, that maybe he could let Sid go. He walked into the wind, and if you had seen him that night you wouldn’t have noticed anything about him besides his smile.

CHAPTER NINE
    Three days later, Mike was drawing at the table in the back of the store with Lamar . Lamar was working on some charcoal sketches of a portrait he had later in the week, and Mike had gotten up the gumption to work on a new set of flash, the pre-made designs that tattoo shops decorate their walls with.
    He hadn’t drawn a set since back in the early days of his apprenticeship, and it actually felt nice to be working on art for himself instead of someone else. The sheet he was drawing now had a myriad of hearts across it, lined in ink, painted in water-color. He’d been up with his sketchbook almost all night, but he wasn’t tired. Everything felt different since he’d gone out with Deb.
    Mike sucked quickly on the paintbrush and then dipped it back onto the palette. Waving yellow across a rose half covered by a heart, he grinned. Why had he forgotten how fun it could be to create art for no one but himself?
    While he and Lamar painted and sketched, they could hear Deb working two doors down. She’d told Lamar before Mike had arrived that she was going to be bisecting the penis of a man who’d come up from Illinois. Lamar, to his regret, had asked her exactly what in the hell that meant, and she’d explained it. As unhappy as he had been to learn that less than twenty feet away from him Deb was going to be dividing a man’s penis into two separate, yet still functional halves, he had been more than happy to share the information with Mike.
    The sounds coming from the room were worse than expected because, rather than the screaming of a person being killed, the man was carrying on a discussion with Deb about the merits of the works of Stanley Kubrick. After just over an hour of having to listen to Deb explain that the only Kubrick works she thought had true