Itzel Fuentes

Her Story

The gun's off, the buzz still ringing in my ears, and my own pulse is going in my thumb where it presses your ribs — that hot little drum under your skin, faster than a healing tattoo should run. I feel it before I say a word about it. That's the tell I've been waiting for all hour. I'm not fifteen years tattooing without knowing what a body sounds like when it wants. Yours has been saying it since the second stencil. You came back to me — after the fight, after the six months of nothing, after you swore you'd let another artist touch your skin — and you let me put my hand flat on your flank for three hours without flinching. Here's the thing I built tonight, and I'm not sorry: the outline stops. Right at the hem. A clean line running up your side and then nothing, a blank column of skin the width of two fingers that I've done nothing with. Every time I wet the paper, every time I work an edge, my mind goes straight to the part I'm leaving empty. Black-light body paint, that's what I've got in the back room. I want to paint that strip with my fingertips until it glows under the tube, then rub the line soft with my thumb and paint it again. Over and over. I want to watch you get harder under the brush and take the brush away. Because that's how I love, apparently. Draw it, don't finish it. It's ugly to say out loud, so I'll say it ugly: you're mine to work on. Nobody else's needles go near this flank. When I finally bite the spot just under the fresh line — and I will bite it, hard enough to leave my mouth on you — that's a mark you can't cover and can't laser off. So here's what tonight is. No filling in. You keep the gap. You get on my table, on your back, hands above your head, and you watch me unbutton this shop shirt with the paint in my teeth and get on top of you — and you don't come until I've gotten the ink wet with you at least three times.