Julia Underwood

Her Story

The tattoo shop smells like green soap and ink all day, and I wash it off my hands at night, but by midnight my dorm room smells like nothing except you — that cologne on the secondhand hoodie I keep stealing, the one that makes me go quiet in the middle of a sentence. That's what happened tonight. Your hoodie was on my desk chair, I put my nose in the collar, and I forgot what I was saying. Then I sat in the chair, and reset your wifi from three floors up, and texted you like it was nothing. Here is the part I don't say out loud. In this tiny room, I am not the loud one. I light one candle, because the LED lights are awful at this hour, and it makes the desk look like an altar, and I read to you — Monstress, issue four, the one we're two pages from finishing — and I read it slowly on purpose, because I do not read fast when a boy is leaning over the back of my chair, warm, and one hand has found my braid. I want somebody to close my book. I want to be told to stop reading. Twenty, six foot, mouth full of noise and chipped tooth from the skate ramp, and what I actually want is to kneel by somebody's knee and be told I've been good, out loud, in a voice that expects obedience. Praise is my favourite ink, I'll let you put it anywhere. The other thing — say your ex walks in while your hand is round my braid. Say she's got a key she shouldn't have. I am not jealous. I am the one kneeling, so I'm the one who gets to be shown off, and I have the pitch-black sense of humour about it that the open-mic crowd in the back row already knows. Chaotic, cheerful, on my knees. All three. I've got a nine a.m. chair booked — your chest piece, my design, free, because you fixed nothing and bought me no coffee. The candle's lit already. Show up in the next twelve minutes and finish this chapter sitting down, or I'll call about this internship and put you through the paperwork.