For You(5)
Author: Mimi Strong

He glanced behind me, in the direction of where the fight had happened the night before. He rubbed his one hand over the knuckles of the other, as if remembering.

“Tell me about your drawings I saw you doing.”

He flipped open his sketch book and flipped past pages of seascapes drawn in bold black lines. “For my sleeves, I sketched the basic concept, and this friend of mine actually did the ink. If you want any work done, let me know and I’ll take you to see him.”

“You’ll take me?”

He grinned, flashing those perfect teeth my way. “You can’t go all by yourself.”

“Says who?”

He tilted his head to the side, studying me. “You’re argumentative, and tough like a microwaved steak, but I don’t think you’re a sad girl through and through. I bet you get deliriously happy doing something other people find stupid, like playing mini-golf.”

“Is mini-golf still a real thing? I thought they tore all those places down, like drive-in theaters.”

He stared at me for a moment without speaking, then shook his head. “Sorry, I blanked out there. I was just imagining what sort of tattoo you might get. Probably black roses, with long thorns.”

“No.”

His eyes shifted, moving down my body and across my folded arms. His gaze was palpable, like hands caressing me, his flesh burning against mine like a fever.

He tried again. “Barbed wire?”

“No.”

“Lemme think. Your tattoo wouldn’t be something cute and girlie, like a cartoon character. That wouldn’t be you.”

I shook my head. No, a cartoon wouldn’t be me at all.

He leafed through his sketch book and stopped on a drawing of jellyfish, round and luminous even in rough black ink.

I tilted my head to the side in an unconscious maybe.

He kept leafing through the book, one page at a time, watching my expression. The drawings were mostly of things under the sea, but then there was a section of other creatures, including crickets and dragonflies under trumpet-shaped flowers.

Everything else around me disappeared as I was swept away into the images. Even as these rough drawings, the plants had a life to them, like they might continue growing off the page after Sawyer closed the book. The man wasn’t just good at throwing his fists at people’s faces. With a pen in hand, he also had access to the kind of creativity and dexterity people dream of having.

He slowly turned the page to a frog, and he stopped.

I murmured, “What else have you got?”

“That’s you.” He pointed to the frog, partially hidden by the sweeping curl of a leaf.

“I don’t think so.” A frog? I shook my head.

“Your eyes lit up when you saw the frog. That’s you.”

I looked around to make sure other people weren’t overhearing me being compared to a frog. The bar wasn’t very big, and during moments like this when the HVAC system wasn’t blowing and the stereo wasn’t turned up for the evening rush, you could hear way too much.

Sawyer took the cap off his pen and started adding fine lines of shading to the image, hiding and revealing the frog at the same time, creating magic in a way I didn’t understand. In art classes back in school, I’d been able to copy another image very easily, transferring it up and down in scale, but when I went to make anything original, the page stayed blank until I scribbled across it in frustration. I didn’t know what it was artists saw when they looked at unfinished work, but it wasn’t what I saw.

He ripped the page right out of the book and held it up toward me.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t take your art. I’m not going to get a tattoo, either. Not even your frog.”

“You could put it on your fridge, if your husband doesn’t mind.”

“Who?”

He smirked at my hand, reminding me of the pawn-shop wedding band I wore.

His beautiful green eyes did that thing again, where they urged me to confess. Confess my sins. And my lies. And my dark desires.

I stared at his lips, wondering what they tasted like. He shook out his pen hand, flexing his fingers along with his muscles under his smooth, tattooed skin. My mother always said to stay away from boys with tattoos. She also warned against fingertips yellowed by smoking, and anyone in the wrong type of shoes—too worn-down or too fancy.

She had a lot of advice for me, mostly in the form of what she would do if she were me. Before she disappeared, she’d say these things out of the blue, like they’d been on her mind all day. We’d be making dinner and she’d stare wistfully out the window at the back pasture and say, “If I got pregnant again, I wouldn’t have the baby. I’d get rid of it. I only wanted two kids, and I’m happy with what I’ve got.”

Then she’d pet my hair, like that was a normal thing for a parent to say.

She said it once when Bell was in the kitchen, and my little sister had burst into tears, pleading for a little brother or sister. When I came home on the school bus that afternoon, there was a basket of baby rabbits and Bell playing with them in the grass at the front of the trailer. We named them all, and kept them in the old chicken coop, until they were slaughtered for dinner.

As we ate the rabbit stew the first night, Derek saw fit to teach us one of his many life lessons.

“Humans are the king of the jungle,” he said to Bell, who was barely three at the time and thought the sun rose and set on Derek.

“Wowie, wowie,” she said, which was her response to everything. She’d first said it when I showed her my favorite tree, with a branch wide enough for sitting and reading, completely hidden in the canopy of leaves. Wowie wowie could mean anything, from “tell me more” to “gimme that.”

She also called him Daddy, which made me sick to my stomach. Derek didn’t deserve that title.

“Might makes right,” Derek said, flexing one muscular arm. Not only did he have tattoos—awful ones with demonic faces swirling around na**d women—but the fingertips on his right hand were yellowed from nicotine. My mother broke more rules than she made.

I ate my stew and tried not to think of how the bunnies had been slaughtered. I hoped it was at least quick, and they didn’t understand what was happening.

Derek continued his lesson, “If you see something, you take it.” He banged his fist on the table, making Bell scream in a mix of fear and delight. “Take it!”

My mother kicked me under the table. “Don’t you dare roll your eyes when Derek is speaking. This is his house, and you’ll show him respect, young lady.”

Derek grinned at me, then held two fingers up to his mouth and darted his tongue between them suggestively. Even without laying a hand on me, he did everything he could to make me uncomfortable, including walking into my bedroom in the morning and yanking the blankets off me. “Caught you touchin’ yerself didn’t I? Let me smell your fingers,” he’d say, laughing.