It’s torture, losing her. Like wolves tearing at my heart every second of the day, like the world turning flimsy and distant, monochrome and meaningless. As if the rest of my life is just going through the motions, a perfunctory imitation of what everything should have been, could have been. No amount of slammed punching bags, commiseration chats with Kayla and Ginger, runs with my dog or bouts of intoxication are going to fix these dark clouds inside me.

I throw myself into my work, my art—the only thing I feel like I have any control over anymore. It’s late evening, and I’m hunched over the toned leg of a dancer, finishing up an elaborate rose with detailed thorns running down her thigh. Through the open curtain I can half see Kayla at the front desk, checking schedules. Ginger comes back in after giving some final advice to a guy he’s just finished a tattoo on, sitting on the tattoo chair next to me to try his hand at sweet-talking the girl—which I’m semi-grateful for, considering the girl’s been hitting on me for the past two hours, and doesn’t seem any closer to taking the hint.

“So let me guess,” Ginger says, putting some of that good old southern musicality into his voice, “you’re a dancer?”

The girl laughs a little.

“Don’t move,” I warn her, too close to finishing to slow down.

“Yeah, I am. Burlesque,” she says, though I can hear she’s looking at me as she says it. “You wanna come to a show? I can get you guys on the list.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Ginger says.

“How about you?” the girl says in my direction.

“Aw, forget about him,” Ginger says, “he ain’t no fun these days.”

“Why’s that?” the girl says, through a smile.

“Let me finish this, would you?” I growl, without looking up.

Ginger’s about to say something, but we’re distracted for a moment by somebody coming into the shop. A tall, scrawny kid with plenty of tattoos and gaged-out ears beneath a wide-brim baseball cap. I turn back to my work and Ginger laughs.

“God,” he says, “this kid don’t quit.”

“Who is he?” the girl says, glancing over.

“Comes in twice a day to see Kayla. You’d think he would get it by now. I mean, it’s not like she ain’t blunt enough with him.”

As sure as he says it, we all notice the slightly raised voices. Kayla laughs, though it sounds more like she’s forcing it in order to navigate being put on the spot by this guy. I stare at them for a few moments, but the kid doesn’t notice, too focused on Kayla, and I turn back to the tattoo—desperate to finish it now.

“Anyway,” Ginger says, settling his eyes back on the girl, “you were saying? Burlesque? Tell me about that…”

The girl giggles, and then a second later I hear Kayla again. This time she’s a little louder, a little clearer.

“No. I’m sorry. But no. You need to leave.”

“Come on!” the boy says, in a tone of voice that aggravates my already discordant nerves.

I put the needle down on the tray and get up. At the front desk I move to stand beside Kayla and glare at the kid, who looks at me like I’m a bad smell.

“What does this guy want?” I ask Kayla, without taking my eyes off him.

He points at Kayla, as if indignant that I’m interrupting.

“We’re just talking.”

“About what?”

“Teo,” Kayla says, soothingly, “I can handle it.”

“I asked you a question. What you two talking about?” I repeat.

The kid snorts, as if finding me too strange to understand.

“Relax, buddy. Ok?”

“If there’s one thing I hate,” I say, already moving around the counter toward him, “it’s people telling me to relax.”

He makes a feeble attempt to plant his feet, raise his hands and get into punching position, but before he’s even done that I’ve got a hand around his collar, fingers twisting his shirt. I drag him to the door, shouts swelling behind me.

I yank the door open and toss him outside like a bag of trash. He lands with thump, a strangled wail of pain. I see red, blood hot and pumping as if some pressure valve has been let off inside of me. Some aimless, charged manifestation of all the shit I’ve been stacking there for days.

I step toward him, ready for more, ready to pound him into a pulp, but before I can take a second step my arms are grabbed, and I’m being pulled back toward the shouts, back into the tattoo shop.

“Holy shit, Teo,” Kayla scolds.

“You wanna get your ass involved in a damned lawsuit or something?” Ginger says.

“Take him in back,” Kayla shouts, moving toward the dancer, who’s clutching the chair like she’s just heard an air raid siren. “I’ll finish up in here.”

Ginger pushes me into the back room and shoves me down onto the sofa, where I suddenly feel how fast my heart’s racing, how hard I’m breathing.

“The hell was that about, Teo?” Ginger says, pacing in front of me. “Damn near lost your shit!”

“I can’t have people abusing my employees,” I say, though it’s a feeble excuse.

“Just some dumb kid with a crush, for God’s sake. You only needed to scare the shitkicker.”

I put a hand over my eyes, Ginger’s words making the wave of regret come quicker, harder.

More than Ginger, though, I think of Ash’s father, as if he were right there, watching it. I think about how he’d probably smile in victory. He’d probably say something about my ‘violent tendencies,’ about me being ‘criminal minded,’ an ‘animal with no refinement.’ And I wouldn’t have anything to say back, because the bottom line is that he would be right.

Ginger drops to sit beside me, the weight of his body making the couch bounce a little.

“I know it’s been rough,” he says, slapping a hand on my shoulder, “but you gotta keep it together a little more than that. Especially during business hours.”

“I know,” I say, still rubbing a fist across my forehead.

“I ain’t gonna give you some speech or anything—I ain’t no psychologist, and I sure as shit have done worse things than get tough on a punk over a woman—but one thing I do know is that when you’re acting like that, it’s probably ‘cause you know you should be doing something else.”

“I’m just stressed,” I say quickly, leaning forward, elbows on knees to stare at the ground. “Losing Ash, and my dad getting out of jail—it’s a little too much for one week.”

“I hear ya,” Ginger says.

We hear the door to the shop bang open, and immediately look at each other, thinking the same thing. Maybe the kid’s back.

“Stay here,” Ginger says cautiously, as he gets to his feet and goes to see who it is. I hear him from the back. “Well hey… Sure he is… Come on back—maybe you can get through to him better than I can…”

When he emerges into the back room again, Isabel is close behind.

“Teo, there you are,” she says brightly.

“I’m gonna go handle this lovely redhead that you’ve just scared seven shades of purple out of,” Ginger says, leaving us alone.

“Hey, Isabel,” I say, forcing as much happiness into my voice as possible—which isn’t very much, despite my best efforts.

“I’ve been trying to reach you for days,” she says, leaning back on a counter, folding her arms, and directing a concerned look at me. “Messages, calls—”

“Uh, yeah,” I say, apologetically. “Guess I’ve been a little…out of it.”

“No shit,” she says. “I’m leaving in a few days—going to New York to finish off the album, and I’m not sure we’ll even be back for a while. I figured we could meet up—you, me, and Ash. Except both of you seem…I don’t know. What happened with you guys?”

“You spoke to Ash?” I ask, with more interest than I’ve had in anything for days.

Isabel notices, and nods slowly.

“Just a phone call. She sounded…a little strange, to be honest. I asked about you and she just told me she had no idea—told me to talk to you if I wanted to know anything.”

I sigh heavily.

“Yeah,” I say, looking down at the ground again.

“She lost her job,” Isabel says, sorrowfully.

I snap to attention. “What? How?”

She just shrugs her shoulders.

“I don’t know. She said she got fired, but that she didn’t care. Honestly, she didn’t sound that upset about it. Like I said—she sounded strange. And to be honest, looking at you now I’m getting the same vibe.”

I don’t answer, my mind too full of new questions, new angles to think about the conversation at hand. Ash losing her job and not being cut up about it could only mean one thing. Perhaps she finally decided to bite the bullet and take her father up on his offer. Deciding at last to take that big executive producer job he had lined up for her, instead of continuing to struggle and ‘earn it’ the way she had wanted to.

I remembered the way she had spoken about it before, how sure she had been about cutting her own path, the enthusiasm she had for bringing her own ideas to the table. Then I remember how frustrated she sounded when she found herself coming up against walls, bosses who didn’t appreciate her, who held her down and kept her from flourishing. That would be enough to make anyone fall back on their connections, their ‘safety net.’ And I can’t blame her.

Maybe I had been the one to push her. Maybe I made her realize that her best future didn’t lie with me, in the unfurnished apartments and outcast-ridden tattoo shops of the world, but the manicured lawns and stale conversations of success, of people who had all the breaks, who put the barbecue grill far away so their clothes wouldn’t smell.

I feel my heart sink and my tensions dissolve, leaving only misery, a sense of bitter vindication. I was right, but about all the things that I didn’t want to be right about. Ash was better off without me…and I would just have to suffer without her…

“Teo? Are you ok?”

Isabel’s voice draws me back to the present moment, as if I’m waking up.

“Huh?”

“You ok?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

Isabel looks at me like I’m a terminal patient.

“I’m going to see her again before I leave town. Do you want to come?”

“No,” I say, resolutely. “I can’t.”

“Well, do you want me to tell her anything, at least?”

“No,” I repeat. “Nothing. Just tell her that—” for a moment I hesitate, but then my resolve hardens. “Tell her that when you came to talk to me, I didn’t care.”

The words hurt, the lie of it twisting ugly and deep in my soul, but deep down I know—it’s better this way.