The shop was draped with black and orange garlands that Tara had finger-knit out of cheap yarn from the craft store down the street. They looked great—cobwebby and bright—but I thought I was going to have a nostalgia-triggered aneurism at the reminder of finger-knitting.

Marcus and I had drawn life-sized classic monsters of Hollywood covered in tattoos on pieces of poster board, then cut holes out for people’s faces so they could snap pics of themselves as Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Bride of Frankenstein (who I had dressed up as for the shop party last year and who, Daniel informed me, was actually the bride of Frankenstein’s creature because Frankenstein was the doctor and it was a common misconception but why should we propagate misinformation, blah blah blah. Then I got him wasted and made him do a Drunk History-style speech about Frankenstein that was the greatest thing I’d ever heard. I mean, you try pronouncing “progeny” when you’re intoxicated.)

People were swanning around, taking pics with the tattooed monsters and posting them on Instagram and Snapchat, which was the real reason we’d set them up. In the last few years, social media had become a great way to drive business to the shop. I’d been completely oblivious about it. Marcus and Lindsey had gotten me on Twitter, and Morgan had set me up on Instagram—she’d had a lot of followers from her manicure days, even before she started posting piercing pics.

It was Tara who really explained everything best, though, and so I’d made her some temporary tattoos in exchange for a crash course that was far more useful than I’d expected. The look on Lindsey’s face when she’d come in and seen my tattoos on her kid had also been priceless.

Now I had social media accounts for the shop as well as personal ones, and had started to actually enjoy it, not just as an advertising tool but as a way to keep in touch with folks I met at tattoo conventions, to see what was new artistically, even to ask and answer questions about methods and tools. There was a part of me that was afraid it could destroy one of the only true apprenticeship-based crafts still out there but the more I participated, the more it seemed like just a different kind of apprenticeship.

I’d found the score to Hocus Pocus on YouTube and Marcus had used…uh, technology to do a mashup between it and some Finnish black metal band, so that was blasting on the stereo, and I had made a secret promise to the Halloween gods that if three people came in tonight dressed as the Sanderson sisters I would tattoo them with whatever they wanted for free.

This was the third year I’d thrown the shop doors open on Halloween for a party and every year I drew up a few small Halloween-themed flash designs that we’d tattoo for a flat fifty bucks a pop. They were simple, took almost no concentration, and were a great revenue stream since they could be done in about ten minutes. People loved the atmosphere of tattoos being done in the shop while the party raged, and it was fun to tattoo in such a frenetic environment.

This year, I had drawn a crooked witch’s hat, a little ghost, a bat flying across a full moon, and a set of plastic vampire fangs. I’d already lost track of how many I’d done. The vampire fangs I’d kind of drawn as a joke, but they were proving to be a popular choice.

Now Marcus took over for me at the tattooing station and I went in back to call Daniel. I hadn’t had a Halloween without him since the year after we met. I knew he’d get a kick out of the Tattooed Monsters photo op and would absolutely want me to give him this year’s Halloween tattoos. He had all the others, strategically placed to fit with his other ink.

“Happy Halloween!” I said in my Nightmare Before Christmas voice.

“Happy Halloween, Ginge,” Daniel said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. I could also hear other voices in the background.

“Ooh, are you with Rex? Put me on speaker,” I instructed. I’d tried multiple times to get Daniel to record Rex’s voice and send me a sample but he refused to do it for some reason.

I’d always had a thing for voices. My mind drifted to Christopher’s voice, warm and rich, like hot chocolate laced with whiskey.

“Hi, Ginger,” drawled a low, quiet voice. “Nice to meet you.”

Damn, he sounded like everything Daniel described—fire and trees and…well, flannel. “Hi, Rex. You have a hot voice. Don’t ever stop talking to me.”

I heard a sharp voice say something, but he was too far away from the phone for me to hear. Daniel muttered, “Everybody does.”

“Who is that?”

“He’s Rex’s ex-boyfriend, Will, who showed up out of the blue to try and sleep with Rex.”

I would’ve bet a thousand dollars that Daniel hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He was so used to being honest with me, but with other people he tended to give the least amount of personal information possible in response to questions.

“Uh, well, okay then,” I said in a tone that I knew Daniel would read as: “Prepare to call me as soon as you’re alone and explain exactly what’s going on.”

It sucked not knowing the landscape of each other’s daily lives. The insignificant details that laid the groundwork for the bigger stuff. I missed not knowing all the little things that set up the context for him to text me one word in all caps and for me to crack up because I knew exactly why that had struck him as funny, or shocking, or as proof he’d been right.

There was such an intimacy in it. One I’d never had with anyone else. I’d tried with my sister over the years, but she was…yeah, no. There had never been any affinity between us, even though there had been a time when I’d held out hope for it.

“Have a good night, Dandelion,” I said absently into the phone. I immediately bit my lip because I never called him that when anyone else could hear. It was a silly joke from a long time ago. Immediately I heard the ex-boyfriend laugh about it.

“Don’t make me kick your ass, pretty boy,” Daniel said, and I snorted. That voice—that scrappy, nothing-hurts-me voice—was one I hadn’t heard in a while. This ex-boyfriend clearly had Daniel’s defenses up big time.

The phone clicked over and then Rex’s voice was right in my ear.

“Ginger,” he said, and damn that voice was…yeah. “I have two beautiful drunk men who are about to fight in my house. If I didn’t hate fighting, it would almost be—”

“Oh, Daniel’s drunk?” I hadn’t been able to tell on speakerphone. Or else Daniel wasn’t as drunk as Rex thought, because I could usually tell. “Then you just need to distract him.”

“Yeah, I should,” Rex said, and I snorted because what he had in mind probably wasn’t appropriate in company.

“I’m going to entrust you with a secret, Rex, but you can’t abuse it or you will feel the power of my wrath rain down upon you.” He made a sound that I took as assent. “Daniel is rather helplessly ticklish in the middle of his ribs on his left side.”

I’d found this out the hard way for both of us when I tried to tattoo him there.

“Huh,” Rex said, and I could almost imagine his eyes locking on the spot. Even monosyllabically he was intense. I really needed to get some more details from Daniel about this guy…

But just then, another guy walked in the door and stole my attention.

Christopher.

In a sea of monsters, movie references, and postapocalyptic dreams, he looked as fresh and hearty as a fall apple. I got unexpectedly nervous at the sight of him, which hadn’t happened to me in forever.

“Uh, okay then, use your power only for good,” I said.

“Okay, thanks. Nice to talk to you.”

“Yep, same, back atcha, hope more soon,” I garbled.

“I hope so too,” Rex said politely. “Thanks.”

I picked my way through the melee toward the door. Marcus was tattooing a guy wearing a dinosaur costume so elaborate that in order to access skin, he’d had to take off pieces of it, which were strewn around the tattoo station. Morgan was arguing loudly with a couple of zombies about the efficacy of newly proposed city zoning laws. A lady dressed like Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction, complete with needle jabbed into her chest, was trying to take a selfie with the Creature from the Black Lagoon but her arms weren’t long enough, so I plucked her phone from her hand and snapped the pic.

“Hey,” I said to Christopher when I made it to the door.

“Wow.” He indicated the scene and whistled.

“Yeah, it’s too bad you’re seeing the shop for the first time during the party. It’ll look super boring by comparison the next time.”

“As long as there is a next time, I’m cool with that.”

My ears buzzed with excitement. Something about the way he just put things out there really did it for me. It wasn’t flirtation, which usually made me roll my eyes and want to get away. It was just genuine interest. I searched for the proper response, realized I’d been standing there staring at him for far too long to seem casual, and forced myself to look away. Smooth, Holtzman. Very smooth.

“Erm. So. No costume?”

“No. See, I had ambitions. I was going to do a kind of deranged Sweeney Todd thing, since I’d be behind the counter making food. But then I realized that the implication that people’s sandwiches contained human flesh was perhaps not the best business strategy.”

He looked sincerely disappointed at the missed opportunity. I was about to tell him that in his normal clothes he could’ve just told everyone he was dressed up as a ridiculously hot urban lumberjack slash construction worker, but fortunately, before I could, he said, “Work was great though. People’s costumes. There was a very impressive Walking Dead crew, but they got fake blood all over my seats.”

“Yeah, South Street does it up pretty well, usually. Earlier, I saw a group where one person was Pac-Man and they were chasing four differently colored ghosts.”

“You look great.”

I hadn’t noticed how close together we were standing so that we could hear each other over the loud voices and the Hocus Pocus black metal mashup.

“Thanks. I already had the hair for it, so I figured…”

I slid the sunglasses back on that I’d taken off while I was tattooing. I was dressed as Slash from Guns N’ Roses and, with the sunglasses, the volume of my curly black hair, my nose ring, and the top hat, I looked remarkably like him. I’d had a cigarette hanging off my lip, but I’d ditched it because it became too hard to resist smoking it.

“I wanted to do ‘November Rain’ video Slash, because I have the cowboy boots, but I couldn’t find affordable chaps.”

Christopher’s eyes slid down my body. “Yeah, it’s a problem,” he said absently. “I hope you won’t think this is intrusive, but I brought you a sandwich.” He held up a paper bag. “Have you eaten?”

He had…brought me a sandwich? As in, thought of me, made a sandwich, and then brought it to me because he thought I might like it? My brain was stalling out somewhere in the midst of processing the incredibly kind gesture, and I realized I was standing there saying nothing. “Only enough candy corn to assure that my blood sugar has transmuted into corn syrup and red dye number whatever.”

He raised one eyebrow and the bag again.

Around him, witches, zombies, every imaginable character from books, television, and movies, and some inanimate objects talked and laughed. In their midst, he looked almost like a joke costume in a movie—“normal guy,” with his jeans, boots, and plain navy blue T-shirt, jacket slung over his shoulder. His hair gleamed like a penny and I was flooded with this intense affection for him. For this person I barely knew. Somehow, without a costume, he looked vulnerable here.

I reached for the hand that wasn’t holding the bag and tugged him after me. “No food on the shop floor. OSHA rules.”

It was a blatant excuse to get him alone, as we broke the rule every day. We moved slowly through the crowd to the back room, and I closed the door behind us. When I jumped up to sit cross-legged on the table, he sat next to me.

“So, what is it?”

“Huh?”

“The sandwich.”

“Oh, right. It’s today’s Halloween-themed special—grilled Wisconsin cheddar with pesto, avocado, and watercress. I wanted to do orange and black, but black’s not very appetizing and it dyes your teeth, so I went with orange and green.”

“Holy shit, that sounds amazing.”

Christopher’s smile was bright and immediate.

I pulled out the sandwich and the smell hit me immediately. I groaned when I tasted it. “That’s so damned good. Is Wisconsin cheddar different?”

“Nah, just orange.”

“Uhh…” I could tell I was missing something.

“Naturally, cheddar is white or yellowish because…you know, milk. But Wisconsin cheddar—and some others—is dyed orange with annatto seed. They’ve done it since the nineteenth century. Maybe based on Gloucester cheese? Something about a shift in grazing habits resulting in a lighter cheese, and then wanting to distinguish it from New York and Vermont cheddars in the market. I don’t remember the details.”

“Huh.”

While I ate, we talked about more of the best costumes we’d seen, and I told him about all the ghosts of Halloween parties past.

He listened intently, smiling at my enthusiasm. “You love Halloween.”

“Yeah, it’s the best. Oh man, you know those haunted walking tours? This one year, Daniel and I followed their route the day before Halloween, so we’d know where they went. Then on Halloween night, we got all dressed in white and I gave us this creepy dead face makeup, and we crept into the cemetery where the tour would stop. When the tour guide got to the grave in front of us, we jumped out and scared the bejesus out of the tour group. It was awesome. They screamed, and oh, man. Only, right after, this figure jumps out and runs straight at us, wearing, like, a rotted potato sack, with this long bloody hair all matted, and we screamed and ran away. I guess that guy was part of the actual tour, and he was supposed to have jumped out and scared them for Halloween but we totally ruined it.”

He laughed.

“So, um, your mom seemed nice the other day.”

“She is. She still treats me like I’m sixteen sometimes, but I guess I can’t blame her…”

I snorted. “Sure you can.”

“To be fair, until the last year I was kind of all over the place.”

“Where were you.”

“After college I drove around the country as a roadie for my friend’s band. Not as glamorous as it sounds, by the way.”

“It really doesn’t sound glamorous at all.”

He grinned. “Yeah, well. Then I taught English in Croatia for a year. Then, um…oh, then I was a bike messenger in Baltimore and lived with a friend there. Then I came back to Philly and bartended for a couple of years while I took business classes online. I thought about opening a bar where people played board games, but after seeing what went into owning a bar, I gave the idea to my friends and went to culinary school instead.”

“You went to culinary school? Wait, is that why you knew that thing about orange cheese? Jesus, I can’t even make minute rice.”

“Well, rice should take a lot longer than a minute, so it’s no wonder.”

“No offense or anything but I wouldn’t think you’d need to go to culinary school to make sandwiches. Not that this wasn’t a great sandwich, but…”

“Oh, you don’t need to. I didn’t even think of opening the shop when I started. I just love to cook. I didn’t exactly graduate. Still a few classes short, but I decided I could live without more sauces in my life. But it definitely helped when I applied for the loan to open Melt.”

I nodded, stomach tightening at the word loan.

“It wasn’t just that I moved around a lot, though,” he continued, and he looked down, rubbing at a scratch in the table. “I was kind of…scattered, you know? And she’d worry a lot.”

“Scattered, how?”

“Uh, like, impulsive. If someone was taking off somewhere I’d go with them. Friend of mine decided to do a three-month bike trip through Canada and I just left with him in the middle of the night. And, uh, I was doing a lot of drugs, just kind of, I don’t know, looking for something.”

His expression was serious and he wouldn’t look at me.

“What were you looking for?”

He shrugged, and fidgeted. “I was trying to understand things,” he said slowly. “I—things had been hard for my brother and I was trying to understand.” He shook his head. “All my life, I was pretty good at everything—pretty good at everything, but not great at anything. Not obsessed with anything. Not…driven to any one thing. And when I finished college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I did so many different jobs, dated all these different people because I was looking for that one thing that I just felt more for.”

He shrugged and I got the sense there was a lot that he hadn’t said, but he clearly was done talking about it.

“What about you?” he asked.

“This is exactly what I always wanted to do.”

“So who’s the dude?”

“Dude? What dude?”

“Mmhmm.”

Morgan looked at me over the top of her glasses. I was finishing a totally nice tattoo of totally nice flowers on a totally nice guy, but it was a pretty mindless job.

Whenever clients came in, I always reminded myself that I didn’t know their stories. That those extremely generic, middle-of-the-road flowers were likely very personal to the person getting them tattooed.

Even if they weren’t, I didn’t have some kind of campaign against meaninglessness or anything. Tattoos were art. They didn’t have to be meaningful necessarily, any more than you had to have a reason better than I like it for hanging a piece of art in your living room. Besides, half the time we didn’t even consciously process why we cared about things, did we? Sometimes we found ourselves strongly drawn to something for reasons that seemed mysterious. Nothing wrong with that either.

But I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t believe—just the tiniest bit—in a kind of tattoo blood magic. That transmutation of flesh and ink that renders the aesthetic permanent. I felt it. When my machine bit into flesh, my needle whispered secrets in its hushed buzz. It felt sacred to me, the communion of art that changed a body forever.

Flower Guy murmured his approval into the mirror, and I wrapped up his tattoo and started cleaning up my station.

“He was certainly vibing you pretty hard, whoever he was.”

I should’ve known Morgan wouldn’t let it go.

“He works at Melt. He brought me a sandwich. We’ve chatted a few times, that’s all.”

“Who have you chatted with?” Marcus walked the client he’d just finished to the door then dropped into my now-empty chair.

“Dude who was in here last night to see Miss Ginger.”

“Oh, yeah, I wondered who that guy was. Handsome.”

I rolled my eyes. They were never going to let it go. I dumped my station’s debris in the waste bin and sighed, throwing myself onto the battered leather couch along the wall.

“Fine. His name’s Christopher and I’ve been going to his sandwich shop to see him like a pathetic loser, and last night he brought me a sandwich and it’s, like, the nicest thing any random has ever done for me.”

“What? No way. How about the time that girl gave you backstage passes to Lady Gaga?” Morgan chimed in.

“Okay, point of clarification. It’s the nicest thing any random has done for me because I’m me as opposed to because I gave them a tattoo they liked.”

“Why does that make you a pathetic loser?” Marcus asked.

“No, I know,” I said.

“The question stands.”

“Ugh, because, whatever. He has a functional relationship with his mother. He eats balanced, healthy meals.”

“Well, obviously that’s stupid. What’s the real reason?” Morgan flicked her nails at me.

“I’m being totally serious.”

I wasn’t, really. But aside from Marcus himself, who I’d dated for a year a very long time ago, and a woman named Bria, who’d left the city after we broke up (not that her leaving was really my fault), I’d never dated anyone longer than a month. And even that was usually too long. So it was easier to just avoid it, especially when I turned out not to like very many people much anyway. It was easier to be on my own than to make the kind of compromises that nearly everyone I’d ever dated had encouraged me to make.

Sometimes that encouragement was clear. If you’re always working, I’ll never get to see you, so just take a night off. Or, I like your tattoos fine, but it’s a pretty nice restaurant, so… Sometimes it wasn’t explicit; it was just me. Me, seeing the things someone wished were different about me and expending a lot of energy not to capitulate to what they wanted me to be.

The chances of Christopher being the exception to all the rules I’d built up over the years seemed mathematically unlikely. So, given that it wasn’t going to turn into anything but me being hot for a guy I had no chance of a successful relationship with, hanging out at his shop made me, by definition, both pathetic and a loser. So there.