Covet Thy Neighbor

start?”
    He shifted a bit, muscles moving but not relaxing. “I’ll let you know in a minute.”
    “I’m going to turn on the needle,” I said. “Just so it doesn’t freak you out.”
    He laughed dryly. “Thanks for the warning.”
    I turned on the equipment. Then, watching him, I slowly pushed the pedal down. When the needle started buzzing in my hand, he shuddered.
    I put my other hand on his back, just below his neck. He sucked in a breath. I pretended I wasn’t tempted to do the same thing.
    Focus, Seth. Be a damned professional.
    “There’s no ink on the needle,” I said softly. “It’s going to sting, and it’s going to feel a little weird. You ready?”
    He nodded slowly.
    “Okay. Here we go.” I brought the needle up and held it close to his skin, but didn’t touch him yet. I watched his neck and shoulder muscles tense, waited until I was sure they were more or less still, and then touched the tip to his skin.
    He gasped, but didn’t move much.
    “You all right?”
    He exhaled slowly. “Yeah. I think . . . I think I can handle it.”
    “I’ll just do the outline and text for starters. We can do the filigree later if you want to.”
    “Better to just do it all at once.” His voice was taut, like he was speaking through clenched teeth. “I probably won’t have the nerve to come back.”
    I chuckled and dipped the needle into the cup of black ink. “I heard that from a client last year.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “Yeah.” I brought the needle up again. “Just finished his fourth piece last month.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Yep. All right, we’re doing this for real now.”
    “Ready.”
    I leaned a little closer, held his skin tight with my left hand, and pressed the needle to the uppermost corner of the cross. He gasped again, tensed, and I thought he might’ve come as close to cursing as he was capable of, but he didn’t tell me to stop.
    So I kept going.
    I’d put on my share of religious designs. Everything from tiny pentagrams to graphic depictions of the Crucifixion to quotes from the Baghavad Gita. Just three weeks ago, I’d done a back piece of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Tattoo artists didn’t last long if they refused designs of religious significance.
    But this was different. Surreal. Like I was literally writing in blood the reasons I couldn’t put my hands on him except like this, wrapped in latex and in the name of art and spirituality. The Scripture the tattoo referenced—and damn if I could remember what those verses were—may as well have been Seth Wheeler, thou shalt not.
    I continued down the left side of the cross, nearing the first corner. My eyes flicked toward the names and numbers on either side of it, and I told myself it was just to make sure I wasn’t smearing it with my other hand. Not because I was racking my brain, trying to remember what they really meant. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
    Darren jumped, grunting quietly.
    “Doing okay?”
    He nodded.
    I put my left hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Still breathing?”
    He released a long breath, then pulled in another. “Yeah. Still breathing.”
    “Keep doing that,” I said. “Helps with that whole ‘not passing out’ thing.”
    He laughed. “You don’t say.”
    “Handling the pain all right?”
    “It’s, um, taking some getting used to, but I think I can handle it.”
    “You’re doing fine so far. If you couldn’t handle it, I think we’d have stopped already.” I dipped the needle again. “So, out of curiosity, what made you become a minister?”
    “What made you become a tattoo artist?”
    I furrowed my brow at the back of his head. “I . . . it just seemed like what I was good at.”
    He looked over his shoulder as much as he could without moving. “Like you’d found your calling?”
    “Yeah, I . . . I guess.” I continued with the left branch of the cross.
    “Same deal,” he said. “I did some missionary work when I was younger, and by the time I came back I—” He gasped.
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah. Wow.” He slowly relaxed. “Must’ve hit a nerve or something.”
    “Yeah, there’s a few of those back here.”
    He laughed. “Very funny.”
    “So by the time you came back . . .?”
    “Right,” he said as I continued working on the tattoo. “I guess I just knew what I was put here to do.”
    After I’d dabbed away some excess ink with a paper towel, I continued working my way down the underside of the cross’s left