I guide her fingers around the handle. “All you have to do is outline.” I lift a brow, daring her.
She bites her lip, teeth sinking in as she decides.
“The needle only needs to go one to two millimetres,” I remind her. “Don’t push too deep.”
Her hand trembles as she brings the gun closer. My arm rests flat on the table, offered.
The buzz fills the room when she flips the switch.
The first touch is rough—jagged, too deep. I grit my teeth, the sharp bite grounding me.
“Not so deep,” I rasp.
Her face is scrunched in concentration as she follows the stencil. She leans in close enough that I catch the scent of my body soap on her skin. Every time she strays, she pauses, wide-eyed, looking up at me.
Every time, I nod.Keep going.
It takes just over thirty minutes. By the end, her hand is cramped, her forehead damp with sweat.
The design isn’t perfect. The lines are shaky. The iris slightly lopsided.
But that isn’t what matters.
I look down at my wrist. She’s marked me. Claimed me with ink.
Her drawing is on my skin for eternity.
An eye watching over me, the way I watch over her.
Emily
I can’t stop staring at the droplets of blood dotting Eli’s skin. Can’t stop seeing the uneven lines, the inflammation I caused.
“I told you I’d ruin it,” I whisper, unable to meet his eyes—afraid of the disappointment I expect to find there.
His fingers slip under my chin, tilting my face up. “What are you talking about? It’s perfect.”
“The lines are jagged. I went too deep in the corner—”
“Em.” His voice cuts off my spiral before it can take hold. “Look at it.”
He grabs a wipe and swipes it over his wrist. Black ink and red blood smear together before he holds his arm out to me. It’s small—easy to miss among his other tattoos, the professional ones.
“Do you know what you’ve given me?” he murmurs, his grip firm on my jaw.
“A scar?”
He chuckles, shaking his head. “You. You’ve given me you.” He releases me to wrap the tattoo carefully. “It’s always been me watching from the shadows, waiting for someone to disappear. Like my mother. Like Jenny.”
He leans across the table, his forehead resting against mine. “But now? Now I have your eye on me. Permanently. Wherever you are, I’ll have your gaze with me.”
I should be horrified. The clinical markers of delusional attachment and transference are so thick they’re suffocating. I should be running.
Instead, I reach out and trace the edge of the bandage.
“I’m the most unprofessional person I’ve ever met,” I whisper—the truth I’ve known since the beginning.
“Good,” Eli rasps as he moves around the table. His hands find my waist, pulling me flush against him. He doesn’t care about my thick thighs or the way my stomach presses into him. He doesn’t see the patient-therapist boundary I should be enforcing. He just sees me. “Professionalism is for people who don’t belong to each other. And you, Doctor Morgan, are very much mine.”