I’ve had one rule for twelve years and I broke it at 9:07 on a Wednesday, and I’d like to tell you I thought about it for a long time first. I thought about it for three weeks. That’s not the same thing.
I own Needle & Anchor on High Street, just north of Fifth. Two stations, a front counter, a wall of flash nobody picks anymore, and a back room with a mini-fridge and a leather couch I bought off a dentist in Upper Arlington for sixty bucks. I’ve tattooed half the bartenders in the Short North and most of the sound guys, including Malik at the Rialto, whose left forearm is a mixing board I’m still proud of. I’m thirty-four. I was married for four years to a woman named Dana who told me in the divorce that I was “a very good listener for a man who never says anything.” That’s still the best review I’ve ever gotten.
The rule is simple. You don’t touch clients. Not in the chair, not after, not ever. You’re a guy with a needle and they’re trusting you with skin they have to live in until they die. You don’t make that weird.
Then Cass walked in for a consult in September, and I started keeping the rule the way you keep a door shut against wind.
Cass is twenty-five. Tends bar at Kell’s on Fourth, where the Tuesday Busch Lights are three dollars and the jukebox only works if you hit it. He’s about five-nine, slim, with dark hair he tucks behind his ears and a nose ring and nails he paints a different color every time I see him. That day in September it was a pale green, like a mint. He sat on the other side of my counter and showed me a photo on his phone of chicory, the blue weed that grows along every highway shoulder in Ohio.
“It’s the only flower that doesn’t give a shit where it is,” he said. “It grows in the gravel by the Kroger dumpster. I want that.”
I drew it for him. Fine line, three stems climbing the inside of his left forearm from the wrist, the blue done in a single wash so it’d look like it was growing out of him. He came back for the stencil approval and stood in front of the mirror with the purple transfer on his arm and said “oh” very quietly, the way people do when you get it right. I felt that in my chest in a way I did not care for.
Three weeks. Two texts about scheduling. Once at Kell’s, when I went in with Malik after a show and Cass slid me a Busch Light and wouldn’t let me pay for it, and I stood at the rail the whole night being extremely careful where I looked.
Nobody tells you that when you’ve only been with women, wanting a guy doesn’t feel different. It feels exactly the same. That was the part that scared me.
The appointment was 6 to 9. Wednesday, because the shop’s closed to walk-ins Wednesday nights.
He sat in my chair for three hours and didn’t flinch once, not even on the wrist bone, where grown men cry. I did the linework with a 3RL and the wash with a soft mag, Dynamic black cut down to a gray and a blue I mixed myself. He talked the whole time about the bar, about a regular who only orders Midori sours, about his friend Sunny from the Rialto merch table, who had just started texting some guy from Kell’s who “types like a golden retriever.” I listened. It’s the one thing I’m good at.
His arm was warm under my glove. I could feel his pulse at the wrist when I stretched the skin. Every time I leaned in to wipe, I could smell him: some kind of vanilla lotion, and under it the clean-laundry smell of the T-shirt he’d worn.
At 8:52 I wiped it down one last time and put the Saniderm on, the clear second skin, smoothing the air bubbles out with my thumb from his wrist to his elbow. He looked at it under the light and said “Wes,” just my name, like he didn’t have anything else.
He paid. He tipped forty on three-sixty, which is too much, and I told him that, and he told me to shut up. He signed the slip.
At nine I flipped the sign to CLOSED.
At 9:07 I peeled off my gloves, threw them in the bin, washed my hands, walked past him to the front door, and turned the deadbolt.
When I came back he was sitting up on the edge of the chair with his wrapped arm in his lap. He’d watched me do it. He didn’t say anything.
I picked up an aftercare sheet off the counter. I’d printed a stack of them in 2019 and still had half. I held it out to him.
“Read it.”
“I’ve read it twice.”
“Read it again.”
He took it. He didn’t read it. He looked at me over it.
“No soaking,” I said. “No sun. No picking.”
“I don’t pick.”
“You absolutely pick. You picked your cuticles for three hours.”
He looked down at his mint nails. His cheeks went pink.
I sat on the rolling stool across from him. My knees almost touched his. The shop was different with the music off and the window dark. The only light was the two lamps over the stations, and my ears were ringing in the quiet.
“Text me if it looks weird,” I said.
“That on the sheet?”
“No.”
“Then why’re you telling me?”
I looked at the paper. Then at him. Twelve years.
“Because I’d like you to text me.”
He was very still.
“You give every client your number?”
“No. Never.”
“Seems like a bad policy.”
“It is.” I stood up. I put the sheet down on the counter beside him, close enough that he’d have to decide whether to move away from me or not. “Cass.”
“Yeah?”
“Appointment’s done. You paid. You can walk out that door and I’ll never bring this up. I mean that.”
“I know you do,” he said. “That’s why I’m not walking out.”
I stood there for a second like an idiot. My heart was going like the machine on a bad day, that rough hum when the spring’s shot. I’ve done this with women. I know how to do this. I did not know how to do this.
“Can I kiss you?”
He laughed. One breath, surprised.
“Wes, I have been waiting for you to ask since September. Yes.”
I kissed him against the front counter. I’d never kissed a man. His mouth was softer than I expected and his jaw was rougher; he’d shaved that morning and I could feel it coming back. He tasted like the spearmint gum he’d been chewing through the whole session. He got his good hand into my T-shirt and held on and made a small sound into my mouth when I pushed him back against the glass case, and I just kept kissing him. I kept one hand flat against the counter so I wouldn’t knock over the tray of business cards. The other one held his bad arm up and out of the way by the elbow, gentle, like I would with any fresh piece.
“Careful with the wrap,” I said against his mouth.
“You’re the one who put it on.”
“So I’m responsible.”
He laughed again, lower. He dropped his good hand to my belt.
“Not out here,” I said. I’ve got a bloodborne pathogens card in my wallet, and I was not going to do anything within six feet of my station. “Back room.”
The back room is small. Mini-fridge. Couch. A calendar from a supply company in Cleveland still on August. I hit the light and it buzzed on, and Cass looked at the couch and said “is that a dentist’s couch” and I said “how the fuck did you know that,” and he said “it has a vibe.”
Then he got down on his knees on the worn-out rug in front of me.
Just like that. Looking up at me. His wrapped arm resting on my thigh. Brown eyes, lashes, the little silver hoop in his nose catching the light.
“This okay?” he said.
My throat didn’t work. I nodded.
“Say it, Wes.”
“Yeah. Yes.”
He opened my belt one-handed, which I was impressed by. Pulled my jeans and my boxers down, and my cock came out and bobbed an inch from his face.
I’ve never been embarrassed about it; Dana used to say it was the one part of me that talked. I’m about seven inches and thick, cut, with a bend up toward my stomach. The head was dark and swollen, and a string of precum was already hanging off it, because I had been more or less hard since he’d said “oh” at the stencil. He looked at it. He took his time. He wrapped his hand around the base and his fingers didn’t meet.
“Jesus,” he said, pleased. “You’ve been sitting on this for three weeks?”
“About that.”
He licked the string of precum off the tip with the flat of his tongue and looked up at me while he did it.
Everything I know left my body.
He sucked me slow. He didn’t try to take it all, not at first; he just worked the head, his lips tight around the ridge, his tongue flicking the spot under it, his hand stroking what he couldn’t fit. The wet heat of it. I got a hand in his hair because I didn’t know where else to put it. His hair was so soft, softer than anything, and I made a fist in it by accident. He moaned around me and I felt it all the way to my knees.
“Sorry—”
He pulled off. “Don’t be sorry. Do it again.”
I did it again. Tighter. He went down further, and further, until I felt my head nudge the back of his throat and he gagged hard. His eyes went wet instantly, and spit ran down his chin onto my balls. I started to let go and he grabbed my wrist with his good hand and held it there on his head.
He looked up at me with watering eyes and his mouth full of my cock and pushed his head down onto me, deliberately, until his nose was in the hair at the base.
I said something that wasn’t a word.
He held it for three seconds, four, then came up gasping with spit strung between his lips and me.
“Like that,” he said, hoarse. “Use me like that.”
“Cass—”
“You’ve been careful with me for three hours. Stop.”
So I stopped being careful. I fucked his mouth standing in the back room of my shop, with the fridge humming and the August calendar on the wall. I held his head in both hands and watched my cock slide in and out of that pretty mouth, his lips red and stretched and shining. He took it and took it and made these sounds like he was starving. His good hand was down the front of his own jeans. I could see his wrist moving.
“Look at me.”
He looked up. Mascara I hadn’t noticed he was wearing had started to run.
“You like that?”
He nodded with me in his throat.
“Tell me.”
He pulled off, panting. “I love it. I wanted it since the consult. I wanted you to shut the door.”
I pulled him up by his good arm and turned him around. He braced his good hand on the back of the dentist’s couch and kept the wrapped arm tucked against his chest like I’d taught every client to hold a fresh piece. Even then. It made me want him more.
“You got anything?” I said, and I hated how it came out, but I didn’t have a single condom. I’m thirty-four and divorced and don’t keep them at work.
“Back pocket.”
His wallet. A condom and a little packet of lube, the kind they put in the fishbowl at Kell’s during Pride. I held it up. He looked back at me over his shoulder.
“I said I’d been waiting,” he said.
I pulled his jeans down. He had on a pair of black panties, lacy at the back, and I stood there looking at them for long enough that he said “Wes” again.
“Give me a second.”
“You’ve had three weeks.”
I slid them down. His ass was small and round and pale. His cock hung hard between his legs, slim and flushed and leaking, and his balls were smooth. I tore the lube packet with my teeth and slicked my fingers and pressed one against his hole. He was tight and hot and he pushed back into it. Two fingers. He hissed, then breathed out slow, and then he was fucking himself back onto my hand, saying “more, more, come on, I’m ready.”
There’s a jar of Aquaphor on the shelf above the couch, the one I use on healed pieces. He saw me look at it.
“Petroleum eats latex,” he said.
“I know that,” I said. “I put things on skin for a living.” And we both laughed. I was laughing with two fingers in a man, in my shop, with my one rule lying on the floor somewhere.
I rolled the condom on. My hands were shaking. I lined myself up and pushed, and nothing happened, and pushed again, and the head popped in past that tight ring. He let out a sound that went straight to my spine.
“Okay?”
He reached back with his good hand, grabbed my hip, and pulled.
I sank into him inch by inch. God. The heat of it. The squeeze. He was tighter than anything I’ve ever been inside, and he was trembling all over. When I was all the way in, my hips flush with his ass, he let his forehead drop to the back of the couch and said “fuck, you’re big, fuck, stay there, stay there.”
I stayed. I kissed the back of his neck. He clenched on me and I nearly lost it right there.
“Move,” he said. “Please move.”
I moved.
Slow, long, all the way out and back. Then faster. The couch creaked and scooted an inch on the floor every time I went in, and he laughed breathlessly and said “the dentist is gonna feel this.” I held his hip with one hand and gently gripped his bad arm by the elbow with the other, keeping it tucked. Every time I bottomed out I could feel him flutter around me. I found the angle, and he went up on his toes and said “there there there.”
“Whose shop is this?”
“Yours.”
“Whose couch?”
“Yours.”
“You gonna text me?”
“Yes. God. Yes, Wes.”
I reached around and got my hand on his cock. It was slim and hot and soaking, and he came almost instantly, three strokes, crying out. He shot all over the back of the dentist’s couch, and his hole clamped down on me so hard I saw stars.
“That’s it,” I said. I don’t know what I was saying. “That’s it, good, fuck, Cass—”
Then it hit me.
I drove in deep and held there, both hands on him now. My whole body locked up from my calves to my neck. My cock throbbed hard inside him, jerking, pumping into the condom in thick pulses I could feel all the way down, again, again. The spasms rolled up through my hips and out my mouth as a sound like I’d dropped something heavy on my foot. He pushed back against me through every one of them. I bent over him with my forehead between his shoulder blades and my breath shaking against his T-shirt. The last pulse took the strength out of my knees entirely.
We stood there bent over the couch, breathing, for a long time.
I got him a bottle of water out of the mini-fridge. I checked the Saniderm under the light: not a bubble, not a lifted edge. He watched me do it and smiled.
“You’re doing aftercare on the aftercare,” he said.
“Somebody has to.”
I walked him to the door at 10:15. Before he left, I took the aftercare sheet off the counter and wrote on the bottom of it. Under CALL THE SHOP IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, I wrote my cell number. Then I crossed out “questions” and wrote “anything” above it.
He folded it once and put it in his jacket.
Then I wiped down the back of that couch with CaviWipes twice. That’s the job. I’m not ashamed of it.
At 10:42 my phone buzzed.
Cass: arm looks perfect. unfortunately i have another question
I typed back before the bubble even went away.
Me: good Me: ask
