fifteen

"He's doing really well," I tell her.

"I haven't passed out yet." He turns his head so he can grin at Maya, who grins back.

"Usually if someone's going to pass out," she says, "it's going to be a guy."

"It's true," I add. "Women have a higher pain tolerance."

I can practically hear the client shrug. Men don't tend to think they can't handle pain like women can, but in my experience, they can't. I've had women feel faint while they were being tattooed, and I've had to stop so they could recover, but in all the years I've been doing this, and I started my apprenticeship the summer I was twenty, I've only had one woman faint, and it turned out that she was so nervous about being tattooed that she hadn't eaten all day.

( But I can count the men who've passed out in my chair on two hands. )

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sixteen

So he tells me about his work and his potential time in another studio, and he tells me about Bodie's work, and he tells me about Jonatha and her studio and the tattoo artists I know and the new people I don't. In exchange I tell him about Maya and Kona and that Rachael left so she could travel, and I tell him about Liliana and Kelly's visit, and that makes me remember the guy who turned into a hedgehog at the coffeeshop, so I tell Mel about him.

"What does that sound like to you?" I ask, at the end of my story. "Does that sound like a curse? Does it sound normal?"

"You're telling me about a guy who turned into a hedgehog in the middle of a coffeeshop, in the middle of the day," Mel says. "What about that is normal?"

"You live with a technomancer. You must have heard some weird magic stories."

( Not about shapeshifters, especially hedgehogs. )

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