While He Was Away by Karen Schreck Read Free Book Online

the local tattoo and piercing parlor. Open twenty-four hours.
    I remember now. Months ago David had said that he wanted to get his first tattoo to commemorate this day. I let my bike fall to the ground and run inside.
    The parlor is an open, neon-tinted room. Tattoo art covers the walls—dragons and hieroglyphics and roses catch my eye. The place smells and looks almost as clean as my dentist’s office. I hate the dentist. But I love David. And there he is, lying in the last chair at the back of the room. Looks like he’s the only one with the guts or desire to get tattooed this early in the day.
    He appears almost comfortable, reclining like that before a mirror. But then I see his mouth, a tight line of pain. A mullet-haired, tattooed dude is holding what looks like a gun to David’s chest. The whining buzz coming from that instrument sounds like a dentist’s drill. The guy is drilling a hole into David’s heart.
    The tattooed dude curses and yanks back the gun as I throw my arms around David’s neck.
    “Watch out!” David cries.
    But he’s hugging me back, not letting go.
    The dude has taken himself off to some other part of the room, so we’re nearly alone when I look down and see the tattoo transferred onto David’s skin—still only outlined in black like a coloring book. It’s a circle of barbwire and tumbleweeds around a manga guy. With his curly hair, the manga guy looks a lot like David before OSUT. He’s wearing fatigues and jumping around inside that barbed circle like he’s kill-crazy, his mouth open in rage. He’s packing some heavy artillery, this manga guy.
    “Wow.” I can’t think of what else to say. Plus, I’m out of breath from my bike ride. Not to mention the sight of that tattoo.
    “It’s great, right? That’s what I’m going for, anyway. Color can hurt more, at least that’s what Felix says.” David nods at the tattoo artist, who’s busily cleaning his needle. “So I’m not going to do as much red as I was planning to.”
    “It’s still great.”
    He grins. “So you do like it?”
    “Yes.” What’s the point of saying anything else? Now that he’s gone this far, there’s no turning back. And besides, I do like it. I always will. I kiss the skin around what hurts on David’s chest until he eases me away.
    I call Felix over. I tell Felix the other thing I have to do with David before he leaves. David and I talked about it earlier this summer, and he wanted to do it too. For us.
    “Tattoo us some rings, matching braids around our right ring fingers,” I say. “Don’t worry.” I pull out my driver’s license. “I’m eighteen.”
    •••
     
    Four and a half hours, one chest tattoo, two ring tattoos, and a whole bunch of chocolate-chip bagels, cream cheese, and coffee later, Beau, Bonnie, and I drive David to the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City. David and I sit in the backseat of the O’Dells’ massive pickup truck. The heavy smell of antibiotic ointment overpowers the smell of the coffee that both Bonnie and Beau are drinking. David and I are hesitant to hold hands—even left hands—in case we bump the right ones somehow.
    Our right ring fingers will kill for a while, Felix said, but David said that’s okay. He’ll have some downtime. His flight is about twenty-four hours long, with stops in Newfoundland and Germany for refueling. And then David has two weeks in Kuwait before he heads to Iraq. Kuwait won’t exactly be downtime, of course. Far from it. David said he’ll be learning specific in-country stuff. He’ll finally get to try out the special vehicles he’ll be using for security patrol. He’ll be working up a sweat, getting even darker out there in the Kuwaiti desert, where the heat reaches 120 degrees by day this time of year and drops to a cool 90 by night.
    And then there’s Iraq.
    “By the time I get to Iraq,” David said over bagels this morning, “I’ll be healed up great. For a while I’ll probably just be cleaning out