Grace fungus spreading in my brain

The machine buzzed in his right hand with a steady brrrrrrr, needle driving pigment beneath the skin in clean passes, black first, then a diluted gray wash that pooled, soft as cigarette smoke, around the linework. The smell of green soap, latex gloves, disinfectant, warm skin, and old coffee had soaked itself into the walls of Black Mesa Ink so deeply that Valko sometimes smelled it in his clothes two days later, when he was sitting in a metallurgy lecture pretending he did not have eighteen unread Canvas notifications and a cranky old pit bull named Myrtle waiting for him at the rescue.

Tonight, though, he had a machine in his hand, seventy-five dollars an hour on the books, and a client lying still enough to make God jealous.

Maritza Ibañez was a forty-three-year-old restaurant manager from Aurora with a laugh like coins dropped into a glass bowl and the pain tolerance of a mountain lion. She had dense black hair pinned messily atop her head with a yellow claw clip, the loose pieces curling damply against her temples and nape. Her face was heart-shaped, with a strong nose, full cheeks, sharp brown eyes, and a tiny beauty mark under the right corner of her mouth. Her left forearm carried a faded rosary tattoo, her right wrist had a burn scar shaped like a pale crescent, and the skin along her ribs trembled only when Valko wiped it with a paper towel.

“You are doing good,” Valko mumbled.

Maritza snorted. “That means I’m doing bad.”

“No. It means you are doing good.”

“You say it like a doctor before he amputates somebody’s leg.”

He dipped the needles in the cap of black ink, tapped the excess with the smallest movement of his wrist, and bent back over the stencil. “If I take your leg, I charge extra for the trauma and time.”

Her laugh knocked the paper towel tucked beneath her side. “Mijo, you are too damn dry. Somebody ever tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“My mother and sisters, and sometimes my professors. Oh, and the cashier at King Soopers once.”

“Damn . . . even customer service got you.”

“She asked if I wanted a receipt. I said no because I am trying to live a life without more paper. She did not enjoy this.”

Maritza laughed again, then hissed through her teeth when the needle crossed closer to the tender underside of her rib cage. “Ay, fuck.”

“Breathe out,” Valko murmured, voice low and calm, almost bored except for the way his eyes tracked the skin. “Long breath, like you are tired of everybody.”

“I am tired of everybody.”

“Then it should be easy.”

She exhaled in a slow shudder as Valko pulled a precise line through the lower petal of the rose curling around her ribs, his gloved fingers stretching the skin firm. The tattoo was his design, drawn between a failed thermodynamics quiz review and a phone call with his third sister, Galina, who had needed him to explain why her Corolla sounded like a spoon in a garbage disposal: 

A wild rose, open and thorned, with a black snake winding through the stems. 

Maritza, during her first consultation, had asked for something feminine, mean, and ‘a little fuck-you, but classy enough that my daughter won’t roll her eyes at me during Thanksgiving.’

Valko understood that kind of request better than he understood half the American idioms people threw at him.

The studio’s front windows were fogged at the corners from the cold gathering outside. East Colfax blinked neon and headlights beyond the glass, red taillights smearing over rain-dark asphalt. Somewhere down the block, a bus braked with a hydraulic sigh, and somewhere closer, probably in the alley, a man shouted at nobody in particular about the Broncos needing an offensive line. Two girls in cropped jackets hurried past the windows, laughing around cigarettes.

Inside, Black Mesa Ink held its usual Thursday night shape: music from the overhead speakers played low enough to talk over, high enough to keep the awkward silence at bay; tonight, it was a shuffled mess of Judas Priest, Blondie, and whatever Japanese city-pop playlist Hiroto had bullied everybody into tolerating. The flash wall was crowded with daggers, saints, crying hearts, wolves, moths, skulls, and one cursed little cartoon shrimp wearing cowboy boots that people kept asking about as a joke until they learned Paola would absolutely tattoo it.

Paola Mancini owned the place, and she ruled it with espresso, gold hoops, and weaponized patience. 

She was fifty-one, five-foot-two in platform boots, with silver hair cut into a razor-sharp bob that ended at her jaw like a blade. Her face was oval and beautifully lined around the mouth, with a Roman nose, green eyes, thin brows, and lipstick always in some shade of red that made men twice her size behave. A blackwork Madonna climbed the left side of her neck, a cracked porcelain doll covered her forearm, and her right hand had a faint     L O V E    M E     tattooed across the knuckles in letters so old they had softened blue.

At station two, Hiroto Kenji was finishing a chrome koi on a finance guy’s calf. Hiroto was thirty, narrow and wiry, with straight blue-black hair falling to his collarbones and cut in blunt bangs that made his cheekbones look even sharper. His face was long, his mouth soft, his eyes dark and sleepy behind rectangular glasses, and his skin had the pale indoor cast of someone who lived on vending-machine matcha and spite. He wore a sleeveless black turtleneck that showed roped forearms, lean shoulders, a flat chest, a tight waist, and paint-splattered cargo pants hanging low on narrow hips. A tattoo of a skeletal fox wrapped around one bicep, and a tiny silver hoop pierced the center of his lower lip, trembling as he spoke. 

“Yo, Stoyanova,” Hiroto called over the music. “You coming to Cervantes tomorrow?”

“No.”

“You always say no, man, what the hell?”

“Because I mean no, Kenji.”

“Punk show, cheap beer, and tall women.”

“I have a lab.”

“At night?”

“I have a lab and academic stress and a migraine planned at 11 pm.”

Maritza barked a laugh and immediately regretted it. “Ow, fuck, don’t make me laugh while you’re stabbing me.”

“I am not stabbing,” Valko said.

“You are literally stabbing me thousands of times.”

“With . . . art. Such cancels out.”

“Oh, with art. My bad. Continue, Picasso.”

“Picasso was a painter.”

“You know what I meant.”

He did, mostly, and when he did not, he had learned to keep his mouth shut unless the mistake was useful. 

English had gotten easier over the years, then harder in stranger ways once everyone assumed he knew it completely. Technical English was fine . . . sometimes; he understood carbon diffusion, grain boundary strengthening, phase diagrams, and precipitation hardening. That shit was easy, clean, rational, and oddly human in a way he could not explain if he tried. 

But . . . flirty English, where it falls off the tongue before the brain could catch it? That remained a room where someone kept moving the furniture in the dark.

He could write a materials characterization report at two in the morning with one eye twitching from bad coffee, but flirtation still landed in his hands like a wet fucking fish.

Tattooing was better because skin spoke the truth. It tightened when afraid, flushed when pissed, and went slick when adrenaline rose. Skin scarred, stretched, aged, softened, healed in ways that showed memories. It took damage and recorded it. There was nothing metaphorical about a needle entering the dermis at the correct depth. Too shallow, the ink fell out; too deep, the line blew ugly under the surface. You had to know pressure, angle, speed, when to push, when to stop, when the body had reached its limit . . . kinda like metal, in a way. 

People thought Valko liked metal because it was hard.

He liked metal because it changed.

Heat it, hammer it, quench it, temper it, because a thing could always become stronger after being brought to the edge of failure. Too much force made it brittle, yet too much softness made it completely useless. Every structure had memory, and every fracture told a story. However, do not get it wrong, he did not say these things out loud because people already thought he was weird, and because his youngest sister, Mila, had once told him with brutal thirteen-year-old certainty that “girls don’t want to hear about grain boundaries unless they are also going to bite you in the right bicep, because girls like to munch down on biceps a lot, be afraid.”

Mila was often wrong about math and nearly always right about social survival.

He wiped Maritza’s ribs again. “Halfway.”

“Liar.”

“A little more than halfway.”

“Better.”

The rose was opening beneath his hand, with the snake’s head resting below Maritza’s breastbone, mouth closed, eyes blank and ancient. He packed the darkest shadow along the underside of a petal and felt that familiar pleasure, quiet and exact, settle behind his sternum. It was . . . mmm . . . work pleasure, competence pleasure, accompanied with a clean line, a steady client, and the money worth the hour.

His phone buzzed face down on his tray stand, its vibration making the bottles of ink tremble. He ignored it; it didn’t matter; the damn thing buzzed again, then again, and again.

Paola’s eyes slid toward him. “Family?”

“Probably.”

“Blood family or school family?”

“Both make the same amount of crying.”

“Check it after that pass.”

Valko finished the line, lifted the machine, and wiped. “Break,” he huffed, rolling his shoulder back.

“Thank fuck,” Maritza muttered, reaching for her own phone.

He stripped off his gloves, dropped them in the bin, and picked up his phone with the clean hand habit so deeply beaten into him by Paola that he now judged surgeons in movies. Six notifications: three from the group chat named STOYANOVA GIRL ARMY 🦇, one from Canvas, one from Astra Animal Rescue, and one from his mother.

The family chat was absolute chaos, which was nothing out of the ordinary for his five little sisters. 

GALINA: if a car sounds like marbles does that mean oil change DANI: girl why is the car making any sound MILA: ask valko he loves suffering NADIA: VALKO do you think mom will notice if i dye my hair copper VESI: copper like wire or copper like hozier woman MILA: copper like she is about to make bad choices

His mother’s text came in a separate notification banner.

MAMA: You eat? MAMA: Do not say coffee.

Valko rubbed the bridge of his nose, the smell of green soap clinging to his knuckles even through the memory of gloves. He texted Galina to check the oil and stop driving if the sound got worse, told Nadia their mother would notice because their mother had eyes like a prison guard and God combined, and sent his mother a picture of the half-eaten burrito Paola had forced into his hand at six.

MAMA: This is not dinner, child. This is sadness in foil.

He smiled before he could stop himself.

Maritza noticed it almost instantly. “There he is.”

Valko glanced up, head tilting. “What?”

“You got dimples, scary boy.”

“No.”

“You do.”

“I do not have dimples.”

“You absolutely do. Little mean dimples, like the devil’s baby pictures.”

Paola hummed from the counter, toying with a pen. “She’s right.”

“Tragic. You should sue your face,” Hiroto added. 

Valko put his phone down. “Everybody is very loud today.”

“You work in a tattoo shop,” Paola deadpanned. “We are not monks.”

“Some monks tattoo.”

“That is the kind of thing that makes people call you dry, sweetheart.”

Maritza shifted on the table, winced, and reached for her water bottle. “How old are you, Valko?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Mm. Baby.”

“I pay taxes?”

“Everybody pays taxes. Doesn’t mean you’re grown. You got a girl?”

Hiroto made a small, wicked noise from station two, and Paola’s gaze sharpened like she had been waiting for this ambush with maternal interest. Valko put on fresh gloves very slowly, his answer slowly trekking up his tongue: “No.”

“No like no, or no like it’s complicated?”

“No like no.”

“With that face? Those shoulders? That whole grumpy Dracula gym-rat thing you have going on?”

“My thing is not Dracula.”

“Bulgarian, right? Close enough.”

“First of all, Dracula is Romanian.”

“See? Dry.”

Hiroto laughed hard enough that his client looked nervous.

Valko adjusted the lamp instead of engaging, and the light poured over Maritza’s side, showing the redness rising around the fresh ink. “Ready?”

“No, but I’m a bad bitch.”

“This is a good attitude.”

“There’s the endorsement I needed.”

The machine started again with a sharp bzzzzzt, and for the next hour, Valko stayed inside the work. He liked that tattooing demanded enough of him to keep everything else outside the door: loneliness, homework, his bank account, the old ache in his right forearm under the sleeve of ink, the stupid idea of getting his tongue pierced even though his mother would cross the Atlantic with a wooden spoon just to threaten him properly.

He already had the appointment booked.

Technically.

Okay, fine, it was a consultation.

. . . mostly.

He had not told anyone except Hiroto, who had been unbearable about it.

The wound beneath his right sleeve pulled when he leaned too far, nothing dramatic. It was a half-healed slice from a shelter accident two weeks ago, when a scared shepherd mix with cataracts had panicked during intake and knocked a broken kennel latch into Valko’s arm. The dog had pissed himself afterward and trembled so violently that Valko forgot to be annoyed. He had then wrapped the wound, cleaned the blood off the floor, and sat beside the kennel for forty minutes, speaking Bulgarian to an animal who understood none of the words and all of the tone.

“Gorkoto momche,” he had murmured. Poor boy.

By the time he finished Maritza’s tattoo, the rose looked as if it had grown out of her body, and the snake looked ready to slide beneath her sternum. The skin was angry, glossy from ointment, bordered by faint purple stencil ghosts he would wipe away before wrapping. Maritza sat up slowly, hand hovering over the tattoo like she wanted to touch it and knew better.

“Mirror,” Valko said, straightening up.

Paola brought the standing mirror over, her gold bracelets chiming. 

Maritza twisted carefully, and, for the first time all night, she went quiet. The tattoo curved with her ribs, flattering the softness instead of fighting it, with the petals blooming along the swell beneath her breast, thorns trailing toward her waist, the snake cutting a dark path through it all. Feminine, mean, and the perfect little fuck-you that she wanted. 

She swallowed. “Oh.”

Valko watched her face more than the tattoo. He always did at the end, because, well, some people smiled, some people cried, and some people stared like they had finally found a way to make their bodies answer back.

“It’s exactly what I wanted,” she said, voice rougher now.

“Good.”

“No, I mean exactly.” She blinked hard, then laughed at herself. “Damn it, I said I wasn’t gonna get emotional.”

“Emotion is included in the price.”

Paola made a soft sound, and Hiroto glanced over before pretending he was not looking.

Maritza turned from the mirror and caught Valko’s wrist with two fingers, careful of the gloves. “You’re gifted, mijo.”

Gifted. Shit. Compliments had always entered him sideways, ever since he was a young boy, like a blade slipping awkwardly between his ribs. He could handle critique, pressure, deadlines, being called intimidating, and being mistaken for an asshole. Sincere praise, however, made him want to walk into Denver traffic.

“Thank you,” he said, stiffly enough that Maritza smiled.

“There. Was that so painful?”

“Yes.”

“Poor baby.”

He cleaned and wrapped her, explained aftercare in his usual blunt way, and ignored Paola mouthing poor baby behind Maritza’s back. When Maritza paid, she tipped him fifty in cash and two foil-wrapped empanadas from the restaurant she managed.

“For later,” she winked. “—since your mama knows that burrito was bullshit.”

“My mother has spies everywhere, it seems.”

“Good. Somebody should.”

When she left, the studio door opened into a gust of October cold, wet pavement, bus exhaust, and weed smoke from the sidewalk. The bell above the door clanged twice and settled, and Valko stood at his station for a moment with the cash in one hand and the empanadas in the other.

Paola sipped her espresso. “Don’t look so suspicious. People feed men who look hungry.”

“I do not look hungry.”

“You always look hungry.”

“For violence,” Hiroto sang from his side.

“For sleep,” Paola corrected. “For a decent meal. For someone to sit on him until he stops checking email after midnight. Maybe for someone to help him get laid.”

Valko’s head turned slowly toward her.

She raised both hands, innocent as a saint in a courtroom. “Spiritually.”

Hiroto wheezed.

Valko started breaking down his station with more force than necessary. “Everybody here needs a hobby.”

“This is my hobby,” Paola said.

“Harassing me?”

“Mentoring.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“In my culture, it is.”

He stripped the barriers, disposed of the needle cartridge, and wiped the tray, cord, bottle, and armrest until they went from clean to cleaner to clean enough to make the next thing possible. He had always liked resetting a space after work; it soothed the part of his mind that hated unfinished edges. By nine-thirteen, his client forms were filed, the cash was folded into his wallet, and the empanadas were tucked into his backpack beside a metallurgy textbook thick enough to kill a raccoon. Hiroto was still talking to his client about second-skin bandages. Paola counted the register with reading glasses low on her nose.

“You heading home?” she asked.

“Gym first.”

Paola looked at him over the glasses, unimpressed. “Of course.”

“It is back day.”

“Oh, forgive me. A holy observance.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand plenty. You boys lift heavy things because therapy has a copay.”

He slung his backpack over one shoulder. “Therapy does not make lats and rear delts.”

“No, but it might teach you to receive a compliment without looking like someone slapped your grandmother.”

“Excuse me, my grandmother slapped people back.”

He pulled on his jacket, black denim with the elbows worn soft, and tucked his hair under the hood for the walk. In the mirror behind Paola, he caught himself in pieces: six-two, shoulders filling the jacket, dark teal shirt beneath, neck marked faintly from the chain he always wore, hair a dusty rose-brown mess from running his hands through it too many times, thick brows drawn in his usual involuntary scowl, amber-brown eyes looking meaner than he felt. The tattoo sleeve down his right arm disappeared under fabric, but he could feel it as a second skin: blackwork, old family motifs, a wolf skull, a stylized firebird, geometric bands inspired by embroidery his baba had once stitched onto cloth in Popovo.

He looked like someone who had never once apologized gently in his life.

He apologized gently all the time, mostly to dogs.

“Lock the back when you leave,” Paola said.

“I know.”

“And eat the empanadas.”

“I know.”

“And call your mother.”

“I know.”

“And get laid.”

The silence afterward was so clean it deserved framing.

Hiroto dropped something metal while trying to muffle the ugly snort.

Valko stared at Paola.

Paola stared back, utterly unmoved, espresso cup steaming in her hand like a prop from a mafia movie.

“Goodnight,” Valko said.

“Goodnight, sweetheart. Get laid.”

The cold hit his face as soon as he stepped outside, needling through the heat of the studio. Colfax smelled like rainwater, gasoline, fried onions from the late-night cart on the corner, cigarette ash, damp concrete, and the sugary rot of spilled soda near the bus stop. Traffic hissed over wet pavement, a couple argued beside a rideshare with the door hanging open, their voices bouncing off the brick, and someone’s bass rattled hard enough to shake the windows of the pawn shop next door.

Valko walked with his hood up and his hands in his pockets, backpack thumping between his shoulders. He was aware, in the way men like him learned to be aware without thinking, of every person within twenty feet. The drunk man was leaning too close to the bus schedule. The two college guys were shoving each other and laughing. The woman in scrubs was power-walking with pepper spray already threaded between her fingers, and the older man was pushing a shopping cart full of blankets and aluminum cans. Nobody bothered him. 

It used to bother him to be read as dangerous by strangers. Then it became useful, and then it became funny in a bitter little way, because he knew exactly how easily he could be bullied by a twelve-pound elderly dachshund with no teeth and a fleece sweater that said PRINCESS.

His truck waited in the lot behind the shop, a dented charcoal Toyota Tacoma with dog hair permanently embedded in the passenger seat and a Def Leppard cassette jammed in the deck because he had bought the thing used from a man in Lakewood who apparently lived inside 1987. Valko tossed his backpack in, climbed behind the wheel, and sat for several seconds without starting it.

The cab smelled like cold leather, pine air freshener, tattoo disinfectant clinging to his sleeves, and faint dog.

His phone lit up.

ASTRA ANIMAL RESCUE: Myrtle ate a full dinner!!! No growling today. See you Tuesday? MILA: valko answer important MILA: if a guy says he likes “females” should i bite him VALKO: yes MILA: thank you VALKO: metaphorically MILA: oh too late

He closed his eyes.

Then he laughed, once, low and helpless, fogging the inside of the windshield.

Fine. He was doing fine.

He started the truck and drove west toward the gym, Judas Priest grinding through the speakers, rain tapping the windshield in frantic little clicks. Denver slid by in pieces of yellow light and black glass. Tattoo money in his wallet. Empanadas in his bag. Homework waiting like a curse. His mother was unsatisfied with his dinner. His sisters were one bad decision away from requiring legal intervention. His arm was aching, his body was tired, and his head was too damn full.

Fine.

Better than fine.

The gym sat in a strip mall between a closed vape shop and a twenty-four-hour laundromat, its sign flickering blue-white against the wet night. IRON SAINTS, because apparently subtlety had died in Colorado around the same time everyone decided exposed brick counted as personality. Inside, the place smelled like rubber mats, metal, sweat, chalk, disinfectant spray, and the vanilla protein powder somebody had spilled near the front desk. Old-school rock blasted from speakers that crackled whenever the treadmills all ran at once.

Valko liked Iron Saints because nobody there wanted small talk from him.

Mostly.

“—Big FUCKING V!” hollered Rafiq Bell from the squat racks.

Mostly belonged to Rafiq. 

Rafiq was thirty-four, six-foot-six, and built like somebody had stacked two refrigerators and taught them to deadlift before puberty. His skin was deep brown with warm undertones, his shaved head gleamed under the fluorescent lights, and his beard was cut sharp along a square jaw. He had a broad face, a wide nose, heavy-lidded eyes, and a chipped front tooth that made his smile look reckless, with shoulders enormous under a cut-off gray hoodie. His chest was thick enough to strain the armholes, belly solid and powerful, waist wide, thighs like tree trunks in black compression shorts, and calves round and veined above red lifting shoes. A tattoo of a phoenix covered one calf; a surgical scar ran across his left knee. He wore wrist wraps, chalk dust on his palms, and the perpetual expression of a man thrilled to suffer voluntarily.

“Oh, absolutely not,” Valko said.

“You don’t even know what I’m asking.”

“You are going to ask something stupid.”

“I was gonna ask if you wanted to hit deadlifts.”

“Yes. See? Stupid.”

“Back day, baaaaby!”

“It is also my back day.”

“Then stop flirting and get over here.”

“First of all, I do not flirt with men who wear red shoes.”

“Fuuucking coward.”

Valko changed in the locker room, swapping jeans for black shorts and his jacket for an old sleeveless band shirt cut so low at the sides that his ribs showed when he moved. Rafiq called it ‘whoreish.’ Maybe it was. The air in there smelled sharper: deodorant, mildew from the showers, foot powder, hot water, and old sweat baked into tile. He shoved his clothes into a locker and stood for a second beneath the ugly fluorescent light, rolling his right shoulder, testing the pull under his sleeve.

The healing wound tugged. Nothing opened. Good.

He ran a hand through his hair, making it worse, and some random guy at the sink glanced at him . . . and glanced away fast.

Valko sighed. 

Okay. 

Out on the floor, Rafiq had loaded a bar with an obscene amount of weight and was stretching his hamstrings with theatrical groans. A pair of women near the cable machines discussed a coworker named Brent who apparently microwaved fish in the break room, which should’ve been fucking illegal. Two teenagers in matching hoodies took turns filming bicep curls. An older man with white hair and a Vietnam veteran hat walked slow circles between sets, smelling faintly of Bengay and spearmint gum.

Valko warmed up with pull-ups. Bodyweight first, dead hang, then up until his chin cleared the bar. The movement pulled his shirt open at the sides, letting air cool the sweat along his ribs. His lats flared, shoulder blades drawing down, arms bending as his body rose in a clean line. 

He did ten. Dropped. Added a belt and clipped on the weight.

Rafiq whistled. “Look at this Eastern European nonsense.”

“Shhhh, I am an American citizen.”

“Your pull-ups are not.”

Valko chalked his hands. “My pull-ups have a green card.”

The second set burned, and the third set scraped pleasure out of pain, that deep muscular ache that quieted everything else. He liked lifting because it turned the body honest, because weight either moved or it did not. Your excuses meant jack shit to iron. He could be tired, lonely, overstimulated, behind on coursework, worried about money, irritated by his own skin, and the bar would still demand the same thing from him.

Grip. Brace. Pull.

His breath came rough, hhhuh, hhhuh, through his nose. Sweat slid down his spine under the thin cotton. The gym lights shone over his shoulders while Rafiq shouted encouragement that would have gotten them kicked out of a nicer facility.

“Come on, Big V! Pull that shit like it owes your mama rent!”

The bar rose.

“Yeah, there you go!”

Valko locked it out, held it, and lowered it with control. His palms stung, and his back lit up hot and heavy. For a few seconds after the set, he stood with both hands braced on his hips, head tilted back, breathing through the burn while the music shifted into “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

“Your song,” Rafiq said.

“My song is my beloved silence that everyone seems to deny me.”

“Oh, bullshit. Your song is whatever plays while you look pissed and moisturized.”

Valko paused, glancing down at his arms. “ . . . I am not moisturized.”

“You should be. Colorado air is no fucking joke.”

They worked for a little over an hour, alternating between pull-ups, rows, deadlifts, face pulls, and dumbbell shrugs. Valko’s body moved from stiff to hot to fully awake, sweat darkening the collar of his shirt, hair falling over his forehead in damp pieces. His hands smelled like chalk and iron, calluses breaking with every pump. The bar knurling pressed diamonds into his palms. Every rep made the healing cut pulse beneath the bandage, a dull warning he ignored until the last deadlift sent a thin flash up his forearm.

He set the bar down with a heavy clank.

Rafiq’s grin faded. “Arm?”

“Fine.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It is fine.”

“Big V.”

Valko flexed his fingers. No blood. Good. “Shelter cut. Healing.”

“From that shepherd?”

“Yes.”

“Man, you gotta stop trying to cuddle the traumatized ones.”

“They need it the most.”

Rafiq’s face softened, which, on someone his size, looked like weather changing over a mountain. “Yeah. I know.”

That was the other reason Valko tolerated him: Rafiq talked like an idiot eighty percent of the time, but he understood certain things without having to be explained to. He had two rescue mutts, a dead brother, and a heart that kept showing through the cracks in his gym-bro performance.

They wiped down the equipment. Valko showered fast, hot water drumming against his shoulders, steam rising around him with the smell of cheap gym soap and wet tile. He kept the bandage mostly dry by angling his arm out of the spray, which made the shower awkward and did nothing for the ache in his lower back. Water slipped over the ridge of his collarbone, over the hard plane of his chest, and down his abdomen in narrow streams that caught in the hair below his navel. His skin overheated from lifting, and his breath was heavier than it needed to be. There was a dull, thick pull low in his pelvis that he tried to ignore by washing his hair. Ha. As if. 

The gym shower curtain clung to his thigh.

He muttered, “For fuck’s sake,” under the water.

It was normal—annoying—but normal. A body did not care that he had homework due tomorrow at midnight and also midnight on Sunday. A cock did not care that his mother might call in fifteen minutes. His blood did not give a shit about thermodynamic modeling or whether he had clean socks for tomorrow. He had gone months with nothing but his own hand and occasional bad decisions he abandoned before they became worse decisions, and now the hot water touched him wrong—or right, fuck—and his body reacted with humiliating enthusiasm.

He braced one hand on the tile and breathed through his nose until the worst of it passed.

Mostly.

He was still so fucking horny.

The tile was cold under his palm, and the water beat down on the back of his neck. Around him, the locker room carried the muffled slam of lockers, the squeak of sneakers, Rafiq laughing somewhere outside about a fantasy football trade. Public place . . . thin curtain . . . oh, absolutely not.

Valko shut the water off hard enough to make the pipe knock.

At home, then.

He dressed in clean joggers and a black hoodie, damp hair shoved back, skin still radiating heat. The empanadas waited in his backpack, as if Paola and Maritza had conspired with his mother from three different points in the city. He ate one in the truck before leaving the gym parking lot, flaky pastry dropping crumbs onto his lap, beef and olives and spice filling his mouth with enough warmth that he groaned before he could stop it.

“Mmmh.”

He froze, mid-chew, then looked around the empty cab as if someone might have heard.

Rain tapped the windshield. The truck smelled like hot food, wet cotton, pine, and the faint musk of his own clean sweat rising from his hoodie. Okay . . . 

He ate the second empanada at a red light with no dignity at all.

His apartment was in Golden, close enough to campus to make commuting tolerable and far enough from Denver that rent only stabbed him a little, instead of disemboweling him. The building was a square brick thing from the seventies with bad hallway carpet and a laundry room that ate quarters. The hallway smelled like old carpet, someone’s garlic dinner, laundry detergent, and the neighbor’s incense. Mrs. Okonkwo in 2B had left a folded note taped to the wall by the mailboxes reminding people not to leave wet boots on the shared mat. Someone had underlined please twice. Someone else had drawn a tiny frowny face.

Inside, Valko’s apartment was warm, dim, and cleaner than anyone would expect from a grad student who worked part-time and lifted heavy things. Books stacked on the coffee table: metallurgical thermodynamics, transport phenomena, failure analysis, a Bulgarian poetry collection his mother had given him, and he pretended not to read. A squat gray couch faced a secondhand TV, and nearby was a small kitchen that held three mugs in the sink, one pan on the stove, and a jar of protein powder beside a bag of rice. His desk sat by the window, crowded with notebooks, tattoo sketches, a half-disassembled mechanical pencil, and a tiny ceramic dog one of his sisters had made in high school art class. 

The place smelled like sandalwood detergent, coffee grounds, graphite, warmed dust from the radiator, and the lingering spice of the empanadas.

He dropped his keys in the bowl, locked the door, and then checked the lock again because his mother had raised him properly paranoid. His phone buzzed before he made it three steps.

MAMA calling.

He stared at it for half a heartbeat before answering. “Zdravei, Mamo.”

“You sound tired,” his mother said in Bulgarian.

“I am always tired.”

“This is not a good answer.”

“It is a true answer.”

“The truth can still be stupid.”

He smiled, toeing off his shoes near the couch. “I ate.”

“The foil sadness you showed me hours ago?”

“Empanadas also.”

“From where?”

“A client.”

“A woman client, oh?”

“Mamo.”

“I ask a normal question.”

“You ask like the police.”

“You are twenty-six. The police should ask too.”

He rubbed his forehead and walked to the kitchen. The radiator clicked. Outside, rain whispered against the window glass.

“She is married and has a daughter. All I did was give her a tattoo.”

“Fine. You make beautiful tattoos. You send picture?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Now.”

“It is on ribs.”

“So?”

“I am not sending you ribs of a stranger woman.”

His mother made a displeased sound that contained Bulgaria, motherhood, and the entire history of Catholic guilt, despite them not being Catholic at all.

“You are difficult, Valko.”

“I came from you.”

“Ha. Eat the fruit.”

“I have one banana on the counter.”

“One banana is not fruit. It is monkey bread.”

“That is not . . . an expression, Mamo.”

“It is now.” A pause, and her voice softened by half a thread. “Your arm?”

“Fine.”

“Do not lie.”

“I changed the bandage. It is healing.”

“You work too much.”

“I am fine.”

“You always say this.”

“Because I am.”

His mother sighed, and Valko could picture her exactly: Elena Stoyanova at the kitchen table in Denver, hair dyed dark brown but silver at the roots, house slippers, reading glasses on a chain, one hand wrapped around tea she would forget to drink, because she worried like other people breathed. She raised six children in a country that first made her tongue feel clumsy, and then concern slowly turned into both a weapon and a prayer.

“You come Sunday. I make the kavarma.”

“I have an exam on Monday.”

“You study here. Your sisters will be quiet.”

He laughed. She did too, because the lie was too big even for maternal optimism.

“I come for dinner,” he said. “Then I go.”

“Good boy.”

“Mamo.”

“You are always my good boy, even with tattoos like a criminal.”

“I make money with tattoos.”

“Criminals also make money.”

“Leka nosht.”

“Eat fruit. Sleep. Do not get more holes in your face.”

His silence betrayed him.

“Valko . . .”

“I said goodnight.”

“VALKO—”

Valko hung up. Oops. The apartment went quiet immediately afterward—quiet enough for the refrigerator to him and the radiator to click. He could hear the distant rain pattering against the window and the faint bass from someone’s TV below. He stood in the kitchen with his phone in his hand and heat creeping up the back of his neck because his mother had absolutely sensed the tongue piercing through the phone like a witch.

Fine.

He washed the mugs and set rice in the cooker for tomorrow before putting the leftover burrito out of its misery. Then he checked Canvas and saw the metallurgy problem set blinking, due tomorrow at 11:59 PM. 

Fine.

He could do two hours, maybe three.

He sat at the desk, opened his notebook, and tried to focus on diffusion coefficients, pencil moving for twenty minutes. Then forty. He solved one problem, half of another, crossed out a derivation so hard the paper tore, and watched rain distort the reflection of his own lamp in the window. The apartment grew warmer. His clean hoodie became too much, so he peeled it off and worked in his T-shirt. Then that became too much too, clinging across his back and shoulders with the leftover heat from the gym.

He checked his phone.

No new messages, except Mila sending a photo that appeared to show a dent in someone’s car door, along with the caption: "before you get mad, consider feminism."

Valko put the phone face-down.

The pencil rolled under his palm as he tried to concentrate, to no avail. His right forearm ached. His back felt heavy from rows—the sort of wonderful, deep soreness blooming between his shoulder blades—and his thighs felt loose and used. Every sensation had edges tonight, it seemed.

He lasted another seven minutes.

Then he stood abruptly, chair legs scraping the floor.

No.

He paced once from the desk to the kitchen and back. Opened the fridge, then closed it like a loser, before drinking water straight from the bottle. Oh, and then stared at the ceiling like the answer might be written in plaster.

He was not a monk. Paola had that part right.

His body wanted what it wanted, and, fuck, it wanted contact . . . weight, heat, maybe a pretty, glossy mouth against his. He could feel five soft fingers in his hair and nails down his back, belonging to some warm, willing body pulling him close instead of expecting him to always be the strong one. The wanting was not delicate, god no. It had teeth and lived low and hot under discipline, under school, under work, under being the eldest son who answered the phone, fixed the car, lifted the heavy thing, translated the document, and showed up on Thursdays for dogs nobody else wanted.

He pressed the heel of his hand against the front of his joggers.

The pressure punched a rough breath out of him.

“Hh.”

His cock was already half-hard, thickening against his thigh, and the contact made his abdomen tighten. Annoyance flickered through him first, then relief so sharp it felt almost like anger. He hooked his fingers under the waistband, stopped, listened to the apartment like he expected judgment from the radiator.

Nothing. 

The only sound came from rain, the refrigerator, and maybe the distant TV. 

He turned off the desk lamp, letting the room fall into a soft blue-gray sort of darkness, coupled with the city light and rainlight leaking through the blinds. It made him feel less observed, which was fucking stupid because he lived alone, but bodies were stupid in ancient ways.

Now in the bedroom, he stripped with none of the grace people probably imagined he had. The shirt was dragged off and dropped, and the joggers were shoved down. Boxers after, and socks saved for last, because nothing killed a mood like socks and nudity, and even sexually frustrated men deserved standards.

The bedroom smelled like clean cotton, cedar from the cheap blocks in his dresser, the sandalwood of his detergent, and the warm human scent of him. His bed was made . . . mostly: dark green sheets, a gray blanket, two pillows flattened from years of abuse. A stack of clean laundry sat on the chair, judging him.

He sat on the edge of the bed naked, elbows on his knees, head bowed.

For several seconds, he did nothing.

His cock stood hard between his thighs, flushed darker at the head, a bead of precum shining at the slit. He was thick and pale, proportionate to the rest of him, heavy enough to curve slightly upward when fully hard, the shaft veined along the underside, skin smooth over heat. His balls hung tight from the workout and the cold that still clung faintly to the apartment. Dark hair framed the base, trimmed carelessly when he remembered, ignored when he did not.

He looked down at himself with a flat expression.

“Ridiculous,” he muttered.

His cock twitched.

“Traitor.”

The laugh that came out of him was breathless and rough—it broke something, some last little barrier of embarrassment, maybe. He leaned back on one hand and wrapped the other around himself, and the first stroke made his eyes close. 

“Ohh, fuck.”

His hand moved slowly at first, palm dragging over the head, fingers tightening around the shaft on the downstroke. He was sensitive from ignoring it too long, from the shower, from lifting, from being tired enough that every nerve seemed closer to the surface. He swiped his thumb through the precum and used it to slick the glide, jaw flexing when the pleasure sharpened.

Outside, a car passed through the rain with a wet shhhhhh. The stupid radiator knocked twice. His breathing filled the bedroom.

He spread his thighs wider, feet planted on the floor, shoulders slumped, head tipping back, the position opening him to the cool room and the heat of his own hand. His biceps flexed with each stroke, and his abdomen tightened, relaxed, tightened again, a faint line of muscle pulling from hip to groin. The tattooed arm braced behind him, fingers gripping the mattress, while his left hand worked his cock with increasing confidence.

This was the part he never admitted to anyone: he was good at being alone, and he hated how good he was at it.

His hand knew the exact pressure, knew the twist near the head that made his hips jerk and the slower drag down to the base, the firm squeeze that made his balls draw up, and his breath catch. He knew when to be cruel and when to give in. He could teach someone that, in theory. He really could. 

“Mmh—da, fuck.”

This time, he imagined no face, only sensation.

A warm body in that abstract way, with some weight in his lap and a glossy mouth near his ear, perhaps even a bell-like giggle ringing through his eardrums. Hands sliding over his shoulders, down his chest, tracing the tattoos, squeezing the muscle there. Someone wanting his size instead of fearing it. Someone laughing softly when his English broke, then kissing him hard enough to shut him the hell up. Someone saying his name as if it belonged in a mouth.

. . .Valko.

His hips pushed into his fist.

“Ah—shit.”

He stopped abruptly, breath ragged, hand clamped around the base to hold back the rush. Too fast, shit, all thanks to months of discipline and one stupid shower that left him embarrassingly close already. He sat there, chest rising and falling, cock throbbing in his grip, precum wetting his knuckles. The restraint made it all so much fucking worse. Pleasure pulsed low in his spine, dark and demanding, causing his thighs to tremble once. Valko peeked down and watched his hand loosen ever so slightly, letting his shaft jump against his palm, and another clear bead gather at the weeping head. His mouth went dry at that.

Well. Shit. 

He stood and went to the dresser, because if he was going to lose this particular fight, he was not going to do it like a teenager with a carpet burn and regret. The second drawer stuck. He yanked it open, found the small bottle of lube shoved beneath compression shorts, and returned to the bed with his face hot despite the empty room. The lube was cold when it hit his palm.

“Chh—fuck.” 

Then slickness.

He stretched out on the bed this time, back against the pillows, knees bent, thighs parted. The gray blanket bunched beneath one calf. Rainlight striped his body through the blinds as one slick hand closed around the thickness of his cock. Shhk, shhk, shhk, each stroke slick from base to head, fingers twisting, palm cupping the swollen crown. His breath fell into rhythm with it, rough little exhales, hhh, hhh, hhh, that became groans when he stopped fighting them.

He was not quiet by nature. A man did not learn the art of quietness in an apartment full of sisters, in shared bedrooms, in thin-walled family spaces where privacy came in scraps. Now? Quietness was as far gone as his promise towards celibacy. 

“Nnh—fuck, good. Good.”

He rolled his hips up into his fist, then slowed, using both hands for a second: one gripping the base, the other stroking over the head with maddening little circles that made his abdomen jump. His balls tightened. The inner thighs tensed. Meanwhile, heat quickly climbed up his neck and face.

His mind drifted to touch again.

Touch, or the concept of it, was vague and faceless, which felt . . . safer that way. But . . . shit, this time around, it had a pretty face, feminine and sweet, pretty doe eyes staring up at him like he hung the moon and stars, followed by a palm pressed flat to his stomach. Fingers curled around his chain; a wet mouth open against his jaw, leaving a trail of saliva he’d love too damn much. She’d straddle him, knees on either side of his hips, softness and heat held over him while he lay there trying not to grab too hard. He would grab too hard, then apologize, then be laughed at, then be kissed again.

His fist sped up.

“Ah, ah—mmmh, mamka mu—”

The curse rasped out of him. He arched, shoulders pressing into the pillows, muscles standing out in his neck. His hand moved faster, slicker, tighter, the wet sound filling the room. His cock was flushed deep now, head swollen, shaft rigid and hot in his grip. He dragged his thumb under the crown, and his hips kicked hard.

He did not stop this time.

He planted one foot harder into the mattress and fucked up into his fist with short, rough thrusts, chasing the pressure that had been stalking him since the gym shower. His free hand gripped the sheet beside his hip. The wound in his right arm pulled, and he ignored it. Sweat gathered at his sternum despite the cool room, mixing with the smell of detergent, cedar, and the musk of his arousal, sharp and warm beneath the rain-damp air.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck—ahh—”

His orgasm hit like something breaking loose.

His whole body locked as the first pulse tore a deep groan out of him, “Nnhh—oh, fuck.” Cum shot over his fist and onto his lower stomach in a hot stripe. Another soon followed, thick and white across his abdomen, then another weaker pulse that made his cock jerk in his hand. His balls drew up tight, thighs shaking, hips lifting through each spasm until he had nothing left but breath and heat and the slick mess cooling on his skin.

For a while, he lay there with his hand still wrapped loosely around himself, chest heaving, eyes closed.

Rain scratched softly against the glass.

The apartment smelled unmistakably of sex now, layered beneath the cedar and cotton and old radiator dust—something human, male, warm, and ridiculously horny, the kind of smell that made loneliness feel physical after the pleasure faded.

Valko opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.

“Fine,” he whispered to no one.

His voice sounded wrecked enough that he laughed under his breath, then dragged a hand down his face. He got up before he could sink too deeply into whatever waited after and cleaned himself with tissues from the nightstand. Then washed his hands in the bathroom with too much soap, splashed water on his face, sighed twice, and checked the bandage on his arm. There he found a faint pink bloom under the edge.

“Idiot,” he told his reflection. “Idiot. You’re an idiot.” 

The man standing in the mirror glared back with damp hair, flushed cheekbones, dark brows, and eyes softer than his face knew how to somehow carry. Naked, broad, tattooed, and exhausted. Mean-looking, despite being tender in inconvenient places. All alone in a warm apartment with soap and sex and rain clinging thick in the air. 

“Idiot.”

With another sigh, he turned his attention to his bandage, changing it with practiced care—taping the gauze down—before returning to the bedroom for clean boxers and, perhaps, a crumb of dignity. His phone buzzed on the desk before he could pull on a shirt.

Canvas notification.

MTGN 573.703: Advanced Failure Analysis & Microstructural Forensics.  Metallurgical Thermodynamics: Problem Set 03 - Stress Intensity and Crack Propagation Due Tomorrow.

He stood there, half-dressed, post-orgasm calm curdling immediately into academic hatred.

“Bitch,” he said, with feeling.

Ten minutes later, Valko was back at his desk, hair damp and shoulders loose, with a mug of tea steaming beside his notebook because his mother’s voice had infected him. The bedroom still held the faint scent of what he had done, simply softened now by peppermint tea and graphite shavings. Rain kept falling outside. His body felt wrung out and heavy in a way that made concentration almost possible.

He solved the second problem and then the third.

At 12:38 AM, he submitted the assignment with twenty-one hours to spare, which felt virtuous enough to be suspicious. He uploaded the PDF, watched Canvas accept it with confetti, and leaned back in the chair while the confirmation screen glowed smugly.

His phone buzzed again.

MILA: update: biting him did solve it

VALKO: metaphorically?

MILA: emotionally VALKO: okay acceptable MILA: love u scary nerd VALKO: love you menace

He set the phone down, scanning around the apartment. The tattoo sketches on his desk waited under the lamp, with one unfinished design showing a dog’s graying muzzle surrounded by marigolds. Another had a moth with wings patterned after Bulgarian embroidery. A third was only a page of rough lines, all sharp angles and soft shadows, the kind of thing he drew when his mind needed to move but had nowhere to go.

He picked up the pencil again.

Outside, Denver and Golden blurred together under rain and late-night traffic. Inside, Valko worked in the small pool of desk light, bare shoulders cooling, tea forgotten beside him, tattooed arm aching quietly, mind finally settled into that narrow, useful silence where shape became line and line became meaning.

He was doing fine—

—better than fine, actually.

Life was good when he was getting paid for a tattoo, when the dogs ate dinner without whining, when his sisters kept surviving themselves, when his mother worried loud enough to keep him tethered, when iron moved because he told it to, and when homework was submitted before midnight, and the room smelled like rain instead of wanting.

At 1:17 AM, Valko shaded the moth's throat with careful graphite strokes, slow and dark and patient, until the creature on the page looked ready to crawl out of its own skin.