Free After Nothing by Rachel Mackie Page B

time, but his body had me completely pinned. I blindly felt around on the floor until I found what I was searching for: another marker. This time, a black one. I swiped at his hand. That led to an all-out marker war.
    I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed that hard before or since. It went on and on. Kane kept getting the upper hand, so then I’d call a truce. He’d make me promise to keep it, and I would, only to renege the moment I was free of him and able to grab another marker.
    It ended up with him on one side of the couch and me on the other. Kane had decided he’d had enough, and had managed to confiscate all of the weaponry except for the two markers I was holding in each hand. He was trying to negotiate my surrender across the couch, but I just kept laughing and saying no.
    So then Kane leapt over the couch, but he must have put too much weight on the back of it, and it toppled over backwards. I was laughing so hard I had tears streaming down my face. Kane was on the floor laughing too, and I collapsed beside him because my stomach muscles were hurting too much to stay upright.
    Kane plucked the markers from my hands. I gave them up without a fight. We both stopped laughing and just lay there looking at each other. There was a draft coming in under the front door, and it gave me goosebumps. The carpet we were lying on was worn, and ingrained with the sort of dirt that takes years to accumulate and can never be vacuumed out.
    I was happy to lie there though, in that draft and on that dirty carpet. Just to look at him and be with him. I wondered where he had come from. What people, throughout the history of the world, had created him: his strong body, his height, his smile. How part of each and every one of those people had contributed to make the face I was gazing at.
    While I was admiring Kane, he must have been admiring me.
    ‘You’re beautiful, woman.’
    ‘So are you.’
    ‘Say what?’
    ‘I think you are.’
    ‘A man ain’t like that.’
    ‘How’s he like?’
    ‘Tough,’ he said, grinning as he rolled over on top of me.
    We did it right there, in the cold draft and on the dirty carpet. I liked it. More than I had ever liked it before then. Kane noticed. He didn’t say anything about it, he just gave me this look afterward as he righted the couch, and it was the sort of look that made my face heat up.
    Kane went back to watching what was left of the game. I made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner because that was just about the only option. I ate two. Kane ate five, and drank a quart of milk.
    Kane then watched the post-game analysis while I lay with my head in his lap. Partway through the commentary he found an overlooked marker between two of the couch cushions. Uncapping it, he bent his head and drew a graffiti-style heart over the mess of lines he’d left on the side of my face.
    I stayed absolutely still. He finished the heart, then wrote on my neck.
    When I went and looked in the bathroom mirror, I could only make out part of what he’d written. The last word was too far round the back of my neck for me to be able to see it. I could guess it was his name though, because the other words, written in his perfect script, were ‘I belong to’. And I knew who I belonged to.
     
    Kane turned eighteen the following week, but I couldn’t hide my new tattoo from him for that long. I let him find it himself. It was fall. We were in the gym storage room, and due to the leaves falling onto the roof from the surrounding trees the skylights let in even less light that usual. We were making out on one of the discarded gym mats, and Kane tugged on the scarf I was wearing.
    ‘Lose this.’
    I unraveled the scarf then turned away from him to dump it on the ground behind me.
    ‘What’s on your neck?’ asked Kane.
    He stopped me turning back to him, his hand going to the letters tattooed to the right down the back of my neck.
    ‘Fuck. Is that my name? Is that for real?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Kane