I was pretty sure you were supposed to avoid swimming pools when you had a new tattoo, but still. “Have you been keeping it clean? What did you wash it with?”

“Regular soap.”

“Not the soap in your bathroom, I hope.”

He smiled nervously.

One time I almost used that soap to wash my hands then changed my mind when I saw all the grit and dirt packed around the pump. Probably teeming with boy-bacteria. Disgusting.

“Little red dots were breaking me out after I swam in the pool,” he elaborated. “That’s when the itching started. So I used stronger soap to kill any bad stuff.”

Stronger soap?

“The stuff Dad uses outside.”

“In the garage? Mechanic’s soap? That’s industrial heavy-duty grease cutter!”

“Well, I know that now. It made it worse. I couldn’t stop scratching. It scabbed up and got all red and gross.” He pulled his boxers back up, then cried out when the fabric brushed against it. “It h-u-u-rts, Cady,” he whined dramatically.

I sighed just as dramatically in response. “Why there, Jupe? It’s just inches away from . . .” Places I didn’t want to think about on him. I wrinkled up my nose, trying to drive away the disturbing image of all his future girlfriends getting an eyeful of my symbol at inopportune moments.

“Where else was I going to get it without Dad seeing it?” He angrily kicked his book bag aside and flopped down on the bed next to me, morose and weary. “Better than on my ass.”

True.

“But why did you do it?” I asked, angling to face him. “You barely know me, Jupe. You don’t know anything about me.”

He acted confused. “I know plenty about you.”

“But not everything.” You don’t know what was bred into me with magick, or that my parents were killers, or that my real name isn’t Arcadia.

“I know you hate ketchup. I know you make a weird dripping noise with your mouth when you fall asleep on your back. I know you always buy the wrong real estate when we’re playing Monopoly.”

“That’s . . .”

“I know you lost your parents,” he insisted quietly, “and I lost my mom. That makes us kinda the same in a way.”

My voice caught in my throat. I started again. “My parents weren’t very good people.”

“Neither is my mom.”

Our shoulders touched as we leaned against each other, both quiet for a long moment. I glanced across the room, spying the promotional Halloween Tambuku mummy mug on a shelf. It sat next to a small statue of Frankenstein’s monster lying on an operating slab, a resin model he’d careful constructed and painted. He’d glued the legs on the slab backward.

“It’s just that getting someone’s name tattooed on you is like a death sentence,” I finally said. “There’s a good chance you’re going to end up with a tattoo that you’ve got to get changed from Winona to Wino.”

“But that only happens when you get your girlfriend’s name tattooed on you,” he insisted. “This is different. It’ll be fine.”

My mind roamed back to Dare’s accusations the night before, when he said that Lon would get bored with me eventually. “Your dad and I are just dating, Jupe. What if we break up?”

His face fell. “What are you talking about? You live here. You can’t break up with him.”

“I don’t live here, I just—” Dammit, he was making me flustered. “Look, no one’s breaking up with anybody. I didn’t mean now.”

“You better not mean later either,” he huffed, suddenly defensive. “My dad thinks this is serious.”

“It is. Calm down.” I didn’t want to get into the messy business of relationships with him. He wouldn’t understand. Hell, I barely did myself. “Just forget about all that. What worries me most is that my sigil is a magical identifier. Having real symbols on you is dangerous. You know the seals on my arm are real. You know what I can do with them, right?” I flipped my arm over, exposing the inner flesh.

He gingerly ran his fingertips over the raised scarring of the seals there, not for the first time. “That’s where I got the idea to put your seal on me,” he admitted. “You said this one”—he stopped above Priya’s seal—“was for your dead guardian spirit and you use the others for protection. You told me your sigil would protect me when you put it on my cast, so when I got the cast taken off . . .” He swallowed hard and finished in a tiny voice. “I didn’t want to lose your protection.”

Oh.

Dueling emotions revved up inside me, slammed down on the gas pedal, and collided into each other in one glorious wreck. Before I knew what was happening, my arms were around him and he was crying on my shoulder. “It’s okay,” I murmured.

I couldn’t really remember ever comforting someone before. I certainly was never comforted much myself growing up. My parents were never “hands-on”—big surprise in hindsight.

Despite my lack of experience, it somehow came naturally. As Jupe repeatedly told me he was sorry, I gladly absorbed his angst-ridden pain, selfishly appreciating that he was warm and his shampoo smelled good, and that his angular arms felt pleasantly familiar around me. Like Lon, but not. Same, but different. At that moment, it hit me like a ton of bricks that they were a package deal.

If I was fully committed to Lon, then I had to accept that Jupe was part of that. I knew this, of course, but Lon and I didn’t exactly have a plan. One minute I was getting to know him, the next he was handing me a key to his house because “it’s just easier.” But even if Lon wasn’t vocal about the future, Jupe was already jumping ten steps ahead, marking himself as mine. Sure, the tattoo was a stupid, impulsive teenage mistake, but it said loud and clear that he was expecting me to stick around.