NEVER SPLIT THE PARTY: Adventures of the Creeping Bam (BOOK 2: One Cold Trail)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: SHAYLINE

Turns out, this hurts a lot more than I thought it would. Each strike of the needle, as gentle as Kurnev is as he's wielding his miniature hammer, is like a tiny bee-sting, repeating itself over and over again. Granted, the sudden sharp stab of each individual jab is gone in moments, but my upper arm is growing increasingly hot as the design grows within my skin, and the initial pain is slowly being answered by a growing dull ache under what's already been laid down. It also doesn't help that, every once in a while, Kurnev has to wipe away a little ink-darkened blood so he can see what he's doing, and while he's as gentle with that as he is with the hammering itself, every time he does it the contact sets fresh flame in what he's done. Clearly this is going to be tender for a little while after he's done, but then I expected nothing less.

For my part, I'm trying to be the politest and most well-behaved subject I can, but the pain still makes me forget sometimes. Every once in a while some random spot will hurt a little worse than the others, with no rime or reason behind it, and I'll tense right up in the chair, hissing and wincing in fresh pain, and it's all I can do to keep from jerking away and fouling his hand mid-line. Once or twice, mostly when we were just beginning, I even yelped, but I've largely got that under control now too. I want him to do the best job he can, I'm well aware just how permanent this is going to be, I'll have to live with it for the rest of my life ... but more than that, having already seen the original art that he's using as the basis and now seeing it being painstakingly copied onto my own shoulder and upper arm with such impressive skill is genuinely humbling. I want to be worthy of receipt of this masterpiece.

Kurnev, for his part, has been thoroughly indulgent of my every foible this entire time. Every time I wince and tense, he simply shushes me as gently as a mother calming her sleeping child when they're woken from a bad dream, his voice as soft and soothing as his touch despite the constant jab-jab-jab. And he always smiles this indulgent little half-smile, making it clear he knows full well just how much this hurts and acknowledging I'm doing my best to weather it. Kesla says I'll get used to this, may even come to crave it a little bit as time goes on, but so far I don't yet see the attraction in this particular pain.

She's been noticeably calm and amenable this whole time, which is a little infuriating for me right now, I'm having to try just as hard not to snap at her whenever she acknowledges her own relative comfort compared to what I'm enduring. Normally this backroom seems to be divided up into sections, using long, folding Abharetian-style paper screens to close each workstation off from the others. Given what we're about right now Novot folded one back between these two stations so both parties can interact with ease, and I can see Kesla as well as she can me as we're both being turned into living canvases.

Right now she's stretched out on a padded, leather-topped medical table, which seems to have been repurposed especially for this work, lying chest-down with her chin propped on her folded arms so she can watch everything Kurnev does to me. All the while Novot is pecking away at her now naked upper back, steadily working a piece across the backs of her shoulder blades and down the line of her upper spine, and as far as I can tell she hasn't noticed once. I'm starting to wonder if she even feels pain.

I'll admit, in the first few minutes after the screen was folded back and I saw her laid out there, I was a little taken back since this is the first time I've seen this much of Kesla. Her skin is beautiful, almost all of her clearly the same velvety smooth, cool smoky brown colour, like rich chocolate or creamy coffee. It's broken in a surprisingly wide variety of places by strikingly prominent near-white scars, but if anything this simply adds to how inherently gorgeous her skin is. Especially now I can see just how impressively, inherently powerful her broad, tightly-muscled form actually is. In truth I can't tear my eyes away from her for very long, and I think she's starting to notice.