Ness likes your piercing parlor.

It’s small and cozy—unlike you and your grandiose ideals—and it’s almost always open when she’s free from her long shift. She likes the macabre decorations you have up; she likes the curvature of the ‘Kaiser’ on your corner-store sign; she likes the magazines and the quiet of your late-night hours; she likes you—you and your piercing parlor.

The place has found its way into her heart—she makes excuses to visit.

It isn’t as if her face is filled with steel—Ness was too apprehensive to get more than a belly piercing. The consultation about angel fangs never had any date set, nor did the ones she wanted on her eyebrows or her tongue or her septum. Despite her yearning for them, the passion died when she went back to work. It’s the sort of thing that Ness hates—the birdcage which was her job chained her from any sort of look outside of pure professionalism.

Her job—Ness hates her job. She’s attending a company party in the evening regardless.

Her leg raps in the chair—a repetitive tap tap tap tap—the heel of her thrifted heart-buckled platform boots drags gently against your thorn-patterned velvet carpet. Although her heart is unsettled, she feels a distinct sense of calm around you. It’s the eye in her life’s hurricane.

She traces the small of her back upwards, peering back at you. Her spine was curved slightly, “I’m aware you don’t really do same-day piercings—or do play-piercings at all, but I have a… social gathering… coming up in a few hours, and it would be absolute magic if you could,” She pauses, formulating her words, “…give me a corset piercing. The ones you see on Pinterest.”

They seem painful. Scratch that, she knows they’re painful—her mind visions sets of little holes in her back with threaded ribbon through them tied into a bow. But they’re defiantly pretty: if she was to go, then she would go pierced by Kaiser.

“Please?” Ness’ down-turned roseate eyes droop slightly, and she smiles sheepishly. “If you would—just this once?”