Page 113 of Embrace

“I’m okay. Just nervous,” I whisper, tracing every ridge and dip of muscle. “How’s your mom and Kiyomi?”

He sits straighter, surprised now. As if he’s never thinking about himself when he’s with me. “She’s been kind of sick. It makes the brain fog worse. But it’s fine. She’ll be fine. They both are.”

“It’s okay to be sad sometimes. Doesn’t mean you’ll get stuck there.”

He swallows. “But people have.”

I tilt my head, pressing into him until all he’s able to see is me. My hands come up to cradle his face, gently guiding him to look at me. I sweep his hair back from his forehead, needing a clear view of those warm, chocolate-brown eyes.

“That doesn’t mean you’ll be one of them. I won’t let you.”

He exhales an amused breath. It’s visible right now, that hidden exhaustion behind his irises, the kind I see only when he lets me. I don’t push.

“What are you drawing?”

He pulls back to look at his Moleskine sketchbook, dragging my attention to the page. The dust of his lead pencil is smudged on the sides.

“Thinking of getting a new tattoo. My dad was an artist, so I use a lot of his old sketches. Feels more personal that way.”

“I had no idea. What kind of artist was he?”

“The hidden kind?” he chuckles. “We only found out when Kiyomi cleaned out their house a few years back. She knew how much they’d mean to me, so she sent me all of his books.”

My chest tightens as I watch the memory flicker behind his eyes. He flips through the worn, weathered pages of an old book, its edges frayed, the faded cover stamped with his dad’s initials—K. I. The same as his.

We sift through the pages together, holding up the sketches against the ink etched into his skin now. The tattoos stretch across his body like living fragments of the past, soft skin layered with stories.

He’s a shrine of his father’s dreams, I realize.

“You re-created all of your dad’s sketches?”

“Pretty much. I even tattooed a few of them on myself.” He points to a few on his arm, and they’re surprisingly well-done. They’re small, but knowing he did them makes them so much better.

“That’s really impressive, Kian.” I go back to the one that he drew today. A rush of something washes over me and I press the book into his chest. “I want this one.”

His head rears back. “What?”

“This tattoo. I want you to do it.” I lift my shirt, showing him the blank space on the side of my ribs. “Right here.”

He presses a hand over the skin. “You’re kidding, right? I don’t—you can’t get this.”

I let my shirt fall back in place. “Oh, I shouldn’t have assumed. I’m sorry.”

“No, I just mean, I’ve never tattooed anyone else before, and never with my own art.”

“I’ll be your first then,” I say, taking his hand and slipping it under the shirt so I can feel his callused palm on my warm skin. “Right here.”

“Yeah?” Kian takes my hand from where it rests in his lap andguides it to the side of his abdomen, his skin warm beneath my palm. “Then you give me the same one. Right here.”

My eyes snap to his, surprise tightening in my chest. “Really? Isn’t having matching tattoos bad luck?”

“Anything you put on my body can only be good.”

He holds me for a while after that, and when he whispers that it’s time to go, I try to prepare as much as I can to finally see Victor.

•••

“Anything, Scarlett. You’rethirsty, the vibe is off, your sweater feels itchy. The smallest thing, just call me, okay? Or text. Whatever, and I’ll be there in less than a second,” Kian says, reminding me for the hundredth time that he’ll be outside.