Page 97 of Possessive Ink

Placing all of his boxes down onto the tattoo couch at his station, Atticus comes to me, reaching for me the moment he’s close enough. I happily go to him, curling myself into his body, and exhaling once his familiar scent surrounds me.

“I was just telling Lemon that if she comes here after she finishes work tomorrow, I can introduce her to Betty and Leo,” Octy announces.

“I’ll walk round and meet you between clients,” Atticus says. “Then we can walk back here together.”

“Okay,” I easily agree.

“You’ll like Betty. But I don’t know who the fuck Leo is,” he growls.

“She’s our piercer slash receptionist. She’s hilarious,” Octy tells us.

“Etta is working tomorrow too,” Knight says.

“Hell yes. I forgot she was coming in. Att, do you remember Etta from the studio I was working at in Vegas? She did the social media marketing and worked the front desk sometimes too.”

I feel Atticus shaking his head. “No. I heard you were working there, but I never visited.”

“She’s married to Oz. He’s on the same team as Nero. Knight worked with them too, until he quit to become my full-time stalker,” she says, laughing as she turns to look at her husband.

“It’s time to leave,” Knight tells Octy, curling his palm around the back of her neck.

“Okay,” Octy says easily. “I just need to clean my station…” Her words trail off when Knight immediately steps away from her and starts to sanitize her couch and the metal cabinet beside it. “Well, okay then.” She giggles, turning back to us. “Seriously though, Lemon, come and meet some of the girls tomorrow. Handling the Barnett legacy without being surrounded by other people who understand it is tough.”

A few minutes later, Knight lifts her out of her seat and into his arms, and after saying goodbye, they both leave.

“Sit. This won’t take me long,” Atticus says, taking my hand and leading me to a comfortable-looking leather chair, identical to the one Octy was sitting in. He waits for me to sit down before he crouches down and opens the metal cabinet.

I watch as he cleans and sanitizes the shelves, then meticulously stacks boxes of things I can’t identify. Just like he promised, it doesn’t take him long to move all the things that he and Knight brought from the back of the studio into the cabinet, and while he works, I scan the rest of the stations around us.

Unlike Atticus’s bare cabinet, the others have all been personalized with stickers, artwork, and on one, what looks like spray-painted graffiti. “Are you going to decorate like the others have?” I ask.

“No. I don’t need to advertise myself all over the furniture,” he says simply.

Unsure how to respond, I just nod, then glance at the framed artwork on the walls. “Are any of these yours?” I ask, pointing toward the frames.

Pausing, he pushes to his feet and scans the walls. “That one and that one and those two,” he says, gesturing to two pictures of people that, until he’d pointed them out, I’d thought were photographs, and two others that I immediately stand to take a closer look at. The pictures are intricate, fine line drawings of two hands reaching for each other, one hand in each frame, the distance between them somehow becoming part of the story the images tell.

“They’re amazing,” I say reverently.

“Not what you were expecting?” he asks softly.

I shake my head. “No, not really.”

I’m so fixated on the pictures that I hadn’t realized he’d moved closer until he chuckles, and the sound ruffles my hair. “I’m all done. Let’s go home and start unpacking.”

After three hours, two suitcases, and six boxes, it’s very apparent that my style and Atticus’s don’t mesh that well together.

“It’s fine,” Atticus says, a little gruffer than he sounded the first ten times he assured me that it was okay that my randomness was exploding all over his ordered luxury.

“Atticus, it’s not. We should just put this stuff back in the boxes.”

“We’re not leaving your things packed in boxes. This is your home, and it should have your things in it.”

“And if my things didn’t come from gift shops and the dollar store, then I’d agree. But my twinkle lights don’t go with your interior designer’s vision.”

“Fuck my designer’s vision,” Atticus growls.

“No, maybe Avery was right, and my extra is just too extra for normal life.”