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As soon as those words left my lips, I realized how dismal they had to sound. The truth was though, that I wasn’t a woman anyone expected anything from, because… I barely existed.

I was here to fix that.

Hopefully.

I closed my eyes, and Tristan took the hint – he didn’t ask me shit else, for a while. He focused his attention on my ink – on the intricate detail work involved with turning my rose into a stylized storm, complete with lightning.

The destructive force I was named for.

At least, that was how I always imagined it, since I didn’t have a parent or sibling to ask, no box of old letters or archives to pull my history from. For as much as I knew of my own creation, I may as well have been born a fully-formed teenager, with no purpose other than earning and maintaining the rose I was paying some undisclosed sum of money to be delivered from.

Freehand.

I liked the sound of the word –freehand. It seemed fitting for the occasion – for the insane amount of gravity it held for me.

“I don’t do freehand on strangers,”he’d claimed, and yet… here we were.

In a tiny, sterile room, my breast bared down to the darkened fringes of my areola, with some rapper screaming over a beat in the background while I was reborn.

A hundred pricks, and then a wipe away of excess ink, sometimes blood.

Then another.

Then an ink refill, or a color change, and then a hundred more pricks of the needle.

The steadiness, the precision of it all, was soothing.

The sterile gloves covering his hands was a perfect barrier, making it easier to focus on the utility of what was happening, instead of being distracted by his touch.

Though, I’d quickly discovered Tristan was a hard man to completely tune out.

With my eyes still closed, I called his face to mind – I’d already committed it to memory. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the flare of his wide nose, the mid-size gauges in his earlobes, the tiny mole on his top lip – the only slight imperfection to their perfect pink-brown fullness.

And hisarms.

Full sleeves covered with beautiful ink I hadn’t fully examined yet. From my short-term memory, I could pull forth landscapes and flowers, dates and names, faces, military references that made me think that like me, he’d served his country.

I mean… if you wanted to phrase it in such a polite manner.

He wasn’t touching me there, but I felt him deep between my legs –insideme.

It was…strange.

This feeling I’d heard about, been trained to emulate – the kind of profound arousal I’d mimicked but never actually, deeply,felt. Not in my time in service to theGarden,and not in the time after – the strange, meaningless year without an assignment, without instruction.

Without… purpose.

It was numbing.

Utterly, completely, but with Tristan over me, with his body heat permeating my personal space and the clean, woodsy scent of him filling my nose… I felt something.

Everything.

I opened my eyes, watching his deep level of concentration play across his features as he worked. The pink tip of his tongue jutted from between his lips for a few seconds, and his eyes narrowed, like he’d reached some difficult part. His thick eyebrows knitted together, forcing the wrinkling of his forehead in the middles as he focused.

And then, he caught me staring at him.

Again, he pulled the machine away from my skin as his lips parted, mouth spreading into a wicked sort of smile that had likely wiped away the inhibitions of a long,longline of women… maybe right here in this chair.

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