AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Wouldn’t I have to kill you, if I told you something like that?” I returned his smile with one of my own, mimicking that lip-bite thing he’d done. “Can you imagine how good I’d look in the outfits?”
“I can,” he admitted, after another of those heat-inducing slow perusals. “You still haven’t answered my question though.”
“I’m retired from my line of work. Prefer to let it stay in the past,” I said, in a firm tone that made him nod, and lift his tool again as his smile shifted into a smirk.
“I didn’t mean any harm,” he told me, after a few moments of silence.
“I didn’t interpret any,” I countered. “Just… letting you know.”
Just… fucking up the vibe,I realized, when he didn’t say anything else.
This was the problem, with being in the real world without a yoke.
I wasn’t “human” enough, not really, to know how this sort of thing was supposed to go. Not without a dossier with every detail about the man I might need, along with a bunch of shit I didn’twantto know. Not without a character to portray, or a script to draw from.
There was no guide anymore.
I was just…me.
No cues, no applause, no stage direction to let me know if I was hitting my marks.
“Okay… I’ve gotta go in with some white now, to layer in the details, get a little definition – this is gonna be the worst part, pain wise. I know you’re a bad ass and all that, you haven’t flinched about the rest of it, but… just a heads up,” he said, only giving me a brief glance before his brow furrowed again as he studied his work.
“Thank you,” I told him, responding courteously even though I didn’t think his little disclaimer was necessary.
Itdidhurt like a bitch.
So much so that I was relieved when it was over, and he sprayed my skin with the bottle from his cart before wiping it one final time, coating it, and then covering with transparent film.
“You ready to take a look?” he asked, already grabbing a hand mirror from his cart, like there wasn’t a full-sized one near the door. I opted for the larger one, accepting the hand he offered for assistance from the reclined seat. Carefully, I avoided letting my gaze drift to my fresh ink until I was fully in position, ready to take it all in at once.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, once I finally let myself look at it.
The rose was…gone.
I stepped even closer to the mirror, as close as I could get without going through the damn wall. You’d think that, having had something on your body for a decade, you’d be able to find it easily, no matter what.
But… no.
Logically, I knew it lay underneath all the fresh ink Tristan had just applied, but from what my eyes were telling me, based on what I could clearly see in the mirror… it wasn’t there anymore.
I was as free as the wild fringes of the storm he’d set against the backdrop of a beautifully setting sun – fiery reds and golds breaking through the swirled black and gray accumulations of angry clouds. He’d used negative space, and that painful white ink to create fractured lighting bursts, juxtaposing that destruction against the peace of the sun as it disappeared behind much quieter clouds.
“It’s exquisite,” I whispered, wanting to touch it, but not daring to disturb it, even though I knew how ridiculous a thought that was.
Just in case, though.
“You’re happy with it?” Tristan asked, and I blinked hard, trying to fight back the sudden, unexpected surge of emotion.
I nodded. “Yeah.” I cleared my throat, then looked at him in the mirror, not realizing until that moment how close to me he was. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Ms.Not Interested,” he teased, breaking the unexpectedly thick tension in the room. “Seriously though… never seen you around here before. You from the city or something?”
“The city?”
“Blackwood,” he said, doing that thing again where he gestured in some nebulous direction like I was supposed to know what that meant.
I did, however, know I wasn’t from Blackwood, which was adjacent to theHeights –the neighborhood that had been my destination in the first place, by recommendation of my mentor.
