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“Exactly,” I agree with her, propping myself up on my elbows and looking deep into her eyes in the cool light of dawn wafting through the window. “I need you to swear to me, Celine.”
“To swear?” she chirps. “What exactly?”
“That you’ll never let any other inker but me touch your skin.”
She sighs out her relief, apparently expecting something else. “I swear!”
“You have to swear properly,” I contradict. “You have to take an oath on what’s most important to you.”
“OK.” Her smile is more to be heard than seen. “Then I swear on the two of us.”
“What do you mean,on the two of us?” I can’t suppress a snort. “We’ve only been together half a night. How do you know that’s the most important thing in your life?”
She sighs, rubbing her nose. “I’m afraid you’re not wrong about that. Then I’ll swear on… Aunt Mareike!”
I roll my eyes. “It’s not that I don’t find your aunt absolutely delightful in her quirky way…”How am I supposed to make Celine understand this?“But… she’s not the youngest anymore, and I sincerely hope that when she will pass away one day… Hopefully in the very distant future… You won’t drop dead, too.”
Celine grunts with amusement, then lies down on her back and looks up at the ceiling, as if the answer is to be found up there.
Time stretches like a latex-free disposable glove until just before it tears, then she finally turns to me.
“Then I swear on the children I will have one day. That’s it. Because in my children, I will live on.” She looks at me inquiringly. “Do you agree with this oath?”
“Oh yes, I do.” I don’t need to let her in on the fact that in the depths under the covers, Jolly Jumper is moving because he finds the idea of fathering these children as tempting as I do. “That’s a very strong and good oath.”
“Well then…” She sits up, places her right hand on her left breast, under which her heart beats. “On the life of my unborn children, I, Celine Lechner, swear I will not let any tattoo artist other than Philipp Sandtmann, present here, touch my skin.”
Touching silence descends over the room as she finishes the vow. We kiss to seal it, and as expected, it ends in Jolly Jumper getting another hot ride with her.
Afterwards, she snuggles up to me, wrapping my left arm around her. She sighs, and I swear I can hear the switching circuits humming in her head.
“What?” I finally ask. “What do you want to know?”
“Well…” she drags out the syllable. “Now we’ve cleared that up… That no one else is allowed to tattoo me… I’d be interested to know what kind of motif you’re going to tattoo me on first.”
Bullshit. She caught me with my hand in the cookie jar.
“Philipp?” Her tone is pushing.
I close my eyes, let it out, “None.”
…twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty… She doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even breathe.…thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…
Oh my fucking God! How much longer can she hold her breath?
Finally, the redeeming sound of her gasping for breath. Then the thunderstorm breaks right over me: “None? What do you mean, Mr. Sandtmann? Why did you just take my oath not to have an i… uh… thing… uh…”
“Inker,” I help her out.
“Thank you,” slips out of her mouth automatically, she snorts. “Why, Philipp? Why the fuss about taking that stupid-ass oath from me—”
“Which still applies,” I interject.
“…taking it from me—when you have no intention of tattooing me at all? Why? Why shouldn’t I have tattoos?”
I wait until she has calmed down. Then I kiss her on the temple, which she only reluctantly allows. “Because you’re perfect, Celine. Just the way you are. Flawless, even, undamaged. The absolute, perfect-fitting opposite of this huge pile of junk I am. You don’t throw that away. Do you?”
“You’re not a piece of junk,” she enthuses.
