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She smirked at her friend. “And you like free advertising.”
“What can I say? You pretty up the place.”
“Yeah, right.” And having a professional ballplayer getting tattooed in the front window sure didn’t hurt either. But whatever. Christian was allowing her to use his space. She sure as hell couldn’t complain about him trying to take advantage of any perks she might bring along with her.
“Everything’s clean and ready to go.” Christian wheeled a cart over to her station. “Help yourself to whatever you need.”
“Thanks.” She opened her case and pulled out her equipment and began setting up the station the way she liked it.
She’d just finished setting up when Christian came back. “Your appointment is here.”
“Great, thanks.” She took one last look at her station, then headed to the front.
“Brandon, hi.”
He turned from where he was looking at the prefab tattoo ideas on the wall. “Hey Kia.”
“Come on back.” She waved her arm, and Brandon followed her.
Brandon pulled off his hoodie. “This shirt gonna work?”
She eyed the cutoff t-shirt with the wide arm holes. “I think so. Have a seat.”
He sat on the edge of the table. His long legs rested on the ground. The guy had to be six-foot-five at least. Normally people looked like Alice in Wonderland when they sat like that. She grabbed a roll of tape out of her case and used it to pull the top of the shirt into a small line so it wouldn’t get in her way. “There, now we should be good.”
She pulled out the drawings she’d done and gave it to Brandon to look at. While he looked at her design, she held her breath. There was no doubt it would make a killer tattoo. The only question was, did it make Brandon ‘feel’ his mom?
He stared at the drawing for several minutes, saying nothing. Finally, he dragged his hand over his mouth, then looked at her. “Wow! This is so much more than I was hoping for.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his face as if the gesture could pull away the emotion that was betrayed in his eyes. “Is it weird that I kind of want to hug you?”
She laughed. “How about we save that for when we’re done?”
“Yeah, sure.” He flashed a cocky grin at her. “I mean, you could still fuck it up.”
She smacked him. “I’ve never fucked up a tattoo in my life and I sure as hell am not going to start with this one. Now, you need to go to the bathroom or anything before we get started?”
“Nope. Let’s go.”
After a quick shave, Kia lined up the stencil on his arm. And paused. Shit, with the lighting in the cafe, she hadn’t noticed the scar on the inside of Brandon’s biceps.
“Um.”
“Problem?” he asked. He watched her like he was daring her to ask about his scars.
“No, not really, just need to make a couple of tweaks.” She twisted his arm and saw more of the same scars on the underside of his triceps. What the hell? They looked like cigarette burns. She eyed Brandon. He didn’t say a word. Okay, clearly not something he wanted to talk about.
“I’m just going to have to freehand a little bit in a couple of places where the stencil isn’t working.”
“No problem.”
She pulled out her colored sharpies and added some additional detail to have the scars fit into the design.
She tapped a large burn near his armpit. “Judging by your face, you don’t want to talk about this and that’s cool, but we need to address it. I have a couple of options for covering this, so it’s up to you. I could either completely blend it in and make it virtually disappear, or I could embrace it and make it part of the fire from the dragon.”
Brandon looked at his arm. While he stared at the burn, she explained to him how she could make the dragon shoot fire, turning the burn into flames. She tapped her pen on a cigarette burn on his inner elbow. “Then here I could make this singed earth since that would tie into the design.”
