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I joggle his head impatiently. “Come on…”
There’s a long pause as we silently glare at each other in a battle of wills.
Finally, he gives a little sigh of defeat and answers, “You know why.”
An avalanche of agony rips through me. My eyes burn and my throat constricts with emotion, but I swallow through the pain. “No. Just no.”
“Yes,” he hisses, tossing his head as if to prompt me to fight him again.
I feel like bawling, but I won’t. I’ve fought for a helluva lot less than this. I’ll be damned if I let this nonsense continue. “No,” I repeat. “You wanna know why, you idiot?”
“You’ve never had a problem before, so yeah, tell me why now,” he retorts with a glint of challenge in his eyes.
“We were playing a game before.” I trace one long red slash. “Thisis not a game.” I get to the heart of the matter. “Whatever you think you’ve done, you don’t deserve this. You deserve to be loved, to be cherished, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
“No I don’t,” he growls. “I deserve the pain. I can’t even manage to catch my brother’s killer, so if you love me, you’ll give it to me.”
My heart howls. Mind racing and heart pounding, I get a tight grip on my emotions and force myself to stop and think.
Oh, my broken, tatted man, as much as you think you need to be punished, you need the opposite.
I’ve known Marku my entire life. I know his scent, his voice, his touch from my earliest memories. I know him as well as I know myself. No, better than I know myself. And I know exactly what will help him, what will truly cure him of this disease of shame and self-blame. And it’s what I need from him as well.
I don’t need to fight him. I need him to take control.
That’s the only thing that will soothe his jagged, bleeding edges.
But seeing the stubborn furrow in his brow, he’ll dig in if I contradict him. Instead, I hook a finger on the V of his polo shirt and tug him until his lips almost touch mine. I part my lips and let us breathe a moment like that, suspended in time, letting the tension between us build. I flick out my tongue and say, “I could do that, but you know how I like it. The only way I’ll come is if you’re the rough one.”
His eyes flare with desire. His breathing quickens against my moist lips.
“Son of a bitch,” he replies gruffly.
Gotcha.
Marku whips off his polo shirt, displaying his hard abs, every ridge of his six-pack perfectly defined. His entire torso is an intricate mosaic of tats. I reverently glide my fingers over the swirls of color. He has so many. A large Popescu eagle across his chest. Asian-inspired dragons, demons, and animals skate up his shoulders and down his arms, halting at the wrists. Along his ribs on his left side is a poem in cursive. I lean in to read it and jerk in shock.
Anguish is for the strong, for only the strong can find the sweet in agony.
That’s one of my lines, from my street art. It came after one particularly hard day when I found my father on the floor, spasming with seizures. I burned the printer out from the hundreds of copies I’d run off. And then I spent the entire night plastering it around the neighborhood, even spilling over into Astoria.
Pride swells in my chest. My words. They spoke to him.
Panting, I peer closer because the lines don’t look like they’ve been inked on. The color is light and more textured than a tattoo normally is.
They look like they werebrandedonto his skin.
A scarification tattoo.
I squeeze my eyes shut, inhaling a sharp, distressed breath. Scarification is about pain, that much I know, and it looks like the phrase was seared in his skin. It’s as if his skin is nothing more than a canvas for his pain. And he used my words to do it. My pride shrivels up.
My eyes bounce from ink tat to scarification tat. I touch them, my fingers tingling as if trying to tell me something. Iseeink tats, but Ifeelmore than just smooth skin. I squint down as my fingers ride over bumpy, damaged skin.
What a minute…
I twist him around, skating my fingertips across his back. The overhead light shines down more harshly on his back, illuminating …
“What the hell!”
