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“My room, my rules.”
“Really…” he draws out with a sly smile.
“Really.” I lean forward for a light kiss. Which becomes a heavier kiss. Which becomes my palm on his cheek, my fingers in his hair, my tongue in his mouth, and ah!
I straighten abruptly.
“Stop distracting me,” I snap. “You’re not getting out of this. Story time.”
He laughs, then falls back to the pillow with a groan. “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“I already told you. Everything.”
“Everything? I’m almost twenty-four. That’s a lot of things.”
“Great. So you better stop stalling and start talking. This one first.” I brush the X with my thumb. “Long version, remember?”
His smile fades as his gaze drifts to the ceiling. “This was one of my more recent tattoos, but in some ways it was the first.”
I take his hand, and his chest rises and falls in a deep breath.
“Tell me,” I say gently.
He blinks at the ceiling, as if the story is playing out above him. “My parents had big plans for me from the day I was born,” he begins in a distant tone. “They named me Perceval after my great-grandfather who started the family business.”
“Which is?”
“Mobile home parks.”
In a thousand guesses, I wouldn’t have guessed that. “Huh. Okay.”
“Exactly. Not really the passion I was wired for. I was never interested in their reality. It was a fight from day one. At the country club, I preferred hanging out with the employees than the other members. At my piano lessons I preferred playing around with my own melodies than the classical masterpieces I was supposed to be learning. At school I focused my efforts on art and music class instead of the ‘important’ subjects, as my parents called them. We fought constantly. I guess they kept hoping I’d grow out of it.”
“Grow out of being you?”
He shrugs. “Apparently. My sister is probably the only reason we never killed each other. She stepped in more times than I can count when things got heated. There was this one time…” He shakes off a memory. “Anyway, she’s the reason I even tried to follow their orders and go to Yorkshire for my business degree. She convinced me to earn the piece of paper, if only to buy myself some time and relief from their tyranny. Honestly, I think she was just tired of watching me get hurt and wanted a break for herself as well.”
“I already know you went. One semester, right?”
“Yeah. It only took a month to learn it wasn’t going to work. I was so miserable, even Paige agreed I had to change majors or drop out. I switched from general business to music business hoping that would help, but it didn’t. I finished the semester, but told my parents at winter break I wasn’t going back.”
“I’m sure they didn’t like that.”
“They kicked me out of the house,” he says with a dry laugh.
I wince as he stares at the ceiling again. “Anyway, Paige had her own place by then and let me move in. It was just supposed to be temporary but it’s hard to gain any momentum when you have a force working so hard against you.”
“Your parents?”
He nods. “For whatever reason in their twisted brains, they thought if they could keep me from achieving any success in what I wanted, I’d be forced back into what they wanted.”
“That’s horrible. I can’t even wrap my brain around that.”
My family has always been my rock and support system. What would it be like to have them trying to tear me down instead?
He pulls in a deep breath.
“No matter what I said or did, they wouldn’t accept it. I had no idea how to get the point across that I would never follow their chosen path. Then, about two years ago during one of our many arguments, they said if I ever got a face tattoo, they’d cut me off completely. I went to my artist the second she could fit me in and asked for the smallest, simplest tattoo we could think of.”
