“Thank you for finishing this and for agreeing to be my artist in the first place.”
“Like there was ever any other option?” I traced the edge of the tattoo. “As soon as this is healed, I want Lisa to take another picture.”
Tenley’s fingers traveled down my chest. “Do I need to remind you that I live with you? Don’t you think you’ll see enough of it?”
“There is no such thing as enough when it comes to you.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
Her palms slid under my shirt and up my sides. I didn’t stop her when she pulled the shirt over my head and discarded it on the floor. I also didn’t resist when she grabbed me by the belt buckle and dragged me toward the tattoo chair. Tenley ripped my belt from the loops and popped the button on my fly.
Her leggings were next. “I love these things. No zippers or buttons to mess with,” I said.
She laughed as I gave one firm tug and down they came. I dropped into the tattoo chair with my jeans pooled around my knees and took half a second to appreciate that she was, in fact, wearing the matching panties to the sexy bra she’d been sporting.
I hooked my thumbs into the waistband and pulled them down, kissing my way from her navel to the crest of her pelvis. Her hands went to my hair as they always did and guided my mouth lower. She rarely left any question as to what she wanted.
I gave her a little lick before I peeked up at her. “Maybe I should take you home.”
Her eyes narrowed in a sexy, sinister way. “Like hell.”
She was going to be a firecracker tonight, if I let her. She let go of my hair and pushed on my shoulders until I was reclined in the chair, then climbed up to straddle me. Hot and wet met hard and ready. I grabbed her hips and kept her from moving.
“Hayden,” she groaned.
Her ponytail flared out over her shoulder, the nipple shield barely visible through the cascade. She was my ultimate temptation, gorgeous and willing and so full of fire. It would be so easy to just slip inside, but I slowed things down.
“I need you. Please.” She kissed me, all soft and sweet.
“You think it’s different for me?”
“Then take me, for fuck’s sake!”
I laughed and she bit my lip, but she was smiling and she melted right into me, as if she understood.
There would never be another one of these firsts: Tenley’s first finished back piece, and the first time I’d ever put something so significant on someone I loved. It was pretty damn momentous. So I was going to savor this experience. And she let me.
We were as close as we could get, fused in every way. In the years between loss and living, I’d forgotten what it was like to love. I didn’t know how it felt to be whole, to be present in my own life.
Then Tenley came along and made me aware of everything I’d been missing but was too afraid to acknowledge. Just as she’d been running, so had I, but I was past that now. I had closure—but more than that, I had her. Tenley was the inception, my new beginning, the rebirth I’d been striving for. She embodied the phoenix embedded in my skin, rising from the ashes to start again.
In this, we were marked by one another. It went far beyond ink on skin. It went right down to the soul.
In this life, for as long as we had, we would be each other’s armor.