“Error? Like what?”
Tyler sighs heavily and sets his guitar back on its stand. “It’s hard to know who to trust. When you get success, it paints a giant target on your chest. Everyone wants something.”
I stop taking notes. Does Tyler trust me? After what I’ve done to Beryl, I doubt it, so I change the subject.
“Why do you have all the tattoos? Are you just cultivating a bad-boy image or do they mean something?”
Tyler grins. This is something he wants to talk about. He squats close to the drum set stool to give me a closer look at his long, muscled arms.
“They all mean something,” he says. “They’re not about being a rebel, they’re about my history.”
I shudder. My history is not something I want to remember, much less ink into my skin. On one of his forearms I see a raven, a fingerprint, twined bass and treble clefs, and a handful of snowflakes. Tyler shows me his other arm and explains a stylized compass rose—he and two friends got lost on a hike and spent an unexpected night in the woods.
“It’s like wearing your heart on your sleeve,” he says. “This one’s my favorite.” He pulls his T-shirt to the top of his shoulder and points to a retro sailor tattoo, complete with an anchor, a heart, and a scroll that says Mom.
The vodka makes me brave and I run my finger over the anchor. His skin is hot and electricity zips up my arm. His coffee-brown eyes darken and I swear he felt that current, too.
“How—how many do you have?” I stutter.
“Nine.”
“Can I see more?”
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” His grin is rakish and tempting.
“I don’t have any.”
“Yet?” Tyler cocks his brow.
“I don’t want to wear my mistakes. When I get a tattoo, I want it to be about the future.”
“See? You said when, not if. You’ll get one. Then you can show me yours and I’ll show you the rest of mine.”
Unnnh. My mouth goes dry. Is he flirting?
“In one interview, Gavin said you copied someone’s tattoo.”
Tyler frowns. “It’s the only tattoo I regret. I was trying to be tough, you know, when I started the band. Gavin and Dave and Jayce were cool. They had game. They had girlfriends, even when we weren’t famous. I could barely talk to girls.”
My heart warms to the idea of this deliciously muscled man in front of me squirming and striking out with the ladies. “So you decided to get a tattoo?”
“Yeah. There was this guy—he was a senior and I was a freshman in college—and he had this gun on his arm. I thought it looked edgy. So I got one, too, but when he saw mine, he got all pissed that I copied him. A few nights later he spray-painted TATTOO THIEF across my mom’s garage door.”
My eyes widen. This isn’t a story I’ve heard before. I scramble to jot down details in the notebook I’d forgotten in my lap, but Tyler touches my wrist lightly. “Can we keep that part off the record?”
I know this bargain: either he’ll tell me more and I can’t write about it, or he won’t tell me. My insides are at war—I love this detail, but I have plenty of other stuff for my story. My curiosity wins.
“OK. So what did you do?”
“My mom came home, and I was freaking out she’d be angry. But she said, ‘Tattoo Thief? That’s a cool name for a band.’ And it stuck.”
I hoot with laughter. “What? Your mom wasn’t pissed about the spray paint?”
“She was at first, but she told me later she wanted me to repaint the garage doors anyway. Gavin begged her to let it stay, like advertising, so she did for almost a year.”
“Your mom is cool.”
“Seriously.”
I want to ask Tyler more questions but my bladder won’t allow it, so I excuse myself to the bathroom. My jaw drops when I enter—twin basin sinks rest above a poured-concrete counter and the glass-walled shower enclosure is bigger than Neil’s whole bathroom. There’s even a heated towel bar. This is sweet.
I finish in the bathroom and do another quick shot in the kitchen. I cross what feels like miles of wood floor to join Tyler on the couches. It only takes me a moment to decide to sit on the same couch he’s on.
“What’s with the bathroom?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s, um, ridiculously nice.”
Tyler chuckles. “I know I went overboard. We’d just got our first big royalties and I really had no business spending that kind of money.”
“What pushed you over the edge?”
“I got sick of short showers. Seriously. I grew up in a house where the showerhead barely reached my shoulder blades and I had to duck my head every time I washed my hair. And the apartment in Brooklyn was worse, because it had practically no water pressure.”
I giggle and stretch out my feet, wincing because I can still feel the abuse I put them through today. “How tall are you?”
Tyler sees my grimace and grabs my feet before I can stop him, pulling them into his lap and easing off my shoes. This is horrifying. My feet probably reek and most of my bright orange toenail polish has chipped off.
Tyler’s looking too closely at my toes and I want to recoil. “Six-three-ish,” he says absently. “You?”
“Me what?”
“How tall are you?”
“That doesn’t matter. I’m not famous.”
“It’s still a question. How tall are you without these shoes?” Tyler presses his thumb against the ball of my foot and I’m in ecstasy.
“Five-two-ish.”
“That sounds like it’s maybe not quite the whole truth.”
I duck my head. “I’m allowed an ish if you are. Does that mean you’re a little taller than six-three?”
“Maybe. Maybe closer to six-four. But I’ll never admit it. It sounds too freakish. In high school, I looked like a flagpole, because I grew really fast but I was only a hundred and twenty pounds. I was scrawny.”
“I find that hard to imagine,” I say, appreciating his lean, muscular body as I relax into the arm of the couch.
Tyler’s long, magical fingers stroke my gross feet. I can’t believe I’m letting him do this. I should straighten up and grill him about something else important for my story, but the motivation has left me.
“It’s true. My body only caught up to my frame in the last year or so.”
“Is that why you have all the weights?” I watch his tattoos dance on strong arms as he kneads my feet.
“Dave makes us work out after band practice to blow off steam. Most bands just drink or get high.”
“Working out doesn’t hurt your record sales, either. All that muscle on display.”
“Mmmn, no. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a motivator.” Tyler pushes back the dark brown hair that’s flopped forward on his face. “So why orange?”
“Huh?” The non sequitur snaps me out of the drowsy place I was sinking into, courtesy of the squishy couch and the vodka. I need more vodka.
“Why orange? On your toes?”
I shake my head to clear the cobwebs from my mind. “It’s my favorite color.” Also, that’s the only color of polish I can find among my stuff right now and I can’t afford a new pedicure. I hope the rest of my nail polish ended up in one of the boxes Blayde packed when he threw me out of his place last month. Sooner or later, I’m going to get them out of storage and into a real apartment.
Tyler hits a sensitive spot on my instep and I moan involuntarily. Oops. His expression sharpens and his hands still, but they don’t release my feet in his lap. His hand caresses my calf and I don’t know what to make of it—is he interested? Is he exploring?