He didn’t move but I heard him call out after me, “Later, Ris!”
It might have been because Trip was a handsome flirty bastard, or it might have been because Sonny went above and beyond the call of being a half-brother who had spent less than a year of his total life with me, but I smiled the entire—short—walk to work.
~ * ~ *
“You ever thought about getting a tattoo?” Slim asked me.
It was a little after ten. Blake was working on the same piece he’d been going at for two hours and Blue had just gotten saddled with piercing a cute but barely legal girl's tongue. I had a feeling she was going to regret that thing tomorrow, but I kept my mouth closed.
Rule number one in working at a tattoo parlor according to Blake—don’t talk customers out of services unless they were a really, really bad idea. Which meant I really, really needed to find out what they thought a bad idea was. Maybe a facial tattoo?
Slim and I had just given each other bug eyes when Blue walked off with the nervous girl and we'd followed after them with our eyes until they disappeared into one of the private rooms. Earlier, a woman well into her thirties had come in requesting to get one nipple pierced. Blue had been in the room with her for ten minutes when a scream pierced through the parlor, scaring the crap out of all of us. It was a miracle that Dex hadn’t messed up the tattoo he’d been working on because I’d whacked the computer mouse across the room in response.
I was fondly starting to call the private room the “torture chamber” in my head.
I nodded my head at Slim. “I wanted to get a tattoo on my lower back when I was eighteen.”
He raised an incredulous eyebrow. “A tramp stamp?”
The guy enunciated the words a little too carefully. Smart ass.
For that, he earned a smirk. “For the record, I didn’t know they were called tramp stamps before I wanted to get one,” I gave him a flat look. “I just thought they were kind of cool.”
“Cool?” He smiled, still enunciating slowly.
I repeated myself with a smirk.
“But…?” Slim trailed off, fishing for an explanation.
“But I couldn’t think of anything I liked enough to get tattooed on me for the rest of my life, you know?” And I'd found out two weeks later that I was going to need another surgery, but I kept that tidbit to myself.
Slim, who from what I’d seen over the last few days, was tattooed from ears to toes, nodded in understanding. “They’re addicting. I was only going to get one when I turned eighteen, and then one turned into two, and two into three—“
“And three into—,” I fanned out my fingers and wiggled them, “Everything?”
He snorted. “Exactly.”
I got it.
Pretty much ninety percent of the clientele I’d seen over the week were repeat customers. They’d mostly all been familiar with one or all of the guys working, and while not everyone had the amount of ink coverage that the artists had, two tattoos was more than my whopping zero.
And they were cool. Almost all of the work that wasn't walk-in was original, hand-drawn and transferred. They really were pieces of art or at least pieces of art in the making.
From what I’d seen in such a short amount of time, the tattoos weren’t just random crap people would regret when they were elderly. The pieces clients got seemed to be so much more than that. They were memorials and declarations. They were outpourings of love and pain. Letters and images, icons and symbolism, personal and eternal.
It was eye-opening for me. The art that they created were badges of honor. It was impossible not to get sucked into the emotion that went behind the artwork.
Well, at least that was the case with most of them. I’d already seen a sketch for a flaming penis that made me cringe.
“You have great skin. It'd be a perfect canvas.” He lifted both of his eyebrows before looking up abruptly and lifting his chin, still grinning but past me. “Done hibernating?”
I tensed up.
“Done with three hours of Club financial shit,” that grumbly, deep voice that I’d learned to associate with Dex’s cool mood answered from what felt like just a few feet behind me.
“Bummer.” Slim made a face.
“I don’t see us gettin’ any more business. Ritz, you’re free to go home whenever you’re ready, and Slim, clean up, yeah?” Dex said.
Slim nodded, hopped off the edge of my desk and walked toward the back. I heard the soft sound of Dex’s motorcycle boots lumber off, and I got up. I’d already cleaned everything about thirty minutes before. The frames, the coffee table, all the free surfaces. My stuff for the day was done.
Blake happened to look over when he took a mini break as I was throwing my purse over my shoulder, so waved at him and mouthed, “See you tomorrow.” He closed both his eyes and nodded before I walked out of the shop.
The street, usually heavy with pedestrian and automotive traffic during the day, was eerily quiet. There weren’t any cars besides the two Pins clients’ and it freaked me the hell out. It was like one of those scary movie scenes before the heroine gets chased by some psychopath serial killer but manages to survive. Survive half-naked, whatever.
Instantly, I regretted not asking one of the guys to walk out with me, but I didn’t want to ask them for favors. I didn’t need to get babysat and plus, I didn’t like being that needy girl. I'd been on my own for years. I could walk to my car by myself.
Sucking in a breath, my feet were brave enough to make their way down the strip, passing the real estate agency while I talked myself out of looking in. The last thing I needed or wanted was to see some masked face staring back at me from the other side.
I’d barely made it to the end of the street when someone yelled out, “Yo!”
Under normal circumstances, if I thought it might have been a stranger instead of someone from the shop calling out after me, I’d start running. But it wasn’t. It took me a second out on that empty street to realize it was Dex's deep voice yelling.
“Hold up!”
I forced myself to turn around and see him jogging over. “Yes?”
He cut the distance between us to stop just two feet away. “What the fuck are you doin’?”
I blinked. What? “You told me I could leave when I was ready.” I blinked again. “I was ready.”
Dex’s amazing eyes, even under the dim streetlight that cast shadows in the shadows, looked incredulous. “Girl, I said you could leave when you were ready but not by your fuckin’ self. You can’t be walkin’ around this side of town all alone so late.”
Did this man just... scold me?
And what the hell did he mean this side of town? This side of town seemed safe enough.
“My car’s just right there,” I told him, pointing in the general direction of the nearby lot.
Dex shrugged. “You gotta have some self-preservation or somethin’, babe. Can’t be walkin’ around here by yourself.”
“It’s right there,” I repeated, pointing again. It was seriously thirty steps away.
“I don’t give a fuck,” he pointed out. “C’mon, I got a business to close. Last thing I need is your goddamn bro callin' me, bustin' my balls over somethin' happenin' to you.” Dex wrapped his fingers—long, not too slim but most, most, most definitely manly—around my forearm and pulled me across the street.
I wiggled my arm in his grasp a little, pointing at my car with my free hand. “You can let go of my arm." I jerked it again futilely, thankful he'd grabbed the good one. "I don’t need a babysitter, but I appreciate the gesture,” I groaned under my breath, shaking my arm in his grasp once more.
“Obviously you need a babysitter if you’re walkin’ around shitty ass Austin alone this late, babe.” He shook his head, yanking me not so gently around Blake’s white Nissan Frontier and toward my old Ford. “So fuckin' stupid,” he hissed under his breath.