Certain phrases caught my eye even when I wasn’t trying to read the writing. The ridiculously large fonts made it impossible for me not to catch the highlighted statements.
“Art was the only class I never skipped in high school.” The caption was directly below a picture of Dex standing in front of the shop with his arms crossed over his chest. Typical.
“It’s an addiction,” another article screamed.
Then there was the one that had me rolling my eyes. “Can’t get arrested for it any more.”
Blah. Blah. Blah.
I was in the middle of cleaning off one of them when I heard, “Ritz.”
I knew it was Dex speaking. His voice was its own unique drawl of deep and rich. All baritone and rasp. On anyone else, I would’ve liked to hear them talk all day but Dex? I’d be perfectly fine not hearing him talk for, oh, let’s say, the rest of my life.
“Ritz.”
Now he wanted to talk? Ha. I sprayed the glass and quickly wiped it down, ignoring him.
“Babe.”
Jerk. I scooted over and sprayed the next frame.
“Babe, I’m talkin’ to you. Quit sprayin’ for a sec,” he said, the quick irritation in his tone hinting at the fact this man wasn't used to repeating himself.
As much as I didn’t want to, I stopped what I was doing and turned to look at him. He was standing just to the side of the desk, hands shoved into his front pockets.
“Yes?” I asked, keeping my gaze locked only as high as his bare neck.
“Ritz,” he repeated the name he’d used at first.
“My name’s—,“ I started to say before he cut me off.
“Would you look at me?”
No.
Was there a treatment for gonorrhea already?
I clenched my teeth together. “You didn't tell me what you wanted me to do until you guys were done, so I figured I'd clean up. Blake said you would put up the—,“ I started to tell his neck in a surprisingly even voice. You couldn’t even tell I’d been fighting back tears the majority of the day.
“Look at me,” Dex interrupted in a low voice.
Slowly, fighting everything in me that ached from his shitty words, I dragged my eyes up to his.
"Yes?" It was like the words were pulled from my throat with rusty tweezers.
Some indecipherable emotion reflected back at me from his true blue eyes as I grudgingly held his gaze for all of ten seconds before turning back to finish cleaning the frames.
Dex exhaled. It sounded like he rubbed his palms together before speaking. "You gotta toughen up," he gritted.
Oh my God. The first person in my life who I had the urge to punch in the face was a six-foot-three-ish biker that I assumed beat the living crap out of someone and went to jail for it. Of all the people in the world smaller than me that I could have chosen, and this was who I wanted to nail right in the testicles? Not Sonny, or even Trip who hadn't given me the impression he'd try to murder me?
I bristled and like clockwork, my molars ground together.
I need the job.
I need the job.
I need the job.
“Wipe down the counters for me," he added in a low voice that seemed to go immediately against the harsh, no-nonsense tone he'd used a moment before. How was this man even capable of speaking in that kind of tone after the daggers he'd been spitting out earlier?
I nodded and swallowed back that gross feeling in my throat again. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
I held back my long sigh, keeping my eyes on the title, “Ink Me!” on the mounted magazine while I wiped streaks across the glass. I wasn’t going to argue with him, I wasn’t going to care enough about the fact he didn’t remember my name, and I definitely wasn’t going to let him know how shitty he'd made me feel. In all actuality, this just made it easier for me to want to find another job. “Yup.”
My pride won out because I didn’t turn back to look at him while he stood in place another minute, and when Blake walked with me to my car twenty minutes later after closing, I didn’t look at Dex again then either.
Fuck him. Not screw him, or damn him. Fuck him. He deserved the f-bomb for being such a dick and heaven knows I saved that word for special occasions.
Just because I let my conscience guide me into keeping the job out of respect for Sonny—and my need for some cash—didn’t mean I had to like my boss. It didn’t mean I had to let what happened go and get over the fire he’d breathed for no reason.
Friggin' asshole.
~ * ~ *
"What's wrong?"
Sonny was going to blow a gasket. There was going to be smoke coming out of his ass and ears. I just knew it.
I'd underestimated him my entire life. When I was a kid, I'd thought he hated me because Will and I had lived with our dad and he hadn't, except for yearly visits that lasted until Son was old enough to tell him to screw off. As a teenager, I thought he wouldn't care too much about the disasters that had stockpiled in my life.
But the fact was, he had. As an adult, Sonny had become the most solid figure in my life even if he lived over a thousand miles away.
We hadn't been raised together, obviously. Sonny had lived in Austin with his mom, where I'd grown up with mine in Florida nine years later. We'd settled for seeing each other once a year when I was younger, when my dad would take Will and I to Austin to see Sonny. So I'd never had that typical overprotective older brother situation as a kid until he got old enough to drive himself, and by that time, Dad was long gone.
Sonny Taylor, whose mom hated Curt Taylor with a magnitude that led her to move out of state the moment Son graduated high school, did care for me. He loved me in his own way, and he knew my facial expressions.
So when I walked into his house, still more hurt than pissed off over what I'd overheard that afternoon, he'd caught onto the clues like Sherlock Holmes.
And now I was a little worried to tell him because I'd promised to quit lying. Apparently, I'd run out of get-out-of-lying passes when I didn't tell him they'd found more cells in my arm.
"Iris, tell me," he insisted.
Crap. He never called me by my first name.
I blurted the tiny story out, feeling like a kid again who wanted her mom or dad to make things better.
The words rode a boomerang in my head over and over again. The moment I'd gotten to Sonny's house, it all hit me straight in the solar plexus.
The guy was just a dick. An ass who didn't know how to get past the things that made us all up—the good and the bad.
When I was in the hospital, any of the times—all of the times—I'd met so many people who just couldn't let go of the anger. The resentment. Frustration with the hand they got dealt. I mean, I got it. I did. If anyone understood what it was like to think that life was unfair, I'd probably won the award a few years in a row.
But at some point, you had to get over it. I didn't want to be a bitter old lady the rest of my life.
Now I was stuck working for a bitter, mean, happiness-sucking leech.
"It's not a big deal, Son. Whatever. I don't care what he thinks."
Liar. Liar. Big, fat liar.
Sonny's lips twisted in a way I'd only seen once before. Barely restrained anger hid beneath the thick layer of his red-brown beard. "That fucking dumbass," he ground out. He cocked his head to one side, and then the other. A deep breath blew out from between his lips. "I'm gonna knock his teeth in."
He was being completely serious. So, so serious about defending my honor, I couldn't help it.
I started laughing.
"It's fine." I snorted. "Son, it's really fine. Knock his teeth in another day." I laughed again. "Or maybe once I find another job, okay? Then you can bust all his teeth and his kneecaps for all I care."
Those hazel eyes that were an exact replica of mine, narrowed. And then he quirked a little smile. "His kneecaps too?"
I shrugged. "Why not? Call him a friggin' idiot while you do it."
Sonny
shook his head, full out grinning by that point. "To think I used to call you a good girl. My little sis telling me to break someone's kneecaps. You might make me cry, Ris." He leaned forward across the armchair I was sitting in and ruffled my hair. "Thatta girl."
I snorted and batted his hand away.
His face sobered a moment later, his gaze serious. "Nobody talks to you like that, you hear me? I don't care if it's another member of the MC or some asshole on the street. If somebody takes their anger out on you, I'll beat the shit out of them."
Lord. Where had he been when I was fifteen and got made fun of? I pushed the thought out of my mind and nodded, settling in just to make him feel better.
"Yes, father." I gave him a little smile. "Quit stressing, would you?"
By the way his jaw clenched, you could tell he wasn't exactly happy with staying quiet but he didn't argue against me.
"Fine, but wear whatever the fuck you want, kid. Wear a three-piece suit just to piss him off," he grunted. Sonny leaned forward again to mess with my hair until I swatted at him.
He stood up, grabbed his phone out of his pocket and disappeared down the hall that led toward his bedroom, silently.
Wait...
Sonny wasn't the silent type.
"What are you doing?" I yelled out after him.
His answer, "Nothing!"
A minute later, from the confines of his bedroom, he started yelling.
What did I do? I tip-toed into the hallway that led toward his bedroom and tried to listen in. Just for a minute. That was it.
"—the fuck is wrong with you?...She's shy with strangers, Dex. Shy. You think your attitude helps that any?....No. No. Imagine if she was your sister. How the hell would you feel if somebody called her a bitch....Well, that's Lisa. That's not Ris. Imagine if it was Marie...Did you hear me? What if—no. Fuck you, Dex. If something crawls up your ass, don't take it out on her. You act like a bitch—"
I might have smiled. Big.
Chapter Five
I wore my usual clothes the next day. Khaki pants and a white, long-sleeved button-up shirt were my big "fuck you" to Dex. Throwing all those "fuck you" comments around sort of made me feel empowered. Just a little, at least.
He'd taken a long look at me when I showed up at the door fifteen minutes until four and didn't say anything. Neither did I.
My silent treatment—and eye aversion—lasted exactly eight work hours. For eight hours, I managed to dodge Dex during business hours by bothering Blake. We'd only spoken when he needed me to schedule something and when a customer came in for him.
Each and every single time, I’d feel this incredibly nauseating pressure on my neck. It was my body’s wordless reminder of how carelessly mean he'd been, and how he'd made me feel like I needed a tetanus shot afterward. I'd stayed up the night before wondering why it bothered me so much that he thought I was stupid. It was really his fault I didn't understand what I was supposed to do, wasn't it?
Such a beautiful man, and he was a complete friggin’ asshole. Go figure.
Only a very small part of me wanted to drop the issue. Pretend that he hadn't lost his mind briefly and said something that I'm sure Sonny and the rest of the Widowmakers more than likely said casually. But I couldn't. I just couldn't. When had I become the type of person who couldn't let things go, I had no idea.
Even when Lanie had taken my car without permission and wrecked it, I hadn't stayed mad for more than a couple of hours. When Will lost my cell phone, I think I'd gotten mad for all of an hour. And when I'd gotten fired, I'd been more sad than mad. Stuff was replaceable, so I didn't bother holding onto my frustrations.
Except every time I saw him, Dex, something ugly churned inside my chest.
I only let myself look at him below the face when he’d walk by, and by that I mean that regardless of whether he was a dick or not, I considered looking at his tattoos—and body—as a lesson in learning about body ink. You know, occupational research and all. After occasional and close observation, I was able to figure out that his sleeves were complete opposites.
His right arm was a matting of solid black ink, broken up by a spiral of rectangular tiles surrounded by an inch of the most beautiful black, gray, and skin tone flower outlines. Outside of the flowers it was flat, almost shiny black ink that made my arm hurt to look at.
Dex’s other arm was as colorful as I figured a guy who wore black shirts three days in a row could be. Trying to be discreet wasn’t exactly a strength of mine, so what I was able to distinguish were the tracings of what seemed to be a black wing that wrapped around his bicep and the upper part of his forearm, with the brightest red, blue, and gray triangles that clustered together at the shoulder and eventually faded out toward his wrist.
I’m not going to lie. The tattoos on his arms, the only ones I was able to see but had a feeling were only the beginning, were really hot. And I mean really hot.
But it didn’t matter how attractive his ink was or how corded and ripped his biceps were when he had his tattoo gun to someone’s flesh, or even when he was just standing with his arms over his chest while I tried my best to ignore him—Dex, my boss, was a prick. And I wasn’t going to pretend like his douche-baggery didn’t bother me. I hadn't seen him crack a single smile or say something nice to anyone but his clients. It was like Blake and I didn't exist, but me especially.
In front of clients, he was relaxed and easygoing. A completely different person. If I wouldn’t have been on such a one-way track with thinking I disliked everything about him, the things he said randomly would have made me laugh.
But I didn’t let myself.
So in my head it made sense that my work day had been spent A) ignoring Dex, B) avoiding Dex, and C) getting to know my coworkers slowly.
On the brief occasion that we’d speak to each other, I’d look at his right ear. Another time I looked at his left. Then I’d focus on the tiny, barely noticeable scab he had on his eyebrow, because I couldn’t bear to look at his face without my heartbeat accelerating. The traitor.
I blamed my period. It was coming and it made my hormones get all out of whack. It’s true. It had nothing to do with his jaw or the fact that I could see the outline of his lateral muscles through his t-shirt when he bent over my desk to type something on the computer. It was my crazy ass hormones. I swear.
Maybe it was childish, but I couldn’t help it. I had hope that in time, I’d forget what I overheard. But obviously, it was going to take some time to let it go and I wasn’t in the mood to rush things with my PMS on the way and all.
And by some time, I estimated it would probably be closer to my retirement age before I purged that moment from my brain.
Instead, I focused on trying to find another job. Which had been useless. Everything I found was too far away or didn't pay enough. All that meant was that I needed to look harder to find somewhere else to work.
What I didn’t expect was how much I liked the two other tattoo artists that worked alongside Blake and The Dick. Slim was a cute, lanky, tall redhead who greeted me warmly. He seemed super sweet and outgoing. Blue, the other artist, was a woman a few years older than me with pink-highlighted hair, so soft spoken I had a feeling I was going to learn to read lips before I quit to understand what she was saying.
The only thing I let myself stew on was Dex The Dick and the fact that I was bumbling around trying to figure things out so that I wouldn't ask him for help.
Friggin’ asswipe.
It was easy to pretend he didn’t exist during the day before work. I’d kept busy cleaning up Sonny’s house slowly, carefully and thoroughly. I think the last time someone had dusted his place had been before he bought it. The dust, unorganized DVDs, and randomly strewn laundry nipped at my borderline obsessive cleaning tendencies.
My day at Pins had at least, while embarrassing the shit out of me, warmed me up to the people I’d be working with until I found another job. Slim had finished up with a customer and sat down on the edge of my desk, crossin
g one leg over the other like I’d seen him do while sitting at his station alone. I liked this crossing-his-leg thing he had going on.
“Iris, right?” he asked.
I nodded, smiling just a little. “Yeah.”
“First time working at a tattoo place?” He’d smoothed his hand over the longish red hair that curled at the ends.
For some strange reason, I felt comfortable around this guy from the get-go and it might have been his crazy natural red hair, the Harry Potter lightning bolt he had tattooed right smack behind his ear, or the fact that he crossed his legs, but I’m not positive so I blabbed. “My fourth time in a tattoo parlor, but don’t tell anyone.” I bugged my eyes out.
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