by Ranae Rose
She yielded to him, letting him push his tongue deep into her mouth and steal her breath so she didn’t have to say anything at all.
* * * * *
“Summer is so much nicer here than spring,” Hannah said, approaching Hot Ink with Ben by her side.
“Yeah, it is.” He eyed her shoulders, exposed by her pink tank top’s slender straps. The v-neck revealed a tempting view of her cleavage, and he knew what he’d be focusing on while he got tattooed.
It was three o’clock on an early July Saturday afternoon, and the first floor of the shop was busy. Three people waited on the leather couch, reading magazines, and a woman stood at the counter, handing her credit card to Zoe. The buzz of tattoo machines filled the air.
Hannah glanced at Ben as they climbed the stairs to the second floor together. “Remember how cold it was back in March, the first time we ran into each other here?”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“Oh, yes it was.” She led the way to her booth. It was the first time Ben had been inside it.
“I like the paint,” he said. The back wall had been painted a deep shade of plum. She looked good in that color, and it provided a flattering backdrop for her.
“Jed let me pick the color.” She began moving around, organizing her supplies with practiced efficiency.
“So,” she said after a few minutes. “You’re sure Dylan’s not going to be mad?”
She shot Ben a teasing smile.
“He’ll live. He’s booked a million years out anyway.” Dylan wasn’t upset at all that Hannah was going to tattoo Ben, and she knew it.
Hannah was heavily booked too, but had taken the day off so she could spend the weekend with him. It was the last weekend before his court trial, which would take place on Wednesday.
“Take a last look,” she said, handing him a sketch. “Make sure there’s nothing you want me to change.”
He studied the drawing, though he’d done it a dozen times already. Her artwork was so beautiful that staring came naturally.
“Don’t change a thing,” he said, handing the paper back to her.
He’d asked her to design a tattoo for him – one to symbolize the fight he’d thrown himself into, a determination to move past what sometimes felt impossible.
He was trying hard to be better. She and Dylan both said he’d already made progress. In some ways he had, but that progress sometimes felt like a house of cards on shifting sand. He still wasn’t going to give up the battle.
Life had become too good to give up without a viscous fight.
Hannah smiled at the sketch. “It’s perfect for you. I just need to make a stencil.”
It hadn’t taken her long to design the tattoo for him, one that featured a koi swimming upward, against the current.
“It’s a symbol of bravery and perseverance in the face of suffering or adversity,” she’d told him. “The desire to become something more. You’ve spent so much time swimming against the currents in your life; it’s why you’re strong. You’ll reach calmer waters one day – I know you will.”
He liked the meaning. And he loved her art. She was tattooing the koi design in her usual Japanese style, and he could tell from the design that it’d be world-class, like the rest of her work. He’d wear it proudly, ‘till death.
And he’d think about her every time he looked at it. That was a silver lining around an already bright cloud.
It was going on his left side, over his ribs and near his heart. She’d warned him about the pain, but that was the least of his concerns. He’d endure every second gladly, happy to have her by his side.
“Ready?” she asked after shaving and cleaning his skin, then applying the stencil.
“Yeah.” He lay on his right side, shirtless with his left arm stretched over his head.
It didn’t hurt much at first. Eventually that changed, but the pain was nothing he couldn’t handle. The thousands of little puncture wounds were nothing compared to the thousands of doubts that’d attacked him over the past months. Swimming against the current was exactly what it’d felt like.
But he had to admit that the therapy he’d consented to hadn’t been complete bullshit. Although rerouting his thought patterns was like trying to direct a riptide, the fact that he was still sane this close to the trial had to be a sign that he was making progress, however slow and hard-earned.
He still didn’t know what the hell he’d do if he was convicted. But he was trying to focus on the other possibilities – the better possibilities.
Hannah’s attacker had already been declared guilty of the assault he’d been charged with. Or rather, he’d plea bargained out of two counts of assault to only be charged with one. All Ben cared about was that the man was being held responsible for his attack on Hannah, so he’d agreed to drop the second assault charge he’d pressed against him to facilitate the plea bargain.
Besides, he hadn’t wanted to be a part of two court cases. By agreeing to the plea bargain, he’d ensured that he’d only have to worry about his own trial.
The plea bargain and its single assault charge was a good sign. All Ben and his lawyer had to do now was convince a jury that he’d acted to prevent the crime against Hannah from escalating even further.
Ben could finally believe his lawyer, Dylan and Hannah when they said it was a real possibility. He wasn’t waiting with a Glock for the worst case scenario to come crashing down on him like a ton of bricks.
“You okay?” Hannah asked, blotting excess ink away from his skin with a blue cloth.
“Fine.”
“You’re a good sitter. I wish all my clients were as still as you.”
He remained motionless while she worked, until his side stung as if it was badly sunburnt and she was dragging something sharp over it. Eventually, she stopped and cleaned up his skin.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to finish now?” she asked. “I can if you want me to – I have all day.”
“No. I want to stick with the plan. We’ll be back here together in a few weeks.”
She smiled. “I already had Mina work you into my schedule a few weeks from now. It’ll be beautiful when it’s colored in.”
She applied a cooling gel to his inflamed skin. “The ribs are a tender spot; this’ll be sore for a while.”
“I’ll be too distracted to pay it much mind.” He touched her arm, tracing a cherry blossom over her wrist, just above where her blue rubber gloves ended.
“You will be if I get any say in it. We’re still going out tonight, right?”
He nodded. “Dylan and Crystal are meeting us at the restaurant at seven.”
Dylan had arranged for them all to get together that weekend.
“I’m looking forward to it.” She met his eyes as she peeled off her gloves. “But I’m looking forward to having you alone tonight even more. I have a surprise for you.”
“Really?” He pushed himself up off his side, sitting on the edge of the client chair. “What kind of surprise?”
She grinned like a Cheshire cat. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”
* * * * *
Dinner was good, but for once, Ben didn’t care about the food. Its taste faded as soon as it hit his tongue, superseded by a sense of awareness he’d been trying to suppress for months.
He couldn’t stop it now. Hannah, Dylan, Crystal and Emily captivated some stubborn part of his brain, and he realized, with crippling intensity, how much he’d miss them all if things changed.
If the trial didn’t go well.
If this was the last time they’d all do anything together like this.
There’d been times when he’d felt like an intruder on Dylan and Crystal’s little pseudo-family. But not now. Now, they all felt like family to him, and the thought of being cut off from them made his food taste like ash in his mouth, all scorch and grit.
He could no longer imagine life without Hannah. He loved her not just for her beauty, but her faithfulness and selfless compassion. He was every bit as a
ware of her by his side as he was of the burning pain over his ribs, but unlike that pain, he’d miss her like hell if she was gone.
Despair hovered in the near distance like the cityscape beyond the restaurant windows, like the sound of other people’s conversations.
“Are you okay?” Hannah nudged him in the arm, looking up at him from over a glass of iced tea.
“I’m good.”
“Your ribs bothering you?” She held his gaze, and he knew that wasn’t what she was worried about.
“Nothing I can’t handle.” He gripped one of her hands beneath the table.
He was wracking his mind for something else to say when Emily – seated in a highchair at the other side of the table, between Crystal and Dylan – grabbed a handful of macaroni and cheese and started painting the tabletop with it.
When Crystal tried to intervene, Emily grinned, then threw the incriminating pasta across the table.
A piece of it hit Ben’s chest and stuck to his t-shirt.
“I’m so sorry,” Crystal said, grabbing Emily by the wrist and scrubbing her little fist clean with a napkin. “Emily, no, no… Poor Ben.”
Emily looked to Ben, and he failed to hold back a smirk.
Her face lit up with a smile, and he knew he’d undermined Crystal’s chastising.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, cleaning the macaroni off his clothes. “It’s not like it’ll stain.”
The yellow sauce was easily removed from the black cotton.
“I think she’s just acting up because she wants your attention,” Crystal said. “She’s at that age.”
“You can move her over here if you want.”
Crystal made a fuss over his offer, but he eventually convinced her that sitting next to a toddler wouldn’t be torture for him.
Truth was, he didn’t mind at all. He’d watched so many movies with Emily that she clearly thought he was the fun one at the table, and seemed content to sit beside him and babble.
Loud and sticky-handed, she was a good distraction from the sense of loss that was creeping up on him.
“Let’s see the new tattoo,” Dylan said as they waited for the server to bring dessert.
“What, here?” Ben asked.
“You have a picture, don’t you?”
“It’s just the outline. But yeah – I think Hannah’s got one on her phone.”
“I do.” Hannah pulled out her phone and showed Dylan and Crystal.
“When are you coloring it in?” Dylan asked.
“I’ve got him booked for a session a few weeks from now. We’ll finish it then, unless he hits the limit on his pain tolerance and wants to break it into two more sessions.” She shot Ben a grin.
“He’ll be all right,” Dylan said. “He’s not as frail as he looks.”
Hannah’s grin widened. “He was a great sitter today – like a statue.”
“What colors are you going to use?”
“The koi will be black, fading to silver at the edges of the fins, and of course, the water will be blue.”
“It’s good.” Dylan raised his gaze from the phone to Ben. “Can’t wait to see it finished.”
Being tattooed by Hannah was still fresh in Ben’s mind: her braid shining as she bent over him, the burn of precise lines being permanently inked into his skin and the sound of Dylan tattooing across the aisle. He could see himself in the same chair again weeks from now, with her breathing life into the outline she’d put on his body.
He could see it, and he let himself hang on to that, let the promise of a few hours’ pain and unlimited pleasure – life like this, with no deadline – seem more real than the hell that stood as the alternative.
CHAPTER 25
“So, what do you think?” Hannah stepped into her bedroom, gesturing toward the bed with a flourish.
Ben stopped and stared. “When did you get this?”
She grinned. “Had it delivered this morning.”
He nodded at the queen-sized mattress. “It makes your old bed look like a Popsicle stick.”
“I considered getting a king, but I didn’t want there to be too much room – I want to keep you close. Now you can spend the night whenever you want.”
“It’s nice. Jesus. I hope we get to use it … a lot.”
She stepped closer to him and gripped his hand, interlacing her fingers with his. “Me too. And I believe we will. But even if we didn’t … it’d still be here when you got back.”
He looked at her, his eyes dark and intense, his lips slightly cracked. “Don’t say that. Making promises that’d make your life miserable won’t make it any easier on me if things go bad.”
She squeezed his hand more tightly. “I’ve been trying not to say the wrong things lately. Trying to be sensitive and not make this any harder … but I’m not taking that back. I mean it, and my mind is made up.”
He sighed, and she wrapped her arms around his waist, embracing him from one side.
He flinched – just barely, but she felt it.
“Oh! God, I can’t believe I forgot.” She released him quickly, cringing.
“It’s okay.”
“Let me take a look…” She hadn’t seen his new tattoo since they’d taken the bandage off before dinner.
She lifted the hem of his shirt, and he finished the job, pulling it over his head.
His skin was sticky with lymph again – normal, at this stage.
“I should rinse off in the shower,” he said. “Don’t want to ruin your new bed.”
“Just be careful to keep its exposure to water minimal. And don’t touch it with anything other than your hand.”
While he stripped down and went to stand in the shower, she waited in the bedroom, her heart beating just a little too fast. She took advantage of the opportunity to unbraid her hair, leaving it loose, like he liked it.
When he returned, he had a towel slung low around his hips. His freshly-tattooed skin looked inflamed, but healthy.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed.
He came to her and buried his hands in her hair.
She let her head tip forward until her forehead touched his washboard stomach, where his skin was still warm from the shower.
He was getting hard; it was easy to see and tempted her to rip the towel right off of him.
He swore when she ran a hand up his inner thigh, beneath the towel, and cradled his balls.
Her scalp prickled when he closed his fists, trapping handfuls of her hair.
“I want you way too much for my own good,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” It was obvious that he wanted her; his cock was fully erect, long and thick beneath the towel.
“These past few days I’ve been trying not to give wanting you so much space in my head. Trying to imagine what it’ll be like if I’m taken away from you and can’t have you anymore.”
“Ben…”
“I don’t know how I’ll handle it. I want you so often, and when I want you, I want you so much. The thought of missing the people in my life makes me feel sick, especially you.”
“Thinking about it makes me feel the same way. I think everyone who loves you is heartsick over Wednesday – it’s not just you.”
He shook his head. “I want things to be okay. But if they’re not, they’re going to be really fucking bad. I know I’m not supposed to be obsessing over it, but it’s just … there. And it’s true.”
“I’m not going to argue with you. You think the same thoughts haven’t been haunting me lately? Part of me is afraid. But if things go well, it’ll be the start of something too good to even put into words. Imagine being together without being afraid of anything tearing us apart.”
He relaxed his hands in her hair, cupping the curve of her skull and pushing a stray lock of hair out of her eyes with his thumb. “I always thought that if I loved someone, I’d have to constantly be worried about my issues tearing us apart. Never mind any of this other shit.”
“No. It’d
have to be steel bars. Nothing else could keep me from you.” She withdrew her hand from beneath the towel and let it rest against his belly.
He touched her lower lip with his thumb, then tilted her head back so her gaze met his. “You make all this a lot easier to bear.”
“How can I? I’m the cause of it.”
He shook his head. “No matter how bad things have looked to me since that night, I haven’t regretted what I did. If it’d been in defense of someone else, I might’ve. But not you. That’s what’s been keeping me sane lately: reminding myself that it was for you. It’s the only thing that keeps me from being ashamed of it, like I am of so many other things I’ve done.”
She gripped one of his hands and didn’t let go until she had to, until he had her on her back on the bed and the exquisite pressure of his body against hers demanded that she wrap her arms around him.
* * * * *
The courtroom was a battlefield trench: Ben would either emerge victorious or destroyed. By late Wednesday afternoon, he was sweating and bile had burnt what felt like a permanent sore in his throat.
Waiting for the verdict seemed to take longer than the entire trial had, and that was saying something. Ben had endured every moment of it, from the opening arguments to closing statements, in a state of anxious agony.
His lawyer gave him a confident look from his spot by his side.
Ben wished he could have a fraction of the guy’s self-assurance. He’d done a good job presenting the case, at least in Ben’s eyes: he’d made the charges against him look weak in comparison to the severity of the damage done by Hannah’s unprovoked attacker. He’d made Ben’s actions seem not only justified, but necessary – which they had been.
But Ben was biased, and sometimes the way he saw things was anything but typical. What if the jurors didn’t see it that way? What if they’d been repulsed by the pictures of the other man’s damaged face?
It’d looked pretty bad. It’d been pretty bad.
Ben kept his eyes straight ahead, on the judge. Looking at her was easier than looking at the strangers who’d decided his fate, and definitely easier than seeking out Dylan or Hannah’s gazes.
