by Dahlia West
Adam frowned at her.
“Not that kind of social worker,” she amended. “He works with the elderly, securing them services.” Adam took the card from her and glanced at it. A social worker may not be so bad. Adam had to admit he was in over his head at this point and the diagnosis had been illuminating but not all that practical when it came to the day-to-day details of taking care of Pop from now on. He pocketed the card, careful not to bend it.
“Thanks,” he told her and meant it sincerely. “I don’t exactly know what I’m doing.”
Calla smiled at him. “I thought it could help.” She glanced past him at the framed art on the walls. “Are these drawings all yours?”
He squared his shoulders. “Every last one.”
She seemed to be intrigued as her eyes swept over each frame. She walked the length of the wall, slowly making her way toward him as he stood in the doorway to his workroom. Adam stepped out of her way and gestured for her to enter the room behind him. “There’s more in here.”
Calla skirted around him, her hip barely whispering against his own. Her wild brown hair came close to brushing against his face as well. She paused frozen for a moment as she looked at the work displayed here. Adam’s pencil and ink sketchbook drawings adorned the lobby walls, tasteful and inoffensive. Here in his workroom, though, were framed digital photos of actual work he’d done. Back pieces were displayed in a montage of start-to-finish time lapses. Scattered about were photos of full sleeves and peppered in with those were the occasional nudes. Women whose faces were strategically shadowed proudly displayed themselves topless for the camera. Shiny, newly tatted breasts, rib cages, and stomachs were shown off. Calla frowned at them.
“Jeannie takes the photos, not me,” he assured her. “I’ve got better things to do.”
A long moment passed between them until she asked, “Is it just us here?”
Adam nodded. “I haven’t hired anyone else yet. I’m taking it slow. Don’t want to get in over my head. So, yeah, we’re alone. I’ve still got some cleaning up to do and nightly paperwork to file.”
Calla glanced at him over her shoulder. “All business, huh?”
“Absolutely. I am the boss after all.” He cocked his head to the side and scanned the length of her. “So… are you going to drop your drawers?”
Chapter Fifteen
Her jaw dropped. Adam grinned. Before she could respond he said, “If I had to guess, you may be a guidance counselor but you’ve still got a wild streak in you.” He smirked. “But it’s just a small one. I doubt you’d let a strange man handle your tits while he worked on them.” Adam made a show of looking her up and down. “So I’m guessing it’s on your hip. Just low enough so your waistband covers it. Otherwise Mom and Dad might have seen.”
Calla continued to gape at him. Adam guessed it was because he’d nailed her—her personality at least.
“So, are you going to let me look at this monstrosity?” he asked.
For a moment he thought she’d say no. Maybe she’d been a guidance counselor now for longer than she’d been a rebellious teen and she just wasn’t that kind of girl anymore. She surprised him, though, when she slowly reached down and unbuttoned her shorts. Unzipping them she turned slowly, giving him her back. She pulled her shirt hem up and her waistband down. Adam might have been a few feet away, but he could spot a thong from a mile away, in the dark. A black smudge marred her otherwise smooth skin on the right hip, just below the waistline. He moved forward slowly.
“I need a better look,” he said gently. He put his left hand on her left hip and slipped a fingertip into her shorts. He pushed them down just a scant inch, not enough to reveal anything but the old tattoo. He heard her gasp anyway. He swiped his thumb over the faded ink. She shivered and watched him out of the corner of her eye.
“Can you fix it?” she asked. “Cover it up with something else?”
Reluctantly Adam let go of her. Her half-wild hair brushed his face before he could step back. He didn’t swat it away.
“I don’t normally advocate covering up mistakes,” he told her. “But you’re too damn beautiful to have something this ugly on you.”
He turned away from her and walked to the counter. As he picked up his sketchbook and pencil, he nodded at the chair. Calla refastened her fly and sat down.
“Did you always want to do this?” she asked as he sketched.
Adam nodded. “Pretty much. Knew I had talent and I knew there weren’t a whole lot of options. I get to make my own hours, be my own boss. It could be a lot worse.” He grinned at her. “Did you always want to be a guidance counselor?”
Calla lay back in the chair and sighed. “No. Not really, but I really did like my own counselor. You’re right, I was kind of wild,” she told him.
Adam snorted.
She laughed. “Okay, relatively,” she amended. “My parents split up when I was in high school. I took it pretty hard. Neither of them wanted to talk about it. My friends had their own stuff going on, so one day I skipped yet another class and my guidance counselor, Mrs. Shreve, called me into her office. I thought I’d get suspended, but instead she just asked me how things were at home. She was the only person to ever ask, so I told her. And I kept telling her. About my mom crying in the bathroom every night. About my dad getting remarried. Mrs. Shreve kept listening, so I kept talking.” Calla plucked at the brown leather seam on the chair and looked up at him. “Do a lot of people confess their sins in this chair?”
He smiled. “More than a few. Why? Do you have anything you want to confess?”
She held his gaze a moment then looked away. “I lost someone. A kid, last year.”
“Oh, God.” He hadn’t meant to make a joke of something so terrible. “Calla, I’m sorry.”
“Bullying issues,” she said. “He was a nice boy, didn’t talk a whole lot. The last few times I saw him, he seemed happier, better. I thought he was better, but he just… had a plan, I guess.”
Adam blew out a harsh breath. “Suicide?”
She nodded. “No one said it was my fault, but everything changed. They looked at me differently, talked to me differently. I still go over it in my head, how much I missed. How sad was too sad? Why didn’t I know?”
Adam’s pencil slowed to a halt. “Sounds familiar.”
“I quit just after New Year’s and transferred here, but I still can’t let it go. I know I’m being pushy with Ava but with all she’s going through…”
Adam reached out and took her hand in his. He knew what he’d felt these last few days and he couldn’t stand it if Calla had been feeling even a fraction of that. She was too good for that. “Sometimes things get past us,” he told her gently. “But sometimes there’s just nothing to see, Calla. What happened before wasn’t your fault. And Ava’s alright. I’m not going to let her fall through the cracks.”
“I hope you don’t resent me for sticking my nose in.”
Adam shook his head. “No. I like knowing you’re around. Believe me, it’s comforting to know I’m not doing all this on my own. I’m absolutely unqualified.”
Calla squeezed his hand gently. “You are qualified. No one loves your family more than you do.”
“We took Pop to the doctor today,” Adam said miserably.
“What did they say?”
“Most likely it’s Early onset Alzheimer’s.”
“Oh, Adam. I’m so sorry.”
He nodded. He wasn’t used to feeling sorry for himself, but then again he wasn’t used to having someone around who gave a shit, either. “Every time I think this is as bad as it could possibly get, something else goes wrong. I can take it. But Ava and Jonah, they’ve been through enough. And Mom didn’t deserve to die the way she did. Dad… he’s slipping away and he knows it. He knows it, but he can’t stop it. How is any of that fair to them?”
Adam couldn’t tell if Calla was holding on tightly to him or him to her, but he couldn’t bring himself to let go of her hand just yet.
“I’m here,” she t
old him.
It wouldn’t fix anything, but it seemed like enough.
Finally, reluctantly, he let go of her hand, leaned back, and tore off the page he was working on and handed it over. Calla reached out to take it from him. “Oh, wow,” she breathed as she stared at it. Adam had shaded the black band logo into a flower stem, above it a white calla lily wrapped itself around a yellow spadix. “It’s…”
“Georgia O’Keeffe,” he replied. “I’ve seen enough of her work.”
Calla blushed again at the vaguely erotic drawing. Adam couldn’t help but smile. “It’d be a bit larger,” he told her. “Not sure you can handle something that big.”
Calla raised an eyebrow at him and he fought the urge to laugh. It was such a nice break from the shit he’d been dealing with these last few days, apparently they’d both been carrying a heavy load. Calla seemed just as relieved to set it down, at least for a little while. “Oh, I can take it,” she assured him.
Adam smirked at her. “It’s gonna hurt.”
“Will it look as good as the drawing?”
He sniffed and pretended to be offended. “I can see why you’d ask,” he replied, nodding at her hip. “Given that masterpiece.”
Calla wrinkled her nose.
In this light he realized she had faint freckles that he’d never noticed before. “You ready?”
To her credit, Calla only hesitated the barest of seconds before she stood up and unzipped her shorts again. As tempting as it was to watch again, Adam snapped on some blue latex gloves and set about opening ink bottles on the counter. He stocked the rolling tray with the necessary white, black, gray, and yellow bottles and affixed a new needle to the gun. When he turned back to her, she was already lying face down on the chair with her T-shirt pulled up around her ribs and her shorts pushed down. This time Adam could see the red lace thong that snaked across her hip and dipped in between her—appropriately—lily-white cheeks. He blew out a harsh breath. It was going to be a long evening.
He took a paper drape in one hand and tugged on her shorts with the other. Calla sucked in a sharp breath. As he tucked the sheet into her waistband to protect her clothes, he leaned down over her. His lips brushed up against her wild hair somewhere in the vicinity of her ear. “Relax,” he told her. “We’re not at the sinning part.”
Calla watched with curious fascination as he swabbed her hip then prepped the needle with fresh, black ink. He turned back to her, comfortably settled onto his stool, and pressed the fingers of his free hand against her pale skin. On more than one occasion, he regretted having to wear the gloves. This was no exception. Calla was warm and smooth and beautiful and about to wear Adam’s mark for the rest of her life. Even if he never had her, and he was reasonably certain he would, she’d carry something of him on her forever. He leaned forward and grimaced at the tightness in his jeans. His cock wanted the tat to be over already, but Adam was willing to stretch it out for a little while. Penetrating her with the needle, filling her with ink, there wasn’t much in this world that was more sexual than that.
Calla whimpered just a tiny bit, but didn’t flinch when the needle touched her skin. Blood welled up and Adam expertly wiped it away with his left hand. Some people hated the sight of it. Adam had even known some artists who hadn’t been able to deal with it, but it had never bothered him. Blood made sense. Blood was necessary. Anything permanent, in his opinion, required an appropriate sacrifice.
He dipped and re-dipped the needle as he created the stem of the flower while the thumb of his left hand skimmed the dimple of her cheek. Adam had never molested a female customer before, but damn if he wasn’t tempted to now. He pressed his palm to the small of her back and spread his fingers. Calla gripped the edge of the seat firmly. The tips of her fingers dug into the leather. Adam ignored his raging hard-on and swapped the used needle for a fresh one. He ripped open the plastic packaging with his teeth and spat it on the floor. He told himself he’d throw it away later. Right now he wanted his hands on her. He held the skin taut once more and pressed the sharp edge into her. Her flesh tore again, her blood rose to the surface, and Adam replaced it with his ink.
Calla moaned as he shaded the flower’s spadix, that yellow stalk cradled by folds of white petals.
“Adam!”
“We’re almost done,” he growled and wiped a bead of sweat on his forehead with his sleeve. He was losing patience but he struggled to maintain control. He’d be damned if he half-assed her ass. He filled in the shading with a gray/white mix, enough to give it depth and the illusion of brush strokes on a skin canvas. Finally satisfied that it was worthy of her, he tossed the gun onto the metal tray. It clattered loudly. He stripped off his gloves and snatched up a tube of ointment. Despite how he was feeling, he gently applied it over the fresh wound, taking care to cover every line. Calla craned her neck to see it, but couldn’t quite manage it. He handed her a mirror while he retrieved a square bandage from the cart.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“Damn right it is,” he replied. She looked up from the mirror, duly impressed, and he could tell she knew he wasn’t bragging about his work. Adam carefully applied the large square bandage to the shiny, damaged flesh. She winced a bit. “You’re going to feel it for a few days,” he told her.
Calla laughed and stood up. “That’s what she said.”
She winced as she tugged up her shorts and the denim came up against the bandage. Unable to help himself, Adam reached out and took a length of her kinky hair in his fingers. She looked up at him. “You might want to leave them off,” he said quietly.
Chapter Sixteen
Adam lay sprawled across his bed as Calla straddled him. Her shorts had been tossed onto the chair downstairs, long since forgotten. Her shirt was lying in a heap on his floor and her panties were buried somewhere in his sheets. His fingers tore at the clasp of her bra. He’d lost track of his own clothes. They were strewn about the darkened apartment. As she sat over him, he spread his hands over her silky smooth thighs, careful not to reach for her ass no matter how much he wanted to in order to avoid her fresh ink.
She had his cock in her hands, rubbing it slowly. He was already hard enough to take her, but apparently Calla was as interested in making this last as he was. Her fingers curled around the base of his shaft then slowly slid up toward the head. Her thumb swirled the single drop of pre-cum that surfaced, slicking the head. He groaned but didn’t want to close his eyes. The bra tossed aside, her tits were mouth-wateringly perky. Two dusky nipples were pebbled into hard points. He grabbed her arm and yanked her down to him.
His mouth sealed around one nub and she gasped. Sadly, she’d had to let go of his cock to balance herself, but Adam thought the trade-off was well worth it. His teeth slightly grazed her sensitive skin and she arched her back for him, driving her breast further into his mouth. Though she couldn’t quite pleasure him, he had no trouble reaching her delicate folds. He slid his hand down her belly and over her clit. He would have expected a thatch of wild, unruly hair here as well, but Calla was shaved smooth and glistening pink. The pads of his fingertips rasped over her swollen clit and she dug her nails into his chest.
He worked her most sensitive spot slowly but firmly, gently pinching and tugging it. Her breath was ragged and hot against his cheek as her hot pussy spread for him further down. She was wet, ready for him, and he longed to be inside her but forced himself to put it off just a bit more. He dipped a finger into her, curling it back to himself in search of the rough patch inside that would make his wild goddess even more frenzied. He found it, just a scant inch past the entrance. Calla writhed on top of him and called his name. The sweat beaded between her breasts and he tasted her salty, warm skin.
He slid in a second finger and stretched her wide. “Fuck yourself, baby,” he demanded. “Show me how you like it.”
She slammed down hard onto his hand, forcing his fingers in deep. Adam rather enjoyed a woman who took charge of her own pleasure. Calla humped h
is hand furiously, taking his fingers deep and hard.
“You ready to fit me in there, baby?”
“Oh, God yes!”
Adam wasted no time. He reached for a condom from the nightstand drawer. Calla snatched it from him and settled herself over his thighs. Her expert hands tore the foil and soon enough she had hold of his cock again. As she rolled on the latex, she smiled down at him seductively. As fast and hard as she’d fucked his fingers, she slid the condom on excruciatingly slowly. He felt each inch of it enveloping his shaft. Fuck, he hated having to use it. They were going to fix that as soon as possible, he decided. His fingers couldn’t be the only thing to feel the inside of that sweet, slick pussy.
“God damn, woman,” he growled.
Calla laughed. “You teased me,” she reminded him.
He groaned as she cupped his heavy sac. “Calla,” he said hoarsely.
“You want me to fit you in there, baby?” she teased.
“Calla!” he half-shouted. The last thing he needed was to come while she had her hand on him.
She seemed to sense that he was done playing because her grip tightened on his shaft. She positioned his cock ramrod straight and moved over it swiftly. Once she got the head pressed against her entrance, she shoved herself down on him, burying him to the root.
“God damn!” he shouted as he gripped her thighs.
Calla rode him hard, lifting herself almost entirely off him before slamming back down again in earnest. Her tits bounced tantalizingly above him. Her mouth was slightly open and he realized he wanted to be in there, too. He wanted every part of her open and hungry for him. Because he couldn’t have her mouth tonight, he redoubled his efforts on her pussy, thrusting himself up hard to meet her.
“You’d better come, Calla,” he ordered roughly. “You’d better come all over my cock. And I want to hear you.”
Her pussy juice erupted at his request. She wasn’t coming but she soaked them both in a sweet, warm flood. His balls were coated with it as well as the sheet below. His bed would smell like her for hours and he knew he’d love it.
