Tattoos & Teacups

by Anna Martin

  Chris was clearly a little buzzed, but I didn’t want that; too much alcohol left me with a numbness rather than energy, and for this I wanted to have all my mental faculties firmly in place.

  The last time Chris had been in my home, he’d been in my bedroom, but only because it was the only way to access the single bathroom in the flat. I guessed he hadn’t lingered because when I showed him through again, he took his time wandering around, looking at the little bits and pieces that transformed the place from somewhere where I laid my head at night to my home of the past four years.

  Still, I wasn’t really one for collecting things, “dust collectors” as my mother called them. As far as personal items went, I had books; stacks of books on nearly every possible surface. The most precious thing in my room was the one Chris homed in on, almost as if he knew or understood its value.

  He was incredibly careful with the small frame that held a picture of me and my daughter, taken a few days after she was born. There were photographs taken in the hospital, but I’d never liked them. There was a clinical, depressed, slightly desperate edge to them all. We were only nineteen. Our parents were furious with us. I was overwhelmed.

  When we were allowed to take her home, things only got worse. Chloe was a colicky, fussy baby almost from the get-go. We got precious little sleep. Daylight hours were spent washing and feeding and changing and bathing and, for me, working my ass off. Lu resented me. Chloe, I was convinced, knew I wasn’t cut out to be a father.

  Then, it fell into place.

  I was exhausted after finishing an eight-hour shift and got home to a screaming baby and a frazzled Luisa. She shoved the child in my arms and announced she was taking a bath and there was nothing I could do except learn how to deal with my daughter.

  It took a good hour, maybe more until she settled and I curled up in an armchair with her in my arms, damned if I was going to put her down in case she started screaming again. I must have fallen asleep like that because months later when we were getting the rolls of film from those first few weeks of her life developed, there was the picture.

  Me, fast asleep in a dark brown leather armchair; Chloe, her face peaceful but wide awake, staring up at me. Lu had framed it and given it to me as a Christmas gift, and I cherished it as evidence that I was not a terrible father after all.

  “Does she look like you?” Chris asked as he set the frame back in its place on my dresser.

  “Chloe? No. Not at all. She takes after her mother.”

  When he kissed me again, there was a new kind of low, constant heat that smoldered in my belly and jumped in my throat. His breath was warm and sweet; at some point in the evening, he’d clearly switched from beer to some kind of liquor.

  My fingers went to the hem of his T-shirt, drawing it up over his head in a swift movement. If he was surprised at my forwardness he didn’t let it show, letting me remove my own shirt, then slowly slide leather through metal and metal through denim.

  I was almost sure his breathing was faster than it should be, and it was clear that he was aroused. I wanted to know everything about him, though, all his secrets and his desires and what made him tick.

  “Sorry about the bed,” I said, wondering if he’d noticed that it was a three-quarter size and not a full double. “The last owner left it here. Apparently he spent a fortune trying to get a double mattress up the stairs, and even then it wouldn’t fit around the door.”

  “I’m sure we’ll manage,” Chris said as he inelegantly toed off his shoes and socks, leaving them where they fell.

  He was naked and I nearly so when we finally made it to my soft, soft new sheets, and Chris looked so right there, lying on my bed where I’d imagined him so many times before that I had to take a moment to commit the sight to memory.

  There were other tattoos, ones that I’d known the existence of but not the location. I wanted to touch them, so I did; the swallows that dove over his hips, following the natural contours of his body.

  And he was naked, of course, so the birds were really pointing the way toward what was an inevitable conclusion. He was erect. Painfully so, if I had correctly interpreted the shiny skin, swollen head, and taut, drawn-up testicles.

  I realized I was staring and looked guiltily back up at his face. Chris hitched an eyebrow and dropped his knees open in clear invitation. Stretched out beside him, I placed my hand carefully on his stomach and leaned in for a kiss. He responded with a slow, slick, wet slide of tongues that pooled heat in my groin and made me want him even more, if that was even possible.

  Kissing down his neck, I took time to find the spots that made him shudder and squirm. I hoped and had a feeling that this wouldn’t be the last exploration of his body that I took. It was still worth making these mental notes for future reference.

  As I shifted down the bed, I risked another glance up at his face. Chris was smiling serenely, an arm thrown casually above his head and the other resting gently on my back. I kept my eyes trained on his as my tongue circled his nipple, flicked it, then sucked the pink, puckered flesh into my mouth.

  It was like I’d flipped a switch.

  Gone was the calm, composed man of half a moment ago. Chris arched his back from the bed, thrusting his body up toward me and muttering a string of curses and expletives. Delighted at his reaction, I continued to tease and torture him, drawing the most delicious sounds from his mouth.

  “Fuck,” he said, laughing now as I pulled away. “You found my weakness.”

  I nodded and replaced my tongue with the pad of my thumb, still circling his nipple slowly.

  “Can you come from just this?” I asked.

  “No. But I can get really fucking close.”

  Wanting his lips, I leaned in for another kiss, this one tasting of the spike of heat between us. I reached for my admittedly small stash of condoms and lube. While I was reaching over, I turned on the single lamp, which emitted a soft glow. I wanted to be able to see him.

  Chris took them from me and maybe realized that it was my turn to get some attention, but in the form of gentle reassurance. Then he got a look at my chosen brand of lubricant and huffed.

  “Really, Rob?”

  “What?”

  He smirked. “This is jerk-off lube, not fucking lube.”

  “What would you prefer?” I asked, stung.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, pouring some of it onto his fingers. “I’ll bring better stuff next time.”

  Next time. We hadn’t even gotten there yet and he was already talking about a next time. I watched, entranced, as he spread the lubricant between his legs, over his cock, down to his hole, which he painted liberally with the viscous liquid, but he didn’t attempt to push inside himself.

  Before I could formulate a response to his actions, he rolled over onto his stomach and up onto his hands and knees, pushing his ass back toward me.

  “No,” I said, giving him a sharp, stinging slap on the rump. “Flip over.”

  He frowned but followed my instruction, resuming his previous position. On his back, he brought his knees up to his chest, knowing now what I wanted. The sound of his breathing was loud in my ears as I fumbled with the foil encasing the condom and rolled it down over my cock with shaking fingers.

  My efforts to stretch him were met with a frustrated “Fuck it, now, Rob. Now,” so I abandoned that task and moved between his legs. When I positioned myself, one hand braced on the bed next to Chris’s shoulder, the other guiding my cock, he looked up at me with the same lazy, indulgent expression that he’d worn earlier. Only now I knew how to change it, how to turn him into a writhing, desperate thing. I lined the head of my cock up but watched his face as I pushed forward, knowing that without much preparation, this could hurt him.

  Achingly slow, I pushed into him, waiting for a moment for him to adjust before sinking the rest of the way into him.

  “Wow,” he murmured. “Oh, wow.”

  It didn’t seem to hurt; his mouth stretched wide in an “Oh!” of pleasure,
and he arched back off the bed so only his shoulders and feet and bunched-up fists kept the contact. I wanted to give him time, I really did, but he was pushing back onto me, and I had little choice but to go with it.

  “How do you like it?” I asked, my voice sounding lower, rougher, and inexplicably more Scottish as I bottomed out inside him. His legs locked around my waist, and I found his mouth with mine, kissing him desperately as we rocked together, carefully at first, learning each other’s limits one step at a time.

  “Hard,” he whispered. “Hard and fast. And rough.”

  I smiled. “Only if you look at me.”

  Blue eyes flickered with something raw and uninhibited as they met mine, and I kissed his lips once before rocking back and slamming deep inside him. His cry was enough to send a harsh shiver down my spine.

  “Fuck!”

  Despite my being years out of practice, it was like riding a bike, sort of, inasmuch as I hadn’t forgotten how to do it even if I wasn’t doing it particularly well. Chris didn’t seem to mind as I varied my thrusts, changing up the angle until his fingers dug into my arms tight enough to leave tiny crescents from his nails and one thumbprint-sized bruise.

  “There…,” he said, his eyes still wide but unfocused. “Right there.”

  Now that I had something to focus on, I pulled back up onto my arms, locking my elbows in tight and letting go, finding a rhythm that seemed to suck us both in. My eyes would flick to where we were joined, the incredibly erotic sight of part of me disappearing into part of him, to his cock, locked tightly in his fist, but always back to blue eyes wide with lust.

  His ass clamped down hard on me, and I knew he was going to come moments before he actually did. A red flush spread across his chest and up his neck as he screwed his eyes tightly shut and arched his neck, baring his throat to me as his own hand took him over the edge.

  I still watched as he continued to pump himself and thick ropes of white come painted his chest and stomach.

  “Shit,” I muttered and actually tried to get deeper inside him as I came too, feeling the aftershocks ripple through his body and set off my own.

  My muscles had turned to pudding, and my elbows gave out, causing me to slump forward onto him with an inelegant “Oomph.” Chris groaned, and I rolled off him enough to pull off the condom and dispose of it, then roll right back to him.

  Chris was wearing what one could only call a shit-eating grin.

  “I knew it,” he said emphatically, although the inflection was lost somewhere in the deep, panting breaths he was still taking.

  “Knew what?” I asked and realized my own breathing wasn’t a lot better.

  “I fucking knew you’d be great in bed,” he said, and slapped his hand down on the bed next to him as he cursed, although it caught a spring and bounced back up again comically.

  I laughed and found enough energy to roll over to him for a sloppy kiss. My feet kicked at the edge of the blanket that hung over the end of the bed, drawing it up over my calves until it was close enough to my hand for me to reach down and drag it up over us both.

  His breathing evened out over the next few minutes, and I found my own matching his. It was soothing, this breathing in synch business. Then he leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, and rolled off the edge of the bed and started looking for his clothes amongst the mess on my bedroom floor.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Can’t find my underwear,” he grunted.

  “Were you wearing any?” I couldn’t remember. I didn’t think so. “And why? You can borrow some of mine if you don’t like sleeping naked.”

  Chris stopped dressing and looked at me. His appearance—one sock, his open shirt, and nothing else—was verging on ridiculous. When he didn’t say anything, I shuffled over on the bed.

  “Come back here, you silly bugger.”

  “You… fuck. You want me to stay?”

  “Yeah. ’Course I do.”

  He looked baffled, but stripped again and sat tentatively down on the bed. I took his arm and pulled him back down onto his bed and sort of found a way to snuggle into him.

  “Are you sure about this?” Chris asked as his fingers tentatively combed through my hair.

  “Yeah. Shut up and go to sleep.”

  “Okay. Night, Rob.”

  “Good night, Chris.”

  Chapter 5

  THE next morning brought grey sunlight washed out by the rain and a warm body in my arms for the first time in years. Chris was snoring softly, facing away from the window, probably not yet woken by the fact that my body was shielding his from the light. I hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains before we’d fallen into bed last night.

  My movement seemed to disturb him, though, and as I listened to his deep breathing lighten, he turned to rest his face against my chest. I kissed his forehead.

  There were plenty of things I should have been doing on a Saturday morning. My routine was to wake early, as I did during the week, and start to go through my lecture plans and check through papers that needed to be marked. I needed to return a book to the library and find a suitable birthday gift for my mother. I really should have called her and accepted or declined her invitation to lunch the following day; I hadn’t responded yet. By midafternoon I’d usually be working on marking essays or planning lectures, freeing up my Sunday for whatever it was that I wanted to do.

  Chris sighed heavily in his sleep and rolled over, pressing his chest full-length against my back, slinging a leg over my hips and an arm around my waist, effectively trapping me in bed. I took his hand and held it tight to my chest.

  It can wait, I thought vaguely before drifting back to sleep.

  SETTING up the meeting between Chloe and Chris proved slightly more difficult than I had initially anticipated. My access to Chloe was limited; Lu and I were still on good terms, but Chloe had a whole host of extracurricular activities that filled her weekends and evenings, and she lived nearly an hour away. Not that Chris understood this. He asked me nearly every time we spoke if I’d called Luisa yet, what the progress was, when I’d see Chloe again.

  Finally, a few weeks after the first (disastrous) conversation, the opportunity arose for me to spend a Sunday with my daughter. Not that it was a perfect arrangement for any of us. Far from it. Chris often had a gig on a Saturday night, working well into the early hours of the morning. And I had work to prepare for the week ahead. And Chloe would have a cheerleading competition the day before, meaning she’d likely be tired too.

  I knocked on the front door of Luisa’s house and was greeted by her husband.

  “Hi,” I said to Mike.

  “Hey, Robert,” he said, shaking my hand and welcoming me in. “Lu is in bed. The pregnancy is taking its toll on her now.”

  “How much longer does she have left?” I asked. Dates had never stuck in my head.

  “Two weeks,” he said, thumping the door twice. “Knock on wood.”

  “She’ll be fine. She’s a trooper,” I opined. He tilted his head to one side and gave me a bland smile.

  “Chloe?” I called up the stairs.

  “Coming!” she yelled back.

  Mike and I made small talk as she banged about in her room for a few more minutes, then appeared at the top of the stairs wearing the tightest pair of jeans I had ever seen—they looked like she’d painted them on her skinny legs—and a loose, torn tank top. Her hair was scraped into a ponytail; the curls bounced down her back as she bounced down the stairs.

  I gave Mike a look that clearly said, Do you let her out of the house looking like that?

  He replied with an equally silent It’s not worth the argument.

  “You’ll need a jumper or something, honey,” I told her. “It’s chilly out.”

  “Dad,” she whined. “No one says ‘jumper’.”

  “Sweater. Cardigan. Hoodie. Coat, jacket, fleece. Bloody poncho, Chlo, just put something on.”

  She rolled her eyes and stomped back up the stairs.

  �
��Good luck,” Mike murmured, slapping me on the shoulder and wandering back off into the house.

  She appeared with a hoodie with the logo for her cheerleading squad on it and, at my raised eyebrow, threw it on over her head.

  Chloe had taken after her mother in the looks department for the most part; like her mother, she was petite, her eyes too big for her face, giving her a permanently startled, deer-in-headlights sort of look which had always amused me when she was a baby. As she’d grown, so had the lashes framing her rich brown eyes (the color, at least, she’d inherited from me), making her more of a doe-eyed Bambi now.

  “Not that cold,” she said as we headed to the car.

  “Cold enough,” I told her.

  As we pulled off down the street, I looked over at my daughter. “How did the competition go yesterday?” I asked.

  “You remembered,” she said, looking at me like I was an alien. I felt like one.

  “Of course,” I told her. It was a little white lie. Lu had reminded me.

  “We got second place,” she said. “Out of fourteen teams, it was pretty good.”

  “Congratulations,” I enthused.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  We went through our normal script of questions: how was school (boring), homework (done), boys (Dad, please), her mother (fat). I laughed at the last one, and she cracked a smile.

  “She was huge when she was carrying you,” I said. “For such a little woman, it was funny. She was like a weeble.”

  “What the hell is a weeble?”

  “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down?” I said. “No? Oh. They were toys your Aunty Jilly and I had when we were kids.”

  She shrugged and gave me that blank teenager look that said, You’re old.

  “So, Dad,” she said, her eyes fixed on the road. “Why aren’t you married and having kids?”

  I choked on nothing. “I don’t know,” I said after clearing my throat. “I’m just not.”