“No. Asher’s cool. You can just go hang out in the back. Right Ash?” he said looking at me.
“Yeah. Why don’t you go back to your station, Ryan? I’ll show her there,” I said, getting up.
“I’m really sorry if I’m in the way. I’ll leave and meet Ryan later,” she said behind me. I stopped and looked at her.
“You said your name was Jenn, right?”
“Y-yeah.”
“Well, Jenn. Ryan’s not the boss around here. I am. He can’t tell you what is and isn’t okay to do. Only I can,” I told her. Her eyes became round, and she looked a little scared for a second. They were brown, her eyes, but light, like the color of Hennessy.
“I’m sorry for getting in your way,” she said quietly.
“Who said you were in the way? I didn’t say you had to leave,” I said, turning and walking into the back area, stopping in front of my closed office door. “In fact, I want you to stay.” I watched her become more and more uncomfortable as I looked at her. She was nervous. “Do you want to leave?” I asked.
“I don’t have anywhere to be,” she said. “I’d like to stay if that’s alright.” I paused. Her duffel bag. Her not having anywhere to be. Ryan had said she was a hitchhiker, hadn’t he? Who was this chick? Was she a runaway or something? She didn’t look like a kid, but she looked a little… homeless. Lost. Like she really did follow Ryan in here because she had nowhere to be.
“Behind this door is my office. You can stay here till we start to head out. Do not touch anything,” I said, stressing the last warning. She nodded earnestly, like a schoolgirl. “Come to the front if you want anything. It’s a slow day so you might be able to come out later,” I added because of how scared she looked. I opened the door and held it open for her to walk in. “Hey, Mal. Take care of Jenny here, alright?” I said into the room. Mal was stretched out on the couch on her back. She sat up seeing us at the door.
“Thank you,” Jenny said, turning to face me. “I really appreciate this.” I nodded. She was welcome, I guess. I hadn’t done anything. I’d let her sit in a room in the back alone, or she would be alone once Mal had to work. It wasn’t that much. It was close to nothing, in fact. I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, but what was her deal? Where had she come from? I hated how familiar her gratitude was.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said closing the door. I was curious, but I figured I’d talk to her later. The other guys were going to be coming in, and clients would start showing up. What would she do in there alone? There was no way out unless she found the back door. She had nowhere to go allegedly, so we’d see I guess. I walked back to my station and started setting up.
“Asher?” I heard Mal ask, walking back into the studio. She took her coffee from the tray which Ryan hadn’t bothered to go give her. “Did you turn this place into an Airbnb since yesterday? Who was that?”
“Just some girl Ryan’s trying to fuck,” I said, “emphasis on the word trying.”
“Oh, please. Ryan couldn’t fuck her,” she said, loud enough for Ryan at the desk to hear her. “She looks like a college girl.”
“Jealous, Mal? She’s here from Arizona,” Ryan supplied.
“She’s moving out here? Where’d you find her?”
“Right outside the shop. She was standing there, and Ryan decided he wasn’t going to let her read the sign in peace.”
“You’re just going to let her sit in there? You aren’t going to make her get something done if she wants to hang out like it’s Griffith fucking Park?”
I chuckled, thinking about it. Did she have any tattoos? None that I could see. She had two lobe piercings in each ear, but that was it.
“What? Like an afternoon costs a nipple piercing?”
“Two nipple piercings,” Mal said smiling diabolically.
“You’re giving away free piercings now?”
“If she agrees, I’ll pay for it,” Mal said. “She came into a tattoo shop, what does she expect?”
“A tattoo shop, not a frat house. Maybe she expected not to get hazed?”
“Come on,” Mal said, goading me. I was only showing disapproval because that was what you did when you were the boss. I’d probably run this place like a frat house if it meant we could still make money that way. I mostly wanted to see what Jenny would say if we told her that was what she had to do to stay here.
She sort of looked like she wouldn’t go for it, but I wanted to see if she’d surprise me. I also wanted to see her tits if she actually said yes to getting her nipples pierced.
“Yeah, come on Ash,” Ryan said. “Should I go get her?”
“No, you should get to work. Stop fucking around. The clients should be showing up soon.” Only at work. Only because we were at work.
If I didn’t have to give a shit about being professional, I’d have gone back there and stuck her myself.
4
Felicity
I had never run away before, and I wasn’t that sure of the protocol, but I thought I was doing an alright job so far. I hadn’t been murdered yet, so that was good. That’s really the first rule, isn’t it? Second, I’d made it all the way to Los Angeles.
After leaving Joshua Tree, I’d offered to drive the car, but Jasper wouldn’t let me. It was one of those vintage ones; he probably loved it very much. He’d bought me breakfast and dropped me off somewhere he claimed it would be easy to catch the bus or get a taxi.
I hadn’t had a plan beyond getting here, and now I’d arrived. I had told him I was going to find a way back to Seattle from here, but I’d also told him I was called Jennifer. If any place was going to be my destination, why not the place I already was? I was here. I couldn’t hitch out of the city center; who the hell would pick me up? I didn’t know anyone here so calling in a favor was out of the question too. I did have money now, and since I did, I could pay for some sort of legitimate way out of this place.
I didn’t want to clear my account and walk around with that much money, but I didn’t want to use my cards for anything. I was paranoid. This wasn’t CSI or whatever but I didn’t want to leave any clues to where I was.
The rational thing would have been heading back home. I didn’t know what to do here. It just seemed like the place where Jasper had wanted to drop me off, so I had let him. He apparently lived in Silverdale, or Silverglen or Glendale. Something like that, which was some distance away—I couldn’t remember. He had given me his number and told me to call him when I wanted to hang out or to talk if I ended up staying here a while before going back home. Asking for another ride was totally pushing it. I didn’t want to bother him again.
My pills must have been working because I wasn’t losing my mind yet. I had been going with the flow, lying my way across state borders. Not the best thing to do with my new level-headedness but I was calling that a win. I had made it all the way here.
Guess the next step was squatting in a tattoo shop. Although, of course, there was that rational thing again. I could have at this point used my phone to call my family and let them know that I had left the center and had no intention of completing my treatment program. Thanks, but no thanks.
I was on a roll.
Besides, it wasn’t like I had to leave, anyway. They had said I could stay. He had said I could stay. That guy, Asher. Asher Bailey. The boss. As long as I didn’t touch anything. That was proving harder than I had thought it would be initially. If this place didn’t have so much cool stuff in it, then I’d have no problem not touching anything, but at this rate, I’d have to sit on my hands and shut my eyes to avoid all the visual stimulation.
There was a desk in there, shelves, a lamp—the usual stuff you’d find in an office, but the walls were a harsh candy apple red and were completely covered in framed pictures and posters. Some were paintings, others band posters, and others just line drawings. The desk was strewn with paper and pencils.
After a while of taking it in while I sat, I had to get up. I wasn’t going to touch anything. Just look. The she
lves were full of books, files, knickknacks and things I couldn’t identify. Some of the papers on the desk were drawn on. Others were not. Underneath it all was a laptop computer.
I turned my attention to the walls. I recognized some of the band posters, like The Misfits and Siouxsie and the Banshees but the artwork was what caught my eye. It was really… dark. A lot of darker, murkier colors, but also like, creepy stuff. Strange people with twisted bodies and empty eyes. People drawn with striking deformity and exaggerated features. What looked like blood coming out of heads, mouths, and eyes. It was gross, but objectively, really beautifully executed.
I jumped hearing the door swing open. Instead of the woman, Mal, it was him. Ryan. I smiled and relaxed, seeing him. He didn’t look like the rest of them, or at least not like Mal and Asher—there were probably others. Like, he didn’t look like someone who would work at a place called Broken Seal Tattoo. I had seen him in there when I was outside but hadn’t really done a good job of noticing him till he had come outside to say hi to me.
His hair was sandy brown, curly and he had this pretty boy face, like very smooth and not too many hard edges. Very well groomed, like he probably waxed his chest hair. He looked like the boy you fell in love with on your high school’s football team but totally wouldn’t pay any attention to you.
“Hey,” he said coming in, “everything alright?”
“Everything’s great,” I said, trying to sound chipper.
“Sorry about Ash. He’s a cool guy, just a little uptight sometimes.”
“Are you back here because he let you come or is he going to come and drag you away again?” I asked playfully. He laughed.
“He told me if he was going to let you stay here, you had to earn your keep,” he said.
“Did he really say that?”
“No, I’d just rather be here with you than out there,” he said. I smiled. How corny. How sweet, but how fucking corny. Two guys in twelve hours? What else was in these damn pills? I had never gotten this much male attention, even on the best of days back home. I had also been in a long-term relationship and then indisposed for months back home but still. Maybe dirty hitchhiker was really my look.
“You want me to take the trash out for you or something?”
“Actually, I’m going to grab something to eat. You can come with if you aren’t too busy here,” he said jokingly. I wasn’t hungry but getting out of there didn’t sound bad.
“Are you buying?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. He told me I could leave my duffel there. I walked out the open door, and he followed. We left through the back.
It had only been a few hours. I didn’t have an impression of Los Angeles yet. It was definitely very warm, and very busy and no rain at all since I’d arrived this morning. I knew what people said, about how pretentious people were and how bad the traffic was, but on the short walk down the street to grab lunch, I felt a little excited like I was new in town and couldn’t wait to explore.
I felt like Jenn the aspiring actress, with starry eyes and big dreams, about to make it big in Hollywood. I smiled at the thought, it was funny. I was the furthest thing from Jenn the actress. I was a nerd. I had been trying to get my master’s degree before all this had happened. Not that Jenn the actress couldn’t have one too, but she was in LA to get into acting. She was about to start waiting tables so she could earn enough money to get professional headshots and call her family to tune in to Discovery ID to watch her play a corpse in a reenactment on some True Crime show.
Alright, maybe I was being mean to Jenn. She was totally going to make it. In about five years she’d get Academy attention and trip and fall at the award show à la Jennifer Lawrence—another great Jenn. I kept all these thoughts to myself, careful about what I revealed to Ryan. He was easy to talk to. We ended up at a smaller Mexican place where I’d been unable to eat almost everything because of the spice.
He loved to talk about himself. Most people did, I guess. It wasn’t a bad thing. It was a good thing because I didn’t have to talk about myself. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to tell him. I knew what I wasn’t going to tell him, but since I knew that, I had to figure it out. Why was Jenn in Arizona if it wasn’t because Felicity was in rehab? Where did Jenn come from if Felicity was from Seattle?
Maybe I was overthinking all this. Did it matter if he really knew that I was from Seattle? A lot of people were. He ended up telling me that he had moved to LA from Ocala, Florida and had become part of the team at the tattoo shop because he and Asher had gone to high school together. I asked a few casual questions about Asher because I wanted to seem interested, but just a few because I didn’t want to seem that interested.
Unlike Ryan, he had caught my eye through the window at the tattoo shop, and I was curious. I wanted to know more. He seemed a little… intense. Not mean, but not overly friendly. Not the type to smile at strangers on the street, but then again, considerate enough to let a homeless girl squat in his tattoo shop for an afternoon.
We walked back into the shop through the front after lunch. It was buzzing with activity now. I could see Asher, and I could see the woman, Mal, but the other men I had never met before. One man, an Asian guy, didn’t look up when we came through. He was tattooing someone. The other guy was busy doing something too. I wanted to go over and look. I didn’t have any and had never seen one getting done.
Mal was sitting on a massage table with her legs crossed, watching with a smile as we walked up to her. She was really pretty if a little extreme in her look. It was nice; I just didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off. As she smiled, two piercings sunk into the dimples in her cheeks. We’d talked a little when we had met in Asher’s office.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“We thought it would be fun if we all did something together,” she said, smiling wide like she was plotting something.
“What?”
“Do you have any art?” she asked. I shook my head figuring she meant tattoos. “We think one of us should tattoo you,” she said.
“Why?” I asked, surprised.
“You don’t want a free tattoo?”
“I’m not good with pain.”
“With piercings, the pain’s gone in a second,” she said. “Where can we stick you?”
I looked from her to Asher to Ryan. One of the other guys had turned to pay attention too. They were all looking at me expectantly. Wow. They weren’t kidding. Were they just seeing what would push my buttons?
“Are you serious?”
“Belly button piercings are sexy on girls,” the guy whose name I didn’t know supplied.
“Lift your top, let me see,” she said. “Call it a gift before we send you on your way.” She hopped off the table and grabbed the bottom of my sweatshirt. I moved her hand away.
“Come on, Jenn,” Ryan said. “Mal’s gentle, everyone says so.” I looked at him a little offended. I thought he would be on my side. My eyes met Asher’s, and he was looking at me expectantly, with a smile crinkling them at the corners, like he was laughing at me.
“Come on guys, she’s not into it,” he said, looking right at me like he was daring me to say otherwise. I straightened my back a little. He thought I couldn’t do it? Why did that make me a little mad?
“How much does it hurt?” I asked Mal.
“You won’t feel a thing,” she assured me.
“Mal, you’re full of holes,” Asher said to her. “Tell the girl the truth.”
“Just a little pinch,” she said innocently. “So?” she said to me grinning. I took a deep breath looking between her and the other expectant faces. I could do this. This was nothing. Jenn who’d hitchhiked from Arizona had wanted a navel piercing for a while now, and this was the perfect opportunity to get one.
“Do it,” I said. Mal smiled with glee, hopping off the massage chair and patting it. She instructed me to lie back and relax. I got onto it, doing as she said so I was looking up at the ceiling instead of the people arou
nd me.
“Do you want jewelry with or without a gem?” she asked.
“Uh, surprise me?” I said, leaning up on my elbows to see what she was doing.
“Lie back,” she said. “Relax.” She pulled my sweatshirt up high enough to reveal my navel. I flinched at the soft touch of her making a mark with a pen. “Relax, this is just the clamp,” she said before I felt something pinch my skin hard enough to be a little firm but not necessarily hurt. My heart raced. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I could hear and feel it. She sprayed something cold on my stomach that made me flinch a bit.
“Alright, I’m going to need you to just breathe normally,” she said. Oh my god. What was I doing? Who the hell was I? When had this become who I was? Hitchhiking? Getting body piercings? “Inhale when I say,” she said. I didn’t. My breath was trapped in my throat, and I was frozen solid with panic. “Alright, breathe in,” she said. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited.
Nothing happened.
“Okay, exhale,” she said, “there we go. Done.”
I leaned up on my elbows again.
“What?”
“Lie back,” she said, pushing me back down gently again. That was it? I had felt something, like a little pressure and the movement, I guess, of the needle, but no pain. None. Like, at all.
“You should have chosen something more hardcore,” the guy whose name I didn’t know said, coming over to look at my exposed midriff. “I think she could have done a nipple.”
“Well done, Jenn,” Mal was saying. She was swabbing my navel with a Q-Tip, getting inside it, which was a weird sensation. It came away bloody, which was the only indication that she’d actually broken skin. I felt her put a bandage over it gently. “Keep it clean, don’t sleep on your stomach and no tight clothes till it’s healed,” she said.
Asher (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 6) Page 3
