I shrugged. “She’s not an object. And I couldn’t stake claim on something that wasn’t mine, but I wasn’t about to set the record straight and throw her to the wolves either.”
Ares smacked his tongue. “Bruh, who is you playin’? Did you forget that you were a wolf back then? Probably the biggest wolf at the school.”
“You just kept your shit more covert,” Eros explained. “Something told me the only reason you even played the field the way you did is because you were convinced you couldn’t have the one you truly wanted. The one you cared for even if you had no idea why.”
I twitched at how close my brother was to the truth, because yeah, to me Ivy was my vice. The temptation that I’ve always had lingering even if we hadn’t seen each other in a while.
Not only was she beautiful, she was smart as hell. Driven. Ambitious. She wasn’t out there dating any and everybody. Everyone in town loved her and was always saying she would even up with a lawyer or a doctor or something. She deserved her Ivy League romance with a brother who had a nine to five and wore a suit all day. I didn’t even come close to that.
“So, what are you gonna do?” Ares asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what he means,” Eros chimed in. “The woman you’ve always wanted but felt like you could never have will be filming a porn video in our shop for the next couple weeks. Out of all the cities we could have chosen for our second shop, and all the cities Ivy could have been in right now, y’all are both in the same city at the same time.”
“With unfinished business at that,” Ares added. “’Cause I still can’t believe you never hit that.”
As if she knew we were talking about her, she turned our way and caught my eye. I smiled, earning me a smile back from her before she continued working with her team.
“She could be dating somebody.”
Ares shook his head. “Nah, bruh. She’s single. I asked Layla to confirm when she was around earlier today. Couldn’t have my big bro out here chasing after already-claimed pussy. You’ve never been into that shit.”
“Unlike you,” Eros said to Ares. “Like that woman you brought to the shop last week for a private tour. The one who we’d met at the bar with her boyfriend when we first got to Chicago.”
Ares placed his hands over his chest. “Not my fault, bruh. He must not be layin’ down the pipe like he needs to be doin’, otherwise, shorty wouldn’t be throwing it my way.”
Eros shook his head. “Then throw it back, nigga. You don’t have to entertain her.”
“Of course I do,” Ares replied. “You never know if a woman is in a bad situation and needs some loving. I’m just doin’ my due diligence as a ladies man to ensure that every lady has a man.”
Eros looked to me in disbelief. “Does this dude get dumber every day?”
Ares stood in between me and Eros. “Hey, don’t hate ’cause you’ve always chosen to be Mr. Faithful. Not every guy is cut out to be a one-woman man. Some of us are meant to have two women. Or three.” Placing his hand on his chin, he directed his gaze at the ceiling. “Or four. Hell, I’ve never done five. Could give it the good ole’ new Chicago resident try and aim for five at one time.”
Eros stood straighter before telling Ares, “I can’t believe the shit that comes out your mouth sometimes.” The line he always said right before he’s about to give Ares a lecture. Eros was known for giving long lectures.
I don’t have time for this. Usually, I was all for watching my brothers debate on shit they never agreed on, but today I had a bigger purpose. There was some truth to what my brothers were saying. My crush on Ivy wasn’t healthy and had lasted long enough. But I needed to feel her out. See where her headspace was. Convince her that even though we weren’t right for one another then, now it may be a different story. We were both going to be in the same city for a little while, and in my mind, anything was possible.
IVY
I’m overthinking the mess out of this. Or at least, I thought I was overthinking it. I had nothing to compare it to since Layla was being all secretive about her social experiment, which meant I had to figure it out on my own.
We’d agreed to support one another as best we could, but to me, that didn’t include dropping a bomb on your best friend like she did the other day by telling me to choose Theseus as my no-strings-attached relationship, and leaving me to work through my thoughts. Her day job had called earlier and asked her if she could drop by the office for a quick meeting even though she was on vacation. So she’d barely been here today.
My production crew had gone to lunch, and I wished I’d gone with them instead of hiding out in one of the offices at the tattoo shop trying to come up with my recording schedule for the experiment. I’d already decided that I couldn’t go there with Theseus because we had too much history. Too many close calls and shoulda, coulda, woulda thoughts to sort out. Sleeping with Theseus may be something I couldn’t recover from, and right now I needed something simple, not complicated.
I glanced down at the plan-of-action I’d typed on my iPad so far. Hmm, it could be better, but it’s not bad. I doubted completing my social experiment would be as entertaining as the casting staff suspected, but it was good enough for me and that was all that mattered.
“What are you thinking about so hard, beautiful?”
Beautiful… I’m sure I’d heard him call me that before, but for some reason, it felt like it was my first time hearing him say those words. I clicked off my iPad and sat up straighter in my chair. “Uh, sorry. Ares told me I could hang out in his office during my lunch break and work on some stuff.”
Theseus shot me one of those killa smiles that displayed all of his pearly whites. It was rare that I’d seen him smile full blown, and my oh my was it breathtaking.
“That’s funny,” he said, stepping farther into the office. “’Cause my brother’s office is down the hall. This one is mine.”
I glanced around for the first time, noting small details that I should have noticed before to indicate that it was Theseus’s office.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, standing to gather my stuff. “I’ll get out of your way and head to Ares’s office.”
“Quit apologizing.” He turned to shut the door. “I’m glad you’re here. It will give us a chance to catch up.”
I sat back down, concentrating extra hard to control my heartbeat. Us? Catch up? Out of all three Hood brothers, I sucked at talking to Theseus the most. We’d had a few conversations that I recalled being amazing conversations, but I’d never had an easy time talking to him. Most of our time had been spent in silence, enjoying one another’s company and not feeling a need to talk.
Even now, I was fidgeting with my fingers and biting the inside of my cheek, trying to figure out if this was one of those times. Clearly, he still makes you nervous.
He sat down next to me, his navy-blue hoodie catching my eye. “Did you create that yourself?”
He glanced down at the airbrushed design. “Yeah, it’s one of the first designs I tatted back when we opened our shop in Detroit a few years ago.”
“I love it.” Leaning closer to him, I studied the design. “In college, I took an airbrushing class and fell in love with the technique. Daggered strokes. Undefined edges. If I wasn’t hell-bent on finishing my business major, I would have taken another class.”
I reached out my hand and ran my fingers over the outline of the design. “You always were good at morphing a simple canvas into something spectacular. You did it for a client?”
“Yeah, my first client in our shop back home.”
“Until we meet again,” I read the words aloud and twisted my head to the side to study the design even more, noticing the names hidden within the angles of his design. “Is this … Are these the names of you and your family?”
I glanced up at him, knowing my assumption was correct when he told me, “Yeah, it was for my dad, Apollo. He’d asked for an artistic design that included my mom’s name, his name, an
d all three of his sons. He was my first client a few years ago, right before he passed away.”
My smile faltered. “I was so sorry to hear the news of your dad. He was a great man. I remember waiting for my parents to give me info regarding the funeral, but they said they didn’t find out about it until after the funeral had happened.”
“Since his death was unexpected, my mom wanted to keep things small,” he explained, his eyes sad. “It’s been a few years, but it’s still hard to believe he’s gone.”
I lightly placed my hand over his heart. “He’s still with you here. And I imagine this is your favorite hoodie, so even though you have memories, he’s also reflected in your artwork.”
His eyes studied mine in a way that seemed to say so much without saying anything. “Most people don’t know what to say when I start talking about my pops, but you seemed to find the words effortlessly. I appreciate it.”
I shrugged, dropping my hand back to my lap. “At least somebody does.”
He lightly brushed my cheek. “Who doesn’t appreciate you? Not some whack ass dude I hope. Although if it is, you say the word and my brothers and I can take care of it.”
I laughed, even though I knew Theseus was dead serious. He wasn’t the most civil back in the day when it came to confrontation. He didn’t get into a lot of fights, but those he did get into seemed calculated on his part.
“No, there isn’t any guy in my life. I was referring to my parents.” My voice grew more serious. “It’s not that they don’t appreciate me, but more like, they don’t appreciate what I do. Sometimes, I feel like I never say the right thing. Or maybe it’s the right words, but I don’t back it up with action.”
I left out the part I didn’t want to talk about. The part that made me feel guilty every day. It didn’t do much good because he proved he sensed I was guilt-ridden when he mentioned, “You feel like you need to go home more, right? Since they aren’t one-hundred percent on board with what you do for a living, you’ve chosen to stay away even more. Push them away more than you should.”
I took a deep breath, caught off guard by his assessment. “That’s pretty spot on for someone who barely knows me.”
“I know you,” he said. “Not as much as I’d like to, but we’ve always understood each other.”
There it was again. That feeling in the pit of my stomach that only seemed present when his honey-brown eyes were stuck on mine. Even his eyebrows lured me in since they were thick, but naturally arched in a way that brought his eyes out even more.
I’d never been able to explain our connection, but I also couldn’t recall a time when Theseus was laying on the flirtation as strongly as he had been since I’d walked into his shop the other day.
I glanced down at his lips. Have they always looked so juicy? A similar shade as his complexion, there was a slight pinkness to them that made me want to drag his bottom lip with my teeth for a quick nibble. He must have sensed that his lips were on my mind, because he licked them in a way that reminded me of that time the girls in school were calling him LL Cool J.
He brought his face a little closer to mine. On their own accord, my lips slightly puckered, anticipating a kiss that I wasn’t sure I could stop from happening. Not even sure I wanted to stop it from happening.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, his eyes growing darker and edging closer to that dangerous look that I used to daydream about in my AP English class.
I didn’t say what I was thinking. Couldn’t say what I was thinking. And when his head closed those last centimeters of distance, and his lips lightly brushed across mine, I sank into the closed-mouth kiss. Delicious. They were just as I imagined they would be. Firm, yet soft, with just the right amount of pressure to have me squeak out a sultry moan.
At the sound of my own voice, I broke apart from the kiss, ignoring the blazing heat in his eyes. My pull back was awkward. The room felt awkward. And I sure as hell knew I was giving an awkward look because cool, calm, and collected Ivy had left the building. I still felt that kiss. Crap. If I could feel all that with a closed-mouth kiss, I don’t even want to think about how skilled he is with his damn tongue.
I looked around the room for a distraction. “What’s the story behind that?” I asked, pointing at an oddly shaped object on his shelf before looking back at his sexy face.
He studied me for a minute, his look proving that he was torn between playing along with me changing the subject, or kissing me like he wanted.
“I have no fucking idea,” he finally said with a laugh. “A loyal client got it for me back in Detroit and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t know what it was supposed to be. There’s a lot of random shit in this office that came from clients.”
If I wasn’t so damn nervous, I never would have picked up the funny-looking statue from the shelf, subsequently, dropping it to the floor. “I’m so sorry,” I exclaimed, bending to my knees as I scrambled to pick up the broken pieces. “I’ll give you money for it.”
Theseus chuckled. “Don’t bother. I already told you I don’t know what it is.”
Damn, I’m such a klutz. But I usually wasn’t this clumsy. Only when he was around. He had the ability to make me forget how to be smooth with it. Forget how to act like I had some sense and wasn’t blinded by how good-looking he was. How nice he smelled.
I lifted my head just as he bent down to help me pick up the remaining pieces, only realizing my mistake when I ended up in a squat position, unable to move my head, the pain causing me scream, “Ouch. That hurts.”
“Hold still,” Theseus said, placing his hand on my hair. “Uh, your hair got caught in my chain.”
“What?” I tried to move my head again, and rammed into his thigh.
“Your hair is caught on the chain connected to my belt,” he repeated.
“Why is there a chain on your belt?” I knew the question was stupid the minute the words left my mouth since I’d seen the chain earlier.
“I’ve never liked having my wallet in my back pocket. Got mugged too many times in Detroit. So the chain connects my wallet to my belt, but your hair is caught in the top of the chain closest to my belt loop.”
Lifting my hands, I felt around my hair and his jeans for the part that connected. I removed my ponytail holder, but it didn’t help. My hair remained stuck.
“You may want to stop feeling around,” he said. “I can get it.”
“No, I got—” I stopped mid-sentence when I brushed up against something hard pressing against his jeans. I immediately dropped my hands, which caused my body to slightly shift, pulling my hair even more.
My yelp was even louder this time, oblivious to the knocking on the door until Theseus told whoever it was to come in.
“Damn, bro.” Ares’s voice filled the office. “I figured you would wait until the shop wasn’t full of people before you started putting on the moves.”
“Nah, dummy. Ivy’s hair is stuck in my chain. Hand me those tools over there, I think I have something that can get her hair out.”
“Tools? What tools? You betta not cut any of my hair.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I’ll just unravel it.”
I breathed a sigh of relief while Ares handed him the tools and continued to laugh at us.
“Hey, Ivy, I’m back. Where are you?” The sound of Layla’s voice down the hall made me want to drop my head into my hands, if I’d been able to move my head at all.
“Ivy’s back here, but she’s tied up at the moment,” Ares yelled.
“Doing what?” Layla asked, before she got to the office and immediately began cracking up. “How in the world did you do that?” She looked at us once more. “Betta yet, don’t tell me. I’m sure my imagination is better than the real story.”
Closing my eyes, I tried to ignore the pain. I couldn’t even be mad at her for laughing because I was sure we looked like a hot mess. Plus, there was no way her and Ares were letting us forget this anytime soon.
W
hile Theseus used his tools to try and free my hair, I fidgeted as my legs shook from squatting so long, which caused Layla and Ares to laugh even more. Great, can this get more embarrassing?
Theseus sighed. “I told you not to fidget. See what you did?”
I was about to ask him what he was talking about until I opened my eyes and came into direct contact with his crotch, growing larger by the second. Why yes, yes it can get more embarrassing.
Chapter 6
“Roses are red. Violets are blue.
I heard blue balls suck. But so do you.”
~ Layla ~
(I kid, I kid. Note to self:
leave the rhyming to my girl Meeka)
THESEUS
You’ve got to be shitting me. This had to be some cruel ass joke that the universe was playing on me because there was no man on Earth who could survive having blue balls for four days straight.
It had been ninety-six hours since Ivy had walked into the shop, but it might as well had been ninety-six days. And if dealing with her bouncing around the shop in her tight ass jeans and cute graphic tees wasn’t enough, she’d been avoiding me ever since the hair-caught-in-chain incident. My brothers were still teasing me about it, but I didn’t give a damn. I would dare any man who had a woman like Ivy that close to his crotch not get hard with the idea of what she could do with her mouth.
Crap, thinking about her ain’t helping. Nodding my head to the music bursting through my wireless headphones, I tried to get in my creative zone. I was at the shop super early, trying to finalize this design for a client I had coming in a couple hours. Even though our shop had all types of stuff in it for the video shoot and the windows had all been covered for privacy, I still had work to do and had convinced Ivy to let us have some clients come through the back entrance.
Since my brothers and I were sharing a three-bedroom house while we worked together to get our shop up and running, I’d needed to get out of there for some alone time. There was no reason I shouldn’t be able to finish the concept of this design now, especially since it was for one of my homeboys from Detroit who happened to be in town.
Bad Decisions Good Regrets (Social Experiment #2) Page 5
