“I’m fine, Mom.”
“I don’t mean worried about not knowing where you were. If the men and women of the Badd clan say you’re being taken care of, I know I can trust them to be telling me the absolute truth.” A pause, and this one extended for nearly many seconds. “My worry for you goes much, much deeper than that, sweetheart.”
“Mom, come on,” I moaned. “Not now. Please.”
“Cassie, honey. I’m your mother. You’ve been through a lot and you’re not really dealing with it. And then you go and get drunk, disappear, and I don’t hear from you for three days. I get that you were sick, but it’s all just wrapped up in the whole big messy ball that is—”
“That is my fucking life,” I finished for her.
“Cassandra, really. I don’t like your language.”
“Mom! I can curse if I want to! I’ll never dance again! Rick dumped me! I’m stuck in fucking Alaska with no future! And you’re obsessing over me cursing?”
“I’m not obsessing, I just raised you to find more sophisticated and emotionally mature ways of expressing yourself than crude vulgarity.” Her voice softened. “Rick may have seemed fine, in that he didn’t have any lasting memory loss, but he still suffered severe cranial trauma. And I know it sounds like baloney, but such injuries can have bizarre and unpredictable effects.”
“Whose side are you—?”
She spoke over my protests. “Your side, Cass. Always. I know he hurt you. I know it hurts. You’re allowed to be angry. You’re allowed to be scared. But you have to deal with it. Actually deal with it.” A soft pause. “Going out on a bender is understandable, Cassie. Really, I get it.”
“But?”
“But nothing. I get it. I’m just worried, and I tend to overreact when I’m worried.”
“No kidding.”
Another silence. “Where are you, anyway?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know where you are?”
Ink shifted toward me, and the phone. “Mrs. Goode? My name is Ink Isaac. Juneau Isaac is my cousin. Cassie is at my home. She was real sick for the last few days, but she’s on the mend now. I’d suggest she rest awhile longer, but I’ll do my best to get her home to you soon as possible.”
“Your name is…Ink?”
“Yes ma’am. Ink. Like pen and ink. It’s my real, given name.”
“I see. And where is your home, Ink?” Mom had her mom voice on, the authoritative, interrogative one.
Ink gave her directions to his house, which, since I didn’t know Ketchikan at all, was useless to me, but Mom seemed to understand.
“I know where that is. I don’t mean to invite myself over, but I would very much like to check on my daughter.” It was, essentially, a politely phrased statement of intent rather than a request.
“Sure thing, ma’am. I’d’ve brought her home to you in the first place, but she was really, really sick and my place was closer, and then she was in no shape to be moved.”
After goodbyes were said, with a promise from Mom that she’d see me soon, the call ended and I tossed the phone aside.
“She’s so exhausting sometimes,” I muttered.
“She loves you like crazy,” Ink said. “You’re lucky to have her, Cassie.”
I groaned something like an affirmative. “I know. But she’s still exhausting.”
Ink gently nudged my arm away and rested his wrist on my forehead. “You need sleep. Still runnin’ a fever. Not as bad as it was, but still.”
“Have I had anything for the fever?” I asked.
“Nope. Don’t believe in it unless it’s life-threatening.”
“Don’t believe in what? Medicine?” I asked, meaning it sarcastically.
“Yeah, Western medicine. Best to just let it run its course—how my people have done things for thousands of years. These days, we’ll take something if it gets bad enough that it could kill you, but short of that, we let nature do what it does.”
“So you don’t take medicine? Ever, at all, unless you’re about to die from?”
He nodded. “Never taken so much as an aspirin in my life.” A shrug, mountainous shoulders lifting their impossible weight.
“So you never get sick?”
“I get sick like anybody else,” he answered, sounding bemused. “I just…deal with it. Work through it if I can, stay home and ride it out if I can’t.”
“You gave me a pill or something, though. I remember that.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but that was more to help you deal with the bitch of a hangover, and it was just one little Motrin, along with a shitload of liquids. At least until you started horking.”
“Don’t call it that, please. God. It’s undignified.” I squeezed my eyes shut, but those vague memories of last night—or rather, three days ago—seemed to be choosing now to make themselves available for review. “Did…did I pass out in the bathroom?”
He laughed, nodded. “Yep.”
I groaned. “Please tell me I at least got my pants up?”
He nodded again. “You did.”
“Speaking of which…” I opened my eyes and looked at him. “I really, really, really have to go to the bathroom.”
He swung around and descended the ladder. “Come on down,” he said, from the bottom.
“Easier said than done,” I said, but it was under my breath.
Moving slowly, I extricated myself from the nest of blankets and turned around to face the ladder. One foot on the top rung, I gingerly lowered myself to the next rung down. And even that was too much effort. I shook all over, bones aching, a coughing fit building up in the back of my throat. Nauseated. Head pounding. Stuck on the ladder, too weak to haul myself back up, too shaky to go any further.
“Um.” Asking for help goes against the grain, rubs hard against everything I stand for as a person. But I was about to fall off the damn ladder. “Help?”
He wrapped his hands around my waist, both hands easily spanning all the way around. He lifted me off the ladder, holding me as effortlessly as if I were a child. Brought me to his chest, my back to his front, and lowered me to my feet, and held me there. I didn’t even come up to his chin—barely to his chest. His hands remained resting on my waist, just above my hips. His presence behind me occluded the world. Made me feel…
Safe.
I rested my head against his chest to catch my breath—I was winded from even that. Scary as hell for someone used to being able to dance at max intensity for hours at a time.
His home, despite his own personal enormity, was a tiny house. Two hundred and fifty square feet at the most, it was simplicity at its finest. Under the loft, on the main floor, was an old, sagging, green suede couch, the kind that only gets more comfortable as it gets older. A single light was built into the underside of the loft, providing soft light. Each wall supporting either end of the loft featured built-in bookshelves, crammed with books—mostly art books, art history, tattoo history from Polynesia and Alaska, photography, technique guides and textbooks, and a handful of dog-eared fantasy paperbacks.
To the left of the loft, if you were standing with your back to it as we were, was the kitchen. Induction range and oven, refrigerator, and a few cabinets above and below the counter. Opposite was a big window above the sink, and more cabinets with a back door between; a low coffee table in front of the couch that must serve as an eating area. I didn’t see a bathroom, though.
“Bathroom?” I asked.
He let go of me and took two steps across the room, pushed at a section of wall—what had looked like a space of bare wall between the loft and the front door was actually the door to the bathroom.
Without his support, I wobbled and swayed. He caught me, pulled me up, and helped me into the bathroom.
I braced myself against the wall, looking at him over my shoulder. “You’re really seeing me at my worst, you know.”
He just laughed. “It’ll make seeing you at your best all the better.”
I shoo
k my head, snorted a laugh. “Nice.”
I shut the door, took care of business with an audible sigh of relief, not even caring if he heard or not. Then, I just had to summon the energy to stand up, pull my pants up, and get out of the bathroom. By the time I’d done this, I was panting. Absolutely zapped.
I sagged in the open doorway, sweating, and feeling like I could collapse at any moment. Ink was in the kitchen, doing something at the stove, humming under his breath—making soup, it smelled like.
I just watched him for a moment.
Why did my chest feel tight? Why did my palms feel tingly? The dull ache way down low didn’t bode well either.
He’d taken care of me, and had been kind, nonjudgmental. He didn’t know me from Eve, but he had brought me to his house, gave me his bed, cleaned up my vomit, made sure I didn’t get dehydrated.
Gah.
Gratitude, that’s all I needed to feel. That’s it.
So, when he turned and saw me, and when his eyes seemed to burn a little brighter at the sight of me, why did that make the tingle at the apex of my thighs shift even worse?
“You look done in,” he said.
“I’ve never felt so weak in my life,” I murmured.
“Bad flu’ll do that to you. I got it real bad one time, couple’a years back. Couldn’t even get out of bed for damned near a week. Juneau was out of town that week; don’t have a phone, no neighbors, and no employees. Thought for sure I was gonna die alone in this fuckin’ thing.”
“Obviously you didn’t.”
“Naw. I basically, just unintentionally, fell out the bed, hit the floor hard enough that I had to replace a few floorboards, and bruised a couple ribs in the process. All that was super awesome with the nasty cough I had, which was bad enough I’d nearly cracked a rib from coughing. I managed to get myself some water, and passed out on the floor. It took two weeks before I could leave the trailer.”
“Trailer?” I looked around. “This is a trailer?”
He nodded. “Yep. Mind, I don’t have a truck to pull it, but I could, if I did. I will, someday. Just pull on out of here, see what there is to see of the world outside of Ketchikan.”
I frowned. “You’ve never left?”
He shrugged. “Been all over Alaska, hunted and fished and hiked and camped and canoed and flown in, on, and over most of the state, but never anywhere else.” He waggled his beard, head tipped to one side. “Well, this one time, when I was maybe sixteen, my uncle and I took his charter fishing boat, one o’those deep-sea ones, and we went way out. Fished our way west over several days. I guess ol’ Uncle Billy was a little in the bottle most of the time, and wasn’t really paying attention to where we were going, and I was just a kid, you know? Suddenly, there was land in view, and big old battleships or cutters or something surrounding us, two of ‘em. They were spoutin’ off at us in Russian.”
“You accidentally sailed to Russia?” I asked, with a laugh.
He nodded. “Yep. Got in a hell of a lot of trouble, too.”
“Can’t they, like, arrest you and take your boat and stuff? Like, really bad, bad trouble?”
“Oh yeah, they can. They were gonna, too. Turns out it was fortunate for me that Billy was blasted off his ass. I could just claim truthfully that I didn’t know where I was going, and he was bombed. Talked ’em into letting me turn the boat around and sail back the way we came.”
“That’s crazy!” I took a step forward, wobbled, meaning to try for the ladder, mere feet away. “I’m gonna fall!”
Ink caught me, burly warm arms cradling me. “Gotcha.”
A moment in time, a pause in reality. His eyes, warm and brown. They made the tingling worse. I’d never felt such a tingle, ever. Like a burn, but all over. Centered down low, between my thighs. A tangible, intense, physical ache, but with a boiling core of emotion. His hands held me, his arms surrounded me. I had to cling to him—my arms around his neck. He lifted me, one-armed, and just held me. My heart thumped, pattered, pounded.
My mouth was fused closed, my tongue seared to the roof of my mouth. I couldn’t speak, but even if I could have, what would I have said?
“Up we go,” Ink murmured.
And he carried me up the ladder. I laughed, burying my face in the side of his neck to hide the laughter—but that was worse, because he smelled good. Cedar and pine from his beard, layered over a subtle hint of something that was just male. His skin was warm, radiating heat.
Flushed at my unexpectedly idiotic behavior, I pulled away, embarrassed, but was dizzy from the scent and the feel of him. Just from the way he’d carried me. I mean, I’ve done pair dances with strong male dancers before, done my share of getting thrown and lifted and spun and all that, in the name of dance. But that was always choreographed. Planned. Even when it was Rick and me, when we were dancing, it wasn’t sexual. It was dance. The dance was sacred. We channeled our emotions and each and every touch was always planned and purposeful.
This…this was something else.
He just picked me up, because he was strong enough that my hundred and ten pounds was nothing to him. He picked me up and carried me up a ladder because he could, and because I was too weak to do so myself.
This was different.
It made my palms itch like crazy, as if the only thing that could soothe the itch was to find out if those tattoos felt as beautiful under my hands as they looked.
My thighs ached, my core.
No, no, no.
I didn’t feel this way for Ink.
I didn’t. I couldn’t.
It was dumb.
He wasn’t my type. My type was Rick—tall and lean, strong, clean-cut, sophisticated, educated, worldly. Cultured. European.
Ink was…the opposite. Not just tall—giant. Heavy with muscle, powerful. That beard…thick and long, but combed and oiled and well-kept. Long hair, shiny black, bound into a loose ponytail. Not educated, but still intelligent. Not sophisticated, but real. Honest. Down-to-earth. Wise.
Nothing like Rick at all.
Rick had dumped me, unceremoniously. Sure, sure, medical reasons, inexplicable and unexplainable aftereffects of brain trauma. He’d been rude, brusque, uncaring.
And, if I was being honest with myself, he’d always been that way, to a degree. He’d just hidden it around me. Or I’d overlooked it. Either way, it had come out full force after the accident, and it cut me to pieces.
Something told me Ink would never, could never, treat a person that way, no matter what the circumstances.
We were sitting in the loft, him cross-legged, and me on his lap. As if I belonged on his lap. I felt myself frowning. Felt panic rifle through me. I couldn’t let this happen, not now. Too soon. Too soon.
“What’re you thinkin’, little sparrow?” Ink’s voice washed over me, low and quiet and deep.
I shook my head. “I…I—I don’t know.” I crawled off of him, lay on the bed, on my side. Facing away from him. “I’m tired.”
He was silent a moment, but I felt him there, felt his presence, his warmth. Then, his hand rested briefly on my shoulder. “Rest.”
I felt the mattress rise as his weight left it, heard him descend the ladder. Floorboards creaked, a pot rattled on the stove, liquid poured, and then silence, except for the occasional clink of a spoon against a bowl.
Eventually, I slept. Fitfully, though, and full of dreams—of the accident, the huge grill of the semi smashing into my window, crushing my leg, spinning and rolling, and then darkness; of Rick telling me he wasn’t in love with me anymore, the dead light in his eyes as he slashed my heart into ribbons with those seven words (“I’m not in love with you anymore.”); of Ink, cradling me in his massive arms, eyes on mine, inquisitive and knowing and warm and…boiling with deeply buried desire.
Ink
She slept another twelve hours without stirring. I left a note at the top of the stairs on the morning of the fourth day: Have clients I cannot reschedule. Shop is just out the front door. Call shop phone if you
need me. And I left my shop phone number at the bottom of the note, along with my scrawled signature.
I did three sessions, and took a break for lunch to check on her—still asleep, sweating now with the blankets tossed off: good news, because it meant the fever had broken. Set more soup to simmering, with another note to help herself. I returned to the shop and did four more sessions. I was finishing the aftercare spiel for my last client when a woman came through the door. Not unusual, obviously, except she was dressed to kill in a business professional sense, a knee-length skirt, white shirt, blazer, heels, expensive purse. No visible tattoos, and just didn’t seem like the type. Then I looked her over once more, as my client examined his nearly finished sleeve in the mirror. She was tall, slender but curvy, fine glossy black hair, and vibrant hazel eyes that I recognized immediately.
“Mrs. Goode,” I said, lifting off my rolling stool and stripping off my gloves. “I’m Ink.”
She peered up at me, eyes assessing me, looking me over critically but not judgmentally. “Call me Liv.” She shook my hand, her eyes flicking over my bare upper body and its canvas of interwoven tattoos. “How is Cassie?”
I cashed out my client, scheduled him for the final session, and flipped the sign from open to closed. “Still sleepin’, last I checked. Her fever had broken when I checked in on her around lunchtime.” I gestured for Liv to follow me through the back door. “Come on, this way. I live out behind the shop.”
I’d chosen the shop location primarily because it was close enough to the main drag of Ketchikan that I’d get decent traffic, but mostly from serious tattoo lovers rather than cruise ship tourists looking for butterflies and barbed wire cheap and quick. The other main reason for the location was the fact that there was a bit of a yard behind it, just big enough to allow me to put a tiny house down.
Liv followed me out back, and stopped when she came into view of my home. “Wow. Not expecting that.”
I grinned. “Right? Wouldn’t know it was back here, would you?”
She shook her head. “It’s lovely. Looks…cozy.”
“More space on the inside than you’d think. I studied a lot of different designs and layouts before I built it.”
For A Goode Time Call... Page 4
