A Kiss For You

by Rachel Van Dyken

  “That’s not a big…”

  “While in prison,” King interrupted. “And I’m glad I did it. I like having it, but putting it on the wall would mean I was proud of it. My feelings are a lot more mixed than that. Besides, Grace says you should always have a drawer that reminds you that who you are and what you do aren’t always the same thing.”

  “Who’s Grace?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  “Well, why don’t you just start your own business?”

  King laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are, Pup.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you just asked me why I didn’t start my own business.”

  “And?”

  “And, it’s funny, because…” King gestured to the gun. His face went serious. “I did.”

  A knock at the door interrupted us. I quickly returned the frame to the drawer and shut it just as Preppy let in King’s next client.

  A woman, older than me, strutted through the door wearing a tight tube top and shorts so short the bottom of her ass cheeks hung out. She set herself up on the table like she owned the place, popping her gum as she explained to King, in detail, the Orchid tattoo she wanted on her left ass cheek.

  King told me what he needed set up, and I started gathering his supplies.

  “Who’s she?” the girl asked, casting me a sideways glare.

  “She’s none of your business.”

  “Can’t she step out? I’m really shy,” she whined, even as she pushed her shorts off in a suggestive manner. Leaving on her heels she crawled onto the table and stuck her thong-clad ass into the air.

  “No, she can’t,” King said. Grabbing a marker, he freehanded the outline of an orchid onto her butt.

  The girl made a pouting noise but didn’t push the issue. After an hour, she asked if I could go get her something to drink. King nodded to me, and I went downstairs to grab beers from the fridge.

  When I came back up, I paused at the door.

  “Come on, baby. You don’t remember me? You should. Your work is right here.” The girl turned around and sat up on her elbows, spreading her legs, she revealed tattooed butterfly wings on both sides of her inner thighs.

  “I remember the work. I don’t remember you,” King said stiffly. “Do you want me to finish this fucking tattoo or not?”

  “Yes, but I want your big cock first,” she cooed.

  “That’s not gonna fucking happen.”

  “Is it because of that ugly skinny bitch? She doesn’t even have any fucking tits!”

  There was a commotion, and before I could figure out what exactly was going on, King had thrown the girl’s shorts out into the hallway and was pushing her out the door by her elbow.

  “You can get that shit finished by someone else. We’re fucking done here.”

  She grabbed her shorts off the floor and stomped past me. “Fucking ugly bitch. Fucking asshole,” she muttered as she practically tripped in her rush to get to the stairs.

  King stood in the doorway. “And if I hear you ever talk shit about her again, I’ll find you and take that butterfly tattoo back.”

  “Oh yeah?” she shouted, stopping on the landing. “How the fuck are you going to do that?”

  King was in the doorway one second and an inch from her face the next. “I’ll tell you how,” he seethed. “I’m going to find you, and then I’m going to take my time carving those fucking butterfly wings from that nasty pussy of yours with my knife. Sleep on that before you decide to open that good for nothing dick-sucker of yours again.”

  Her eyes went wide with fear. She couldn’t move fast enough as she rushed out of the house, slamming the door behind her. The gravel spun under the tires of her car as she sped down the driveway.

  “Clean up,” King ordered. He grabbed one of the beers from my arms as he passed me in the hallway and went back into his studio. I stood with my mouth open for a full minute before following him.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked, putting the rest of the drinks into the cooler by the door.

  “It was nothing. Clean up. We aren’t done yet.” King chugged the beer, crushed the can in his hands and tossed it into the trash bin.

  The clock above the door read three am.

  The next client was a man named Neil who King had been working on a full sleeve for before he went to prison. Neil had waited three years for King to be released so he could finish it. He said he just didn’t trust anyone else to do it right.

  I sat on the leather couch and watched King as he scrunched his face up in concentration. How could someone so talented also be so menacing?

  You already know how talented his hands are.

  I bit my lip and remembered the way his fingers felt inside me. My face flushed.

  “I can feel you staring at me,” King said, snapping me out of my daydream. Neil had a huge set of red headphones on with his eyes closed. He was either engrossed in the music or fast asleep.

  “I’m kind of bored,” I admitted, embarrassed I’d been caught staring.

  King stood and removed a glove. He opened another drawer on the toolbox and removed something, tossing it over to me. A sketchbook landed next to me on the couch, followed by a box of colored pencils.

  “Maybe, this will help you stop fucking fidgeting,” he said. “It always helped me.”

  Then, he turned up the volume on the iPod docking station before picking up his tattoo gun and diving back into his work.

  I opened the sketchbook, which wasn’t blank. The first few sketches were variations of the orange tree tattoo I’d seen King tattoo on the redhead earlier. Each one better than the next until I got to the one he used as a template for her tattoo.

  Several pages of stunning artwork later, a beautiful dragon, a skull made completely of flowers, and a pin-up girl dressed as a nurse, and I was finally at a blank page. Doodling, I quickly found, was a much better way to pass the time than wondering about the man who made my head spin, and other parts of me throb.

  I drew happy faces and stick figures at first. But then I started shading and one of the stick figures started to look like a person. I wasn’t actually drawing. It felt more like I could already see the completed design in my mind and was just filling in what was already on the page.

  When I finished, I was staring into the chestnut eyes from my dream. I looked up at King, who was still engrossed in his work. I quietly tore the page from the book and folded it up, shoving it deep between the cushions of the couch. Part of me was hiding it so I could come back to it later and maybe add to it. Another part of me wanted to keep this one thing that I knew was somehow connected to my past to myself.

  I then decided to sketch the bird I saw earlier flying over the water. I visualized it just as I had with the eyes I’d just drawn. Before I knew it, my pencil was flying over the page. I wasn’t just drawing. I was shading, smudging, and contouring.

  When I was done, it wasn’t exactly the bird I’d seen earlier, but a more exotic version of it. Dark. Fierce. Its feathers were ruffled wildly, and the snake dangling from his beak had its mouth open with its fangs exposed. I created smoke billowing out of the small nostrils on the bird’s beak, as if he could breathe fire. But then I decided that he looked too harsh, too intimidating, so I gave the bird a broken wing, and in the reflection of his eye, I drew the snake before he’d killed it, swallowing a mouse. The final product was both brilliant beauty and vulnerability. Tears formed in my eyes, and I wiped them away before they could spill onto my cheek.

  I can draw.

  Not only could I draw, but I could draw well. It came as naturally as breathing.

  The second thing connecting me to her.

  When I put the book down, I looked up, and King’s client was gone. King sat on his stool alone, watching me. “You were in the zone,” he said. “You looked so fucking cute sitting there concentrating.”

  I swallowed hard, “I…uuuhhh…got caught up.”

/>   His words took me by surprise. I visualized stalking over to him and climbing onto his lap. His big strong hands coming around my back and resting underneath my shirt on my bare skin. I thought about what it would be like to let him do more than what he’d done before.

  What would it be like if he used more than his fingers?

  I shuddered.

  “Bring it here,” King said, holding out his hand, snapping me out of my own imagination where I was naked and writhing underneath him.

  “No, you don’t want to see it. I was just messing around. I’ll just put it back in the drawer and clean up now.” I walked over to the sink with the book under my arm. King reached out and snatched it away from me, flipping the pages in search of my sketch.

  “Holy Go-go-Gadget arms,” I quipped. I’d clearly underestimated King’s reach.

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “What do you mean? How do I know what?” I asked.

  “The ‘Go-go gadget’ thing. That’s a reference to a cartoon. Have you ever even seen it?”

  “Um…I think so. It’s this guy who wears a trench coat and has a billion little gadgets all over the place that usually don’t work the way he wants them to.”

  “I know who it is. What I want to know is have you watched it since you lost your memory?”

  “No, I haven’t watched any TV until earlier tonight when Preppy put on something called American Ninja Warrior.” I stepped back and leaned against the counter. “What are you trying to get at? I thought you believed me.”

  “That’s not it. I’m just trying to figure it out. Help me understand.” King leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “If you haven’t watched it, then it’s something that carries over from before. How exactly does that work?”

  “I’m not really sure. When I was living in the group home, I saw a psychologist or a psychiatrist or one of those. He told me that memory loss works differently for everyone. For me, it wiped out all personal information. Names, faces, memories. But I can still walk and talk, so I retained all my functions. I also know facts. Like, I know who the president is, and I can sing to you the jingle for Harry’s House of Falafel’s commercial. I just don’t know HOW I know those things.”

  King nodded. I bit my lip.

  “You know, you’re the only person besides the psychologist guy who’s even asked me about it,” I added.

  King turned a page in the book and found my sketch. He studied it for several minutes. Time seemed to tick by slower and slower. I grew restless wondering what he thought of it. He was probably trying to figure out how to tell me it was complete crap. But then again I didn’t take him for someone who would go out of his way in order to avoid offending anyone.

  So, what the hell was he staring at for so long?

  And why the hell did I need his approval so badly?

  “Are you done for the night?” I asked, trying to draw his attention away from the sketch. If he hated it, I’d rather just not talk about it at all. He lifted his eyes from my sketch just long enough to give my body a slow once over, like he was looking at me for the very first time. His gaze ignited my skin as if he’d actually touched me.

  “Am I done?” he repeated my question. King ran the underside of his tongue across his bottom lip, leaving a sheen where he’d made it wet. “I’m not sure. I’m thinking I could just be getting started.”

  Holy Shit.

  The familiar redness burned its way up my neck and my ears grew hot.

  The clock read 4:45am, and although I should have been tired due to the time, I was more alert than ever. The caffeine and sugar from the four Red Bulls I’d drunk felt like it could keep me awake for days, but I needed to get away from King because I felt myself starting to forget all the reasons why letting him strip me down and have his way with me would be a bad idea.

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means that I’m done with clients. But it also means that I’m not done with you.” King grabbed my wrist and dragged me onto his lap, the very place I’d just fantasized about being.

  I gasped.

  The hard muscles of his thighs rippled under mine. His smell—a light mixture of soap and sweat—was intoxicating. He fisted a handful of my hair and yanked my head sideways, exposing my neck to him. He breathed me in, running his nose along my neck, followed by a long leisurely lick from my collarbone to the sensitive spot on the back of my ear. I moaned, and he chuckled. I could feel it vibrate through his body and into mine. “Oh, Pup. How much fun this is going to be.”

  Just like that, he released my hair and pushed me off his lap. My shaky knees almost gave way, and I had to hold onto the counter to avoid falling forward onto the floor.

  “We’ve got one more,” King said.

  “I thought you just said no more clients tonight,” I said, breathlessly.

  King proceeded to set up three small containers of black ink. “Here.” He handed me a thin-tipped black marker.

  “What do you want me to do with this?” I asked.

  “I want you to draw your sketch again. The same one. Hold it up for reference.”

  “Draw it on what?”

  “On the back of my hand, it’s a much smaller canvas than your sketch so you’ll have to downsize a bit, but it’s one of the few spaces of blank canvas I have left.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you always ask so many fucking questions?”

  “Don’t you have a machine that does this? You can copy this picture and just stick it on there if that’s what you really want.”

  King sighed with frustration. “Yes, I do. But it’s not the point. I want you to draw it on me. I want you to put that pen to my skin and recreate your sketch. I don’t care if it’s crooked. I don’t care if it’s not perfect, just fucking draw it!” he shouted, standing up. He took a few steps toward me until I was backed up against the counter, clutching the sketch book to my chest. “Please?”

  A ‘please’ from the man who didn’t say ‘please’.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “But why?”

  “Because I looked over at you while you were drawing this, and you looked all cute, biting your lip, your face flushed, the back of the pencil pressed against those pink lips. Then, when you showed me what you drew, I saw it right away.”

  “Saw what?”

  “Me. The bird. You drew me.” I opened my mouth to argue that it was just a bird, but I couldn’t. He was right.

  Dark and dangerous.

  Hard but beautiful, taking what he wanted from the world.

  It was him.

  King propped the sketchbook on the table so I could reference my drawing. I did the best I could to create a smaller version of it onto the back of his hand. I worked even harder trying to ignore the electricity humming between us. King never took his eyes off of me.

  It took me twice as long to complete than the sketch, but when I was finally done, I put the marker down and sat back.

  “Okay?” I asked.

  King held his hand up and examined my work. “It will work,” he confirmed. “Now, go get me a coffee.”

  “No Red Bull?” I asked, standing up from the table.

  “It’s after 5am. After 5am calls for coffee.”

  “Okay, coffee then,” I said, making my way down to the kitchen. By the time I figured out the single cup coffee machine thing they had—the only modern appliance in the kitchen—and got back to the studio, King was hunched over his hand with his tattoo gun buzzing.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Silence.

  “So what? You’re ignoring me now?”

  He lifted the gun from his skin. “Yes, because if I talk to you, I’ll be giving this bird a dick in his mouth instead of a snake,” King said.

  “I will get back to the fact that you sort of made a joke later, something which I didn’t think you were capable of doing, but right now, the only thing I can concentrate on is that you are tattooing my sketch onto your hand!”
I shouted.

  “What did you think I was going to do with it?” King dipped his gun into the ink.

  “I don’t know, but not that!”

  “Pup?” King asked softly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Enough with the questions. You’re distracting me. Go the fuck to bed.”

  “But—” I started to argue.

  “Pup?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bed. Now. Or you can choose to stay, but I’m warning you, if that’s the decision you make and you are still here when I’m done, I’m bending you over that couch and fucking you into next week.”

  Shit.

  I scurried out of the room as fast as I could, not stopping to catch my breath, I could still hear him laughing as I closed the door and sank to the floor.

  I was totally and utterly, for lack of a better word, FUCKED.

  King

  You looked so fucking cute, sitting there concentrating. Where the fuck did that come from? I hadn’t even realized I’d said it out loud until I saw the redness rise in her cheeks. On the other hand, flirting with her and making her uncomfortable was by far becoming my newest and most favorite source of entertainment.

  Since she started eating Preppy’s cooking, it only took a couple of days for Pup to pack on some weight. The additional few pounds had done amazing things for her figure. Her sunken cheeks were a little fuller and somehow made her appear even more innocent and cherub-like. Her tits and ass were rounder and begging to be touched even more so than before. She had the body of a woman and the face of an angel and I was constantly walking around like a thirteen-year-old who had to keep adjusting himself to hide his raging hard-on.

  The truth was I didn’t bother her while she was sketching because I didn’t want her to move, and I was perfectly content to just sit and stare at her all night. But then, she would cross and uncross her legs while biting her lip, and all I could think about was how I wanted to be the one to bite that lip. How wet I could make her between those legs.

  I didn’t get up from my stool after Neil left because I was afraid she’d look up from her sketch and see my cock standing at attention through my jeans. If she were any other chick, I would draw her attention to it, but I didn’t want to send her running into the other room. I already felt her fighting off whatever attraction she had for me. The horrible truth of the matter is that I didn’t want to scare her away.