“You’re running out of room.”
I lay down on the table, trying to make myself comfortable on the thin cushion. “Pot meet kettle.”
Pike laughed as he settled in next to me, having already prepared everything before we arrived. “So, tell me, are you still happy you joined the service? I’ve always felt like shit that you left us.”
“Pike, don’t ever feel like shit about me joining up and leaving home. I needed to do something on my own. Something without the help of others. Something without my past following me. You know?”
He nodded, reaching for the tattoo gun. “I do know. It’s why I left home, leaving all the bullshit behind. I wanted something that was just mine. Something I wasn’t given in Tennessee just for being a Moore.”
I tucked my hands behind my head, taking in slow breaths, knowing over the next few hours, my skin would feel like hot coals were being dragged across it repeatedly. “I’m proud of myself and everything I’ve achieved for the first time in my life. It wasn’t about leaving you behind but finding out who I was.”
He smiled down at me as he sat at my side. “I’m proud of you.”
I closed my eyes, trying not to let my emotions get the better of me. “That means more than you’ll ever know.”
Although I had the Gallos, Pike was my only blood relative still alive besides my father. Before Pike left home when I was a little kid, we were as close as any siblings could be with our age difference. My father was never one to say he was proud of me, no matter what I’d accomplished, but hearing those words from my brother meant more than any praise I could’ve received from anyone else in the world.
“Now, let’s get this shit over with so we can get out of here and spend the night with our girls.”
I peered down my body at him.
“I know. I know. She’s not your girl,” he said quickly before I could say the words. “But she will be.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“You know how I met Gigi, yeah?”
“I do.”
He wet my stomach before placing the design on my skin, running his hand across the paper. “I never thought we would be more. When she left me there in the hotel, I figured it was a fun week. I thought just like you.” He pulled the paper away from my stomach and smacked my leg with a mirror. “This where you want it?”
I took the mirror from his hands, looking at the reflection of my stomach. “Looks perfect.”
“Then we’re doing this.”
“We are.”
“If you hadn’t have run into her here, you wouldn’t ever have seen her again, though, brother. Remember that.”
“I looked for her. I tried to find some leads on her, but I had nothing. I had a name and a wrong city. She lied to me.”
“Sounds like she was deeply in love with you.” I snickered.
He lifted the tattoo gun, glaring down at me. “I got her in the end, didn’t I?”
“Dumb luck and you’re relentless when you want something.”
“You never really know exactly what you want until it’s gone. You’ll see. I give you a week in California before she’s the only thing you can think of.”
“She’s being deployed soon. She’ll be out of the country for months.”
“Even better.” He smiled.
I growled as the needle touched my skin, always forgetting the pain, especially on the tender skin of my abdomen.
“You’ll have plenty of time to pine for her.”
“You’re an asshole.”
