“Maybe a little bigger, then. But only if it isn’t too much work. I don’t mind it just as it is.”
I put my machine down and gathered an alcohol wipe to remove the stencil marks.
“It’s not too much work. It’s my job. Let me enlarge thisreal fast. I’ll be right back.”
I could freehand this design in my sleep. I didn’t need to print out a new stencil for her, but she was clearly nervous. From my experience, nervous ones were always scared of freehand designs, so a new stencil it was.
“How’s this?” I placed the paper against her skin before I transferred yet another version of this simplistic image onto her wrist. At this point, she’d had the equivalent of an epic bird migration take flight across her skin.
“I think that’s perfect. Really this time,” she promised with a guilty smile.
Charm oozed from my grin as I shot her a wink. “Of course it is.”
Kelsey was my last scheduled customer of the day… at 5:00 p.m. Business had been slow this winter. Slower than I expected. But there was always the chance that a walk-in would show up looking for some fresh ink on the spot.
I ran my machine across Kelsey’s wrist, delicately inking the marks into her skin. In just a few minutes, she was done. The look of awe that first-timers had when they processed that their fresh ink was permanent always made me smile.
“Thank you so much. I love it,” she gushed.
“It’s my pleasure, Kels. The first one is the hardest. Now that you’ve popped that particular cherry, you find yourself with the itch to get more ink, just let me know. I’d be happy to sit you in that chair again anytime.”
Was I flirting in the hope that she would be a return customer? Fuck yeah, I was.
Kelsey paid her nominal fee for the small work that I did and left. I cleaned the station, disposing of the single-use needle and sterilizing the barrel of my tattoo machine for thenext use.
I went through the motions on autopilot, my mind going right back to the same topic it had been stuck on for days.
Lydia Fucking Wilder.
The purplish-silver-haired minx was lodged in my brain. It had been a week since New Year’s Eve, and I swore I was still getting recurring blue balls from the way she’d left me that night.
She had the right idea. We never should have gone even as far as we did. She was my best friend’s little sister, for fuck’s sake. I wasn’t entirely sure how Luke would react if he found out. How any of the Wilder brothers would, for that matter. They were basically family at this point.
Not that I had any familial thoughts about Lydia.
Any innocent, friendly feelings I had toward her when we were young disappeared the moment she opened her bedroom curtains in her underwear at eighteen years old. I could still remember how her jet-black hair looked against her creamy, pale skin, her bouncy, braless tits covered by the smallest scrap of fabric that she called a tank top.
It was the first time, the only time, in my life that I was utterly speechless.
I remember walking around her room, trying to keep my eyes off her. The feelings she stirred in me that night had done weird things to my chest. I hadn’t shown up with the best of intentions, my pride too important to back down from Tommy Riscuto’s stupid dare. I’d had a plan when I knocked at her window. I was going to tell her about the dare, ask her for a favor—a quick kiss, more than a peck, but no tongue—and laugh it off with her.
Then my heart stopped beating, and I forgot my brain cellsoutside that window.
It was her birthday. I just wanted to give her a birthday kiss. Instead, I ended up taking the one thing she could only give to one person.
Dipshit that I was had to go and take her virginity.
I had never told a soul about that night. When Tommy tried to corner me about whether or not I was able to pull off a kiss, I shoved him off a dock for being a sexist dick. He took that to mean that I’d lost in his little game of dare. I didn’t bother correcting him. It was none of his business what happened between Lydia and me that night.
I snapped my mind back to present day. Lydia was pissed at me, that much was obvious. She somehow found out that I went to her room that night because of Tommy fucking Riscuto’s nonsense. The joys of living in a small town. But what we did in her bedroom was so much more than a meaningless kiss between friends. I could never use her like that to win points in some idiotic battle of male pride.
Plus, if it ever got back to Luke that I was the asshole who deflowered his sister, I was pretty sure he would murder me.
I wasn’t one to kiss—or fuck—and tell, although my reputation typically did the talking for me, but I was even less inclined to share this most recent particular hookup.
Well, not hookup, since she left me hard as steel and hornier than a fucking bonobo.
We were all adults now though. Maybe he would be fine with it.
