Making sure I captured Seb’s interactions with her as well as the tattooing, I closed the door behind me and got to work recording.
13
Sebastian
My eyes felt like I had rubbed sand in them. I almost wished I had. Maybe then I wouldn’t be able to see the numbers staring back at me. I took off my glasses and scrubbed my hand down my face.
Fuck. I was so screwed. If I didn’t get an influx of clients soon, I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be able to stay afloat. My savings had all but evaporated. I had to cut Lindsay, the other artist I had hired, a while back, and that had gutted me. She was talented and had an ease to her that made clients feel comfortable. I knew she would land on her feet, but I still hated having to cut her like I did.
Then I let Rachel go. She was the office admin, who’d dealt with the appointments, collections, and ordering supplies. With barely any customers, it didn’t make sense to keep her on.
The only employee I had on staff now was Lydia. I could scale that back, ask her to only work part-time on my shit, but it would get back to Luke. Then he would offer me a loan… again. And then I would have to turn him down… again.
I, obviously, had no idea the economy was going to sink like it had when I agreed to lease the space next to mine and expand. It turned my shop from a cramped, dark space like someone might expect to find in a back alley into the spacious, bright floor plan that I thought would bring in more clients. Tattoos weren’t something reserved for drug dealers and gang members anymore. It hadn’t been for a long time. People of all walks of life found joy in showcasing their personality on their skin. Favorite quotes, sentimental symbols, memorials, birthdays. Hell, I had even found a niche in the mastectomy clients, although that work wasn’t exactly lucrative, considering they were all pro bono. I wanted my space to be a place where everyone felt comfortable. They knew it was clean and legitimate. No one worried about whether they needed a tetanus shot when they left.
Demolishing the wall, rebuilding the units into a single space, outfitting the shop with new chairs, building out the offices… it all added up. The loan’s interest rate was already pretty steep, but business was good. I was still young. Risks were easy to take.
A few short years later, and I realized that risks were just easy because I was an idiot who didn’t know a goddamn thing. But what was done was done. Now I had to figure out how to make it work without going under.
I shuffled all my papers together into a stack and put them aside for now. I had been looking at this for hours with no obvious solution in sight. Luke and the guys wanted to chill tonight, but it didn’t take much convincing to decide to buy a couple of six-packs and stay in rather than going out. I grabbed my jacket, the March weather in Massachusetts a straight-up shitshow of confusion. One minute, it wasa balmy fifty-two; the next, it was snowing. Sometimes it looked like a sunny, warm day, but as soon as you opened the door, you were blasted with an icy wind. Total shitshow.
Tonight was one of those chilly, windy nights. The trees swayed as my car jolted to the left with each gust of wind. My thoughts turned to Lydia. I wasn’t sure if she was home or out for the night. If she was on the road, or worse, on the road after drinking a few. I hadn’t personally witnessed any behavior that made me think she would drink and drive, but that didn’t stop me from worrying about it. My hand itched to call her and check in, but that wasn’t the type of relationship we had, even living together these past two weeks. We revolved around each other, sometimes cordial, sometimes silent. But we didn’t tell each other our plans or check in with each other.
Dirt and rocks kicked up behind my tires as I drove down Wes’s gravel driveway. Wyatt and Reid’s trucks were already here. I pulled up beside them and grabbed my case of beer.
“Hey, brother. How’s things going?” Wyatt slapped my shoulder, hauling the beer from my hands and depositing it on the workbench behind me.
“Good. Things have been picking up, so that’s a good sign. Just need the fucking weather to break so people start leaving their houses again.”
“Seriously,” Reid added from the couch, his arm slung around his wife’s shoulder. “No one wants to do renovation work over the winter. If it wasn’t for the new construction build for the Hatches, I would have been underwater.”
Claire moved to sit on Reid’s lap, making space on the couch. “Here, Seb. Sit down.”
I would have told her she didn’t have to do that. I wasfine standing. But those two were wrapped up in each other every chance they got. Claire sitting on her man’s lap was no hardship for either of them. I looked at Wyatt first, since he was standing as well. He dipped his chin at me, so I sat my ass on the couch beside them.
Wes was camped out in his usual camping chair, his long hair pulled back into a knot. “How’s things with Lydia?” he asked as he took a pull from his can of soda. His gaze trained on me like he was looking for something.
“Fine.” I shrugged. “She stays out of my way, and I stay out of hers.”
“Is that so?” a familiar feminine voice called from the doorway. Lydia, Luke, and Scarlett all strolled into Wes’s garage together.
“It was so until she barged into my guys’ night hang,” I shot back with a smirk.
“Doesn’t look like a guys’ night anymore.” Lydia’s head tilted to the side with a cocky little grin. I liked giving her shit, but I liked that she was here even more.
“Fuck. Now I feel like an ass that Maeve’s sitting at home with the girls.” Wyatt frowned, scratching at his beard.
“She’s fine. I was just talking to her. She wanted to stay in tonight and catch up on some schoolwork,” Lydia said.
“I love that you guys talk.” Wyatt smiled. “It’s important to her, so be fucking nice.”
“I’m always fucking nice,” she sassed.
The whole room erupted in laughter, causing Lydia to flip us all off with both hands.
“Well, speaking of Maeve,” Wyatt yelled, getting everyone’s attention as we all started talking over each other: Claire and Scarlett immediately catching each other up on somegossip, Reid giving Lydia a hard time about being the “nice one” in the family, Luke and Wes ignoring all of them in favor of discussing one of Wes’s private investigation cases. “Now that everyone is here, I wanted to tell you that we set a date for the wedding. June fifth.”
“Damn, that’s less than three months away,” I said. That seemed quick to pull off a wedding, not that I actually knew what went into that event planning.
