Focusing on my task, I smiled as the image of what I wanted to create formed in my head.
Lydia sat with her knee bent and her thigh propped open for me as I wiped the cloth across her skin periodically, cleaning up the excess ink and any bleeding. I could feel her eyes on me every once in a while, but more often than not, she lay back on the chair with her arm under her head. Her strength, her resiliency, her fiery attitude—they were all parts of her that I admired like hell.
We worked in a comfortable silence. Every time I had to ink along the crease of her groin, it was making it harder and harder to concentrate. I leaned over her leg, and the scent of her sex went straight to my dick. Over an hour went by with my face nearly buried in her. My professionalism was definitely in jeopardy in a way I had never experienced. I tried to think of her as any other client. Or worse, as my best friend’s little sister. Not someone I should be fantasizing about like I was.
I was supposed to be taking care of Lydia. Watching out for her. Helping her get on her feet. Luke was trusting me not to go there with her. I breathed in her scent again.
“Do you need a break?”I asked.
“No, keep going.”
I put my machine down anyway. I was hoping she was going to say yes, but really, it was me who needed a minute.
“Is everything alright?” she asked.
I sat up straight on my stool and took a deep breath. My first breath without her scent tickling my nose.
“Yeah.”
She looked down her body to me. “Did you mess up and you’re trying to figure out how to tell me?”
I lowered my brows, my eyes narrowing back at her. “No. I don’t mess up on body art.”
“Well then, why’d you stop?”
“Fuck, Lydia. Because my nose is basically in your sweet pussy, and it’s all I can smell. I never did get a chance to taste you, and now it’s all I can think about,” I groaned. My dick was uncomfortably trying to join the conversation.
Sick kids. My grandma naked. Those sad animal adoption commercials.
I tried to think of anything that would take this boner down. “Well, figure out how to work with a hard-on, Seb. I don’t have all night.” The smirk she sent me should have irritated me, but it didn’t. She was gloating. But fuck, I’d listen to her gloat all day while I marked up her skin with my ink, the scent of her pussy infiltrating my senses.
“I’m taking a bathroom break,” I grumbled, pushing myself away from the station.
“Make sure you wash your hands when you’re done,” she taunted.
I stalked away from her to do my business and get my raging hormones under control. There was something about that woman that seeped into my bones like no one else. It hadbeen that way since she was eighteen, and no amount of fucking around—as fun as it had been—had ever come close to affecting me like her.
“What do you think so far?” I asked, coming back into the shop with only a semi instead of a full-on erection. Small wins.
“I didn’t look. I want to wait until it’s done.”
I laughed, shaking my head at her in disbelief. “You’re putting permanent art on your body and you’re not even curious about what I’m doing to you?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t curious, but I don’t want to see something half-done and start making judgments,” she said, her head cocking to the side.
“Okay then. You ready to keep going?”
“I wasn’t the one that needed to stop, remember?”
So fucking sassy.
I worked for another thirty minutes, finishing up my design, adding the shading and a few pops of color in yellows and oranges. The final result was cool as shit, and it reminded me of her. I wiped the last of the ink and blood off her thigh and applied the tattoo ointment over the area.
“Okay. It’s done.”
She shot me an excited look before taking a deep breath. She looked down at her tattoo, and her jaw dropped.
“Get up. Come here,” I told her, extending my hand to her. “Check it out in the mirror.”
