I don’t even recognize myself right now.
“Honestly,” I chuckle, “I have no idea what my actual job title is. Started out as a small-time investor with a buddy of mine, now we have kind of a main hub I guess, where we run a few businesses from.”
That buddy of mine taught me everything I know. He was already a year or two into the investing game by the time I’d saved enough to join him. He taught me where to put the money, how to tell if something would be lucrative or if it was destined to flop, and once we’d both put a couple hundred thousand into it, we sold everything at its peak and each made our first few million, then used that to start our own company.
“That’s really cool,” she responds. “Do you like it?”
“I love it. I got to send myself on a two-week long vacation,” I laugh. “Just ‘cause I felt like it. What do you do?”
“We’re here,” she sings, pulling me into the door of a quiet tattoo shop.
The bell above the door dings with our entry, alerting everyone inside to our presence. The faint smell of disinfectant hangs in the air as we walk toward the front desk. A handful of people are laid out on tables getting tattooed, the machines buzzing as they puncture and pour the ink into the patrons’ skin. A couple of them look particularly uncomfortable, but the artists don’t seem to mind it; instead, they work effortlessly around the uncomfortable squirming of their clients, like it’s second nature to them.
“Here,” she says, shoving a thick book at me. “Pick one for me.”
“What?”
“Pick a tattoo for me. I’ll get whatever you choose,” she insists.
A wicked grin spreads across my face. “What if I told them to just put my name on you?”
“You couldn’t even tell them to have a good day,” she chortles. “I think I’m safe.”
Rolling my eyes, I flip through the damn book, scanning page after page of different designs, until I finally settle on one – an outline of a stetson, sprinkled with small, cartoonish flowers. I point to the design as I had the book back to her.
“Show them your purse and tell ‘em to make the flowers match,” I tell her, smirking.
She approaches the desk, book in hand, and shows them the design, explaining something in Spanish at a speed that makes my fucking head spin. She points to me a couple of times, following by pointing to different areas of her body.
Turning to me, she says, “They’ll take us back now.”
“Us?” I gape. “Uh-uh. No us.”
“Oh, so you can have your tongue - and yournipples -run through with a fat needle, but you can’t take a little kitten scratch?” She challenges. “And here I thought you were the big, bad wolf.”
Alright, that’s it. You can say a lot of things about me – I’m a player, I’m an asshole, I need to grow up – but you can’t call me a goddamn chicken.
With a snarl, I move in long strides to catch up with her, leaning to whisper in her ear, “Your ass is mine, later.”
Noelle digs through her bag with a giggle, pulling out a piece of fabric, then she stands on the tips of her toes to tie it around my head, covering my eyes.
What the hell?
“No peeking,” she tells me with a pat to my ass. “Now take your shirt off and lay down. I’ll see you when we’re finished.”
Oh, great. Now I’m left to fend for myself. For some un-fucking-known reason, I do as instructed and lay down on the table after peeling off my t-shirt. I’m suddenly reminded of my twenty-fifth birthday – man, that night was a damn good time. I had glitter stuck to me for a week. That night was worth the antibiotics.
I feel something cold slide over my skin, just over my left pec, and less than two minutes later, I hear the loud buzzing of the tattoo machine. Within seconds, the scraping starts against my skin. It’s not too unpleasant, I’ve definitely felt worse things in my life.
For someone without a speck of ink on her skin – trust me, I’ve seen every millimeter of it - Noelle sure described it well; it is exactly like being scratched by a really pissed off cat.
As the machine comes to a stop, my skin is sprayed down with a soothing liquid and wiped dry with something that feels like a paper towel. That part is more uncomfortable than the actual tattooing process itself. The artist gives my leg a couple pats, indicating that he’s finished, and I remove my makeshift blindfold, blinking away the bright overhead lights as my eyes adjust to the lighting in the room.
“Finished,” he tells me, then points to a mirror at the other side of his station. “You can look.”
I slide off of the table and walk to the mirror to take a look at what the fuck I just let happen to me. For all I know, she had the guy put a soft dick on my chest, complete with three long, crusty pubes. I get in close to the mirror to really check it out.
It’s a lip print, like someone kissed my chest wearing bright pink lipstick, and small script lines the bottom of the lower lip, reading ‘sugar.’
