“I wanna give myself a tattoo,” he tells me, using his eyes to gesture toward the supplies laid out on his bag. “Can’t figure out the best place to put it to really piss off my parents, though.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Because if I come home with something that will embarrass them in public, something they can’t just hide or wash away, they won’t make me go to church tonight for my ‘birthday party,’” he tells me, rolling his eyes with a curl of his lip as his fingers make air quotes.
“I didn’t know,” I say, sitting on the ground in front of him. “Happy birthday.”
“Pretend you still don’t know,” he tells me plainly, and it seems like, at least as far as he’s concerned, that’s the end of the birthday discussion.
Bringing a knee to my chest, I tuck a fallen strand of hair behind my ear and work to fix the tie on my tennis shoe. I feel Tripp’s eyes on me, and it’s like they’re burning holes into my skin.
“You’re really pretty,” he tells me, and I can feel my cheeks burning as I try to fight off the blush rising to their surface. “I mean, you have this whole cheerleader thing going on, but once you get past that…”
“As if I could be a cheerleader,” I chortle.
My hands fidget with the fabric of my athletic shirt in an effort to pull it away from my skin to keep him from seeing the shape of my stomach underneath it.
Leaning away from me just a few inches, he narrows his eyes and looks me up and down.
“Why couldn’t you?”
“Look at me,” I tell him. “I’m not exactly a size two.”
His face pinches, his neck pulling backward, and I can’t help but to think that he seems almost offended by my comment.
“What the fuck does that have to do with you being pretty?”
Peeling open the package of sewing needles, he pulls one of them out and reaches for his lighter, bringing it to life as he holds the end of the needle over the flame. I watch him dip the sharp end of the needle into his collected pen ink, bringing it to the outstretched palm of his left hand.
Despite the horror that I feel watching the sharp point pierce his skin over and over again in rapid succession, I can’t help but to blurt out, “Can you give me one, too?”
Shining brown eyes the color of almonds flick to me, studying me for just a moment with an arched brow.
“Alright,” he says, gesturing toward the track with his head, “but only if you promise to stop worrying so much about shit that doesn’t really matter.”
I offer him a nod, biting down on the inside of my cheek, and as he finishes poking a half circle into his palm, he reaches for a new needle from the package, giving it the same lighter sterilization that he used for his own before he reaches for my hand and pulls it toward him.
I hiss as he presses the ink into the skin beneath the heel of my palm, stinging with every quick poke that hits until a small lowercase T is left behind in black ink.
“You initialed me,” I point out – as if he didn’t know that.
Smooth, Jules.
“So when you look at it, you’ll remember this conversation,” he tells me. “I don’t wanna see you running like that again unless you just wanna feel the wind in your hair; in which case, call me and I’ll come do it with you.”
My cheeks heat again, and the lift at the corner of his mouth tells me that he can see the blush that must be taking over my entire face. Tripp Montgomery wants to hang out with me. I think I might pass out, and I don’t know if that’s because I just got a tattoo under the track and field bleachers, or because of him.
Both, maybe.
“That sounds like a date,” I tell him.
“Do you want it to be?”
I stammer in nonsense syllables as he throws all of his supplies back into his backpack and hoists it over his shoulder, bringing himself to a standing position.
A light chuckle breezes through him at my complete and utter awkwardness, and he bends down, firmly cupping my face with his hand. His lips meet mine and fireworks explode across my skin, my heart feeling like it might burst as his tongue slips into my mouth and brushes against my own.
When he pulls away from me, he wets his lower lip with a smile and tells me, “I’ll catch you later, Jules.”
