Reaching over, I take her arm in my hand, rubbing my thumb over the red ink. “I’ll never be able to see a cherry and not think of you.”
“Same here.” Jensen pulls her arm back. “But lastly, I know you, Beck, your tattoos have a story. Tell me ’em.”
“Okay, you got me.” I take a deep breath before speaking. I’ve never actually told anyone about why I got my tattoos, but I know I want to share it with Jensen. “The lightning on my leg was the first one I got. It was a few months after my mom started forgetting things and we had just gotten started on her diagnosis.
“She was a physics teacher at my high school, which probably would have been a nightmare for a lot of teenagers, but not me. I’ve always been close with my parents, can’t really explain it, but I am.”
Jensen places her hand on my leg. “I know I’ve only talked to them once, but I can see that. You don’t have to explain that part to me.”
The moment it fully registers that her hand is touching me, I take our plates and move them to the coffee table and pull her into my arms.
I need more of her—not sexually, but more of her touch, her comfort.
I let out a small breath when she adjusts cuddling deeper into my body instead of pulling away. “Keep going,” she whispers.
“Naturally, she was everyone’s favorite teacher. She always made it fun and had the best experiments. She had one of those generators that she would set up to make your hair stand straight up. If someone got frustrated or an argument broke out in her class, she had this ball where the electricity would follow your finger—if anything needed to be worked out, you had to hold your finger to it until the issue was resolved. If it was something someone didn’t understand she’d sit there touching it too while they talked it out.”
Jensen laughs. “Oh my gosh, that’s so sweet.”
“I didn’t always get it, but it worked every time. She said something about how it made them stop focusing on what the problem was and focus on the electricity following their finger that they’d calm down enough to actually be able to understand. So, one day when I got really fucking sad, I thought about that and got the lightning tattoo the same day.”
Jensen looks up, this pained look in her eyes. “Beck.”
I brush my fingers lightly through her hair. “It’s okay, it’s not the exact same thing, but every time I look at it I do feel a little better.”
Jensen lays her head back down on my chest. “I’m not calling it slutty anymore. That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I chuckle and place a light kiss to the top of her head. “After that I got the eight ball as a baseball because it combined both my mom and dad. Pool was always my dad’s favorite, he taught me the moment I could stand over the table. But then Mom said I needed to have an actual appropriate hobby as an eight-year-old, so she put me in little league.”
Jensen runs her hand over my shirt right where the tattoo is on my ribs. “Now you’re in the major leagues and have a pool table in your living room.”
“I think it’s safe to say both of them stuck with me. I got my piercings after my vasectomy, can’t really say why, seemed fun at the time.”
“Very fun. That’s all the reasoning needed.” Jensen’s hand moves south, and I catch it before she can tease me.
“Watch it, Killer. You tease me, I tease you back.”
“What a threat,” she mumbles, tugging her hand away, it wraps back around my waist. “You’ve got one more, Beck, what does the brain and heart tattoo on your chest mean to you?”
I take a deep breath for this one. “It was something the therapist told Dad and me when all this started, her mind might not be able to place us, but we’d always be in her heart and there’s nothing anyone or any disease could do to change that.”
Jensen’s hold tightens around me. “I love that. I imagine your head has a hard time rationalizing it too.”
Fuck. I swear Jensen’s the missing part of my soul because that’s exactly why I got it. I still don’t understand why this is happening to my mother. The most amazing person I know, and I want nothing more than for her to remember me. To take this illness away from her, but the only thing I can do is keep the memory of her in my heart.
My anxiety starts to claw at my chest again, but unlike earlier I’m not sure if I can stop it from taking over.
Jensen’s hand moves up to my pounding heart. “When we lost Stella’s mom, the grief felt so immeasurable. I couldn’t understand it…I didn’t want to. The woman I loved like an aunt was gone—my mom couldn’t leave her room for days, I stopped speaking entirely, and Stella was so angry, she started pulling her hair out.
“My dad saw it unfolding with all of us. He got us all into therapy, even though we didn’t want to. A month after that he signed up to take Spanish classes so he could work on being a bit more fluent in Spanish so he could talk to mom’s family abouthow she was doing and not have to have my mom feel like she had to slow down or translate while she was grieving. While he did that, he took Stella to MMA and me to an art class.”
Jensen shifts around so she’s straddling my lap. Her hands rest softly on my chest.
“Stella hated it at first, and I didn’t care enough to fight him. Neither of us participated in the beginning, we half-assed whatever we could to appease my dad, but then somewhere in that, I started talking about what I was drawing with my therapist. Stella stopped losing her temper and hurting herself.
“A few years ago, Stella and I were joking about how it felt like he should have put me in MMA and her in art. I’ll never forget the look of amusement on his face, as if it was ridiculous that we should have been switched… He told us that we both needed to feel something with our hearts instead of letting our minds control the things around us. Our own lightning if you will. Stella needed an outlet that let her feel her pain and express aggression in a controlled environment while finding her strength again. When she was in class, her sole focus was just that class. I needed to actually feel something and express it, instead of letting it consume me. I poured my heart into sketches. Drawing Stella’s crystals and copying her tarot cards.”
Jensen holds out her arm again. “The hand fan was my redrawing of Stella’s mom’s. My cheetah is something I drew during one of Stella’s MMA tournaments.” She chuckles. “She was so fast on her feet, but I had to put stars around it because she said if she couldn’t beat them physically, she’d hex them.”
