I’ve never felt more like I belong.
And I know that I’m not going home.
Instead, I fire off a text to my mother, telling her practice is going long and to have fun at the concert. Then I get in my car and open my GPS.
CHAPTER 29
DAN
The shop has been dead today. That’s partly because it’s summer, when business naturally slows without all the students around, but there’s also a tattoo convention happening downtown. All the shop’s other artists are there. I volunteered to hold down the fort because crowds like that are my own personal hell. But Drake called twenty minutes ago and told Rosie, who’s working the front desk, to close up.
While she shuts everything down out front, I stay back in my booth, my iPad in hand. I’m not in a hurry to get back to Carson’s, not with her mother around. She seems like a nice enough lady, but I hate the way she talks to Carson, her criticism veiled as support. I can see the way it picks at Carson, slipping under her skin until she folds in on herself. It’s not a side of her I’d seen before her mother showed up unexpectedly. It’s only because I didn’t want to make trouble for her that I managed to keep my mouth shut as Mrs. Webber threw little barbs at her.
That’s why I escaped to the shop today and why I plan to stay here sketching even though we’re closing up.
That doesn’t make it easy to be away from her, though. That moment in the hall last night? It took every bit of control I have not to fuck her against the bathroom door. I want her so badly Ican taste it, the phantom flavor of strawberry ice cream on my tongue.
It’s hard to focus on sketching, but I try. I gave a guy a thistle tattoo earlier today, and it made me want to expand my portfolio of weeds. But a scuffle outside my booth, the sound of footsteps hurrying down the hall, breaks my concentration.
“We’re actually closing,” Rosie calls just as Carson turns the corner and appears at the entrance to my booth. She’s in a pair of sinfully short black spandex shorts and a cropped T-shirt, her hair in two disheveled braids down her shoulders. She’s sweaty and smiling, and she’s never looked more beautiful, my gorgeous little bruiser.
“Hey,” she breathes, a wide smile on her face.
Rosie looks from me to Carson and back again. “Did you finally make a friend?” she asks.
“No,” I say, then cross the floor in two strides, take Carson’s round, flushed cheeks in my hands, and kiss her. She sinks into me with a soft moan that I devour with my tongue, the sound going straight to my cock.
“Hey,” I whisper against her pretty pink lips, then glance up at Rosie. “It’s okay. She can stay.”
“Whatever, I’m out,” Rosie says, turning to head back to the front. “I’ll lock the door. Make good choices!”
Carson laughs.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. I’m still crowding her, unwilling to let even an inch of extra space come between us. I’m dizzyingly aware of how close we came last night and how soon we’ll be alone.
“I want a tattoo,” she says.
Well, that’s a surprise. “I’m sorry?”
She takes out her phone, tapping the screen to pull up an image of her lemon wallpaper.
“This. I want this, right here.” She taps her left forearm, the skin soft and smooth and free of any marks. “And I want you to do it.”
I glance at the pattern, my brain already formulating an image. “You sure?”
She nods. “I want you to give me my first tattoo.”
Ohfuck. That is way hotter than it should be.
I kiss her again, tugging on her braids and letting my hands roam down to her hips. Getting to tattoo her, to be the first to mark her skin…the prospect is too good. I want to devour her, swallow her whole.
Instead, I take her by the shoulders and walk her backward toward the large chair in the center of my booth. I press her down into it. “Let me draw for a second,” I say.
I drop onto my stool and reach for the iPad. I feel her watching me, and my attention is torn between her and the drawing. The image comes together quickly, because I’m more familiar with those lemons than I’d like to admit. Ever since she showed me that wallpaper, I’ve been doodling them in every spare moment.
But I haven’t put a single one of those sketches on a flash sheet. It’s like I was saving them for her.
“This look good?” I flip the iPad around to show her the bisected lemon, a leaf peeking out from behind it. “I can take the leaf off if you want, just do the lemon.”
