The crinkle in his eyes confirmed that for me. "Sweetheart, I did better than that for you. My buddy spotted him yesterday."
Chapter Thirty-Three
"I don't think it's going to fit."
I wheezed, way too eager from having to keep it together at Luther's house two days before. "That's what she said!"
"Goddamn it, Ris." Slimshookhis head and laughed, almost dropping the new thermal fax we'd put together just a minute before. "These arms weren't made for heavy labor, you can't be making me laugh when I'm carrying stuff."
Eyeing him out of the corner of my eye, I grabbed the other side of the machine. "Doesn't it only weigh about ten pounds?"
"Don't worry about it," he huffed. "Move that kit over a little more and it'll fit."
I pushed over the set of inks on the counter he'd been referring to and watched as he slid the thermal fax into place. It'd gotten to be a pain running back and forth to the kitchen when one of the guys needed a stencil done, so I might have been a little too excited about ordering a new machine with the intention of putting it in the front when the old one pooped out.
"You wanna break in the new machine?" Slim asked, his back to me.
"I still don't know what I'd want," I explained, referring to the tattoo.
He looked over his shoulder, fluttering those ginger-blonde eyelashes. "The dragon is waiting for you when you're ready."
He meant the dragon that blew rainbow.
“Would it hurt?” I asked him like a wimp, taking a seat on the nearest chair.
Slim bit his lip and made a face that saidyeah, it's gonna friggin' hurt. “Well, yeah. A little.” Ef me. "But you're tough. You can handle it."
The story of my life. Shit.
I found my voice. “I'm still thinking about it, Michaelangelo.”
He let out a resigned sigh. "All right there, grandma."
Blake’s head popped up over the divider of my reception desk and his station. There was nothing scheduled for the next hour and at the last minute, I'd asked Blake to man the desk while we set up the new equipment. His head wrinkled as he narrowed his eyes at what we were doing.
“Does Dex know you want to get a tattoo?” he asked carefully.
"He heard us talk about it the other day," I answered him vaguely. The day they all found out about my arm.
Blake barked out a laugh. It might have been the first laugh I'd heard from him in a week. He still seemed stressed out of his mind aboutSeth, but now that he'd told us, it had hopefully taken a weight off his shoulders.
"I don't know why the hell you're bothering, Slim. You know he's not gonna let any of us pop her cherry."
I almost,almostwheezed at his offhand commentas a memory of the night before—when Dex had stripped my clothes off, laid down flat on his back and pulled me over to straddle his face—swamped me. That was probably the greatest fifteen minutes of my life. And the fifteen or thirty minutes that followed after that, when he’d turned me around and made me appreciate a certain number with a six and a nine in it...well, let’s just say that I was racking up fun new experiences really quickly.
Hallelujah!
"Whatever," Slim drawled. "Maybe he'll let me do this on him instead. You know I've been bugging him about letting me finish up his other side."
"The other side of hischest?" I asked.
Both of them raised their eyebrows in mock amusement but it was the damn redhead that cracked a smile. "Oh, you know all about his inknow, huh?"
Any resemblance of a smile on my face disappeared. "Shut up."
"What happened to MissNothing-is-Going-to-Happen?"
"I hope you forget to put sunscreen on the next time you spend any time outside," I deadpanned.
