“They are.” He put the drinks on the coffee table and joined her. “My first to my most recent.”
“This looks like your motorcycle.” She pointed to a picture. “But it’s missing the design on the side.”
Elias was impressed. She’d only seen his bike once, but he supposed it was hard to forget the detailing on the side.
“That’s before I put the design on it. It had been finished for two weeks when I decided it needed something extra.”
Initially, he’d built it as a gift from a wife to her husband, but a few weeks before he’d finished it, she informed him they were getting a divorce, and she didn’t care what he did with it. She’d paid for it in full, and his policy stated he’d give a partial refund, minus the parts and hours worked during the time of cancellation. She wouldn’t have gotten much, but he’d still offered, and she’d passed. He got the distinct feeling she had used her soon-to-be husband’s money or joint funds to purchase it. In the end, he’d kept it and made it his own.
“Maybe when the weather gets warmer, you’ll let me take you for a ride.”
“Maybe,” she responded, going over to the couch. “Is it hard building them alone?”
“No.” He joined her. “But I’m not always alone. Christa’s there sometimes.”
“Christa?” she asked, brow raised as he picked up one of the bottles from the table.
Elias refrained from smirking because her tone spoke loudly of curiosity. She wasn’t interested in knowing who Christa was, but who she was tohim.
“She works for me part-time. Schedules consultations, orders parts, informs me of competitions, runs social media, and passes me tools now and then.”
“I see. How did you transition from doing tattoos to building motorcycles?”
“I didn’t transition. I still tattoo.”
“Okay, then, what made you want to add it to your repertoire?”
“It’s more accurate to say that I was building bikes before tattooing. Marco and I found a dirt bike sitting outside a house when we were younger. It had a sign that said, ‘Take it if you want,’ and it listed what was wrong with it, which was everything. We took it anyway, deciding we’d fix it.
Our parents, wanting to teach us the value of hard work and a dollar, wouldn’t buy any of the parts for us. We did chores and worked around the neighborhood to buy all the parts for the bike, which we worked on with one of our dads supervising. We took almost a year to finish it, but I had fun doing it.”
The smile she gave him always did something to him. He’d always wonder how his cousin had found himself so utterly enamored, how he had fallen as hard as he did, when he did. Elias could damn near relate when he got a glimpse of that smile, when she wasn’t putting up ten-foot walls and trying to keep him at bay, when they both knew what she wanted was for him to come closer. He wasn’t sure why she was doing it, but he’d resigned himself to going at her pace.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve,” he replied.
“Okay, then, what made you become a tattoo artist?”
“I liked to draw, and my cousin had already gone through the course while in college. I didn’t want to waste more years of my life on academics I wouldn’t use in the real world, so I pursued that instead after graduating high school.”
“Aww. You followed in his footsteps,” Eri teased.
“You could say that. I don’t have any siblings. It’s me, Marco, and Vince. As the oldest, we looked up to him.”
“Mm, Avi isn’t a big fan of Vince.”
“No one is. He ensures that, but I cut him slack sometimes. He’s…spoiled. Marco and I excluded him after a while, which probably didn’t help. We might have even subconsciously excluded him before accidentally.”
“Why do you think that?” Eri asked, and he could read the genuine curiosity on her face.
“In Italian families, we like to live in close proximity. Our parents lived next door to each other, and when we moved here, they found houses on the same block. Federico, Vince’s dad, moved across town to be away from the family.”
“So he broke the dynamic.”
“I guess we didn’t feel like family to him.”
“That’s dumb. Sure, it’s probably tough being an in-law at first, but the others were handling it well.”
