“And the last brother?” he asked, not looking up from my arm.
He’d started into the buildings, and my brain was a little fuzzy around the edges. I had no sense of how long I’d been sitting there.
“Andrew,” I said without thinking. “We just found out about him. He’s twenty-nine or twenty-eight or something.”
“Do you not like him?” Riggs asked.
I scrunched my nose, cracking my neck and staring down at the top of his head. He was a tall man, muscular but slender, and he had to be aching for how bent over me he was.
“I don’t know him,” I answered.
I thought about the group text Hunter had started with all five of us, his plan to force us into friendship something that hadn’t quite come to be just yet. Admittedly, Andrew being the one to take a swing at Scott Shaw had endeared him to all of us more than time could have, so I made a mental note to text him over the weekend and see how he was doing.
“What about you?” I asked, not wanting to talk about my newest brother. “Do you have any siblings?”
Riggs stretched his legs out and slid his stool back from me, changing the tattoo machine for a towel and clear bottle of liquid. He sprayed it down onto a folded towel and gave a long wipe to my arm. My breath hitched in my throat at the sight of my forearm.
I had a tattoo.
It was nowhere near done, half black ink and half purple stencil, but I had a tattoo. Something that was mine, just for me. Something my brothers had no say or thought in. Something I wanted and decided on for myself.
“What do you think?” Riggs asked instead of answering me.
“I love it.”
He tilted his head back and smiled up at me, a closed-lips thing that radiated pride and happiness, and I fought back a ripple of pleasure that attempted to blossom behind my sternum.
“I’m an only child,” he said, ripping off his gloves and flinging them into the trash. “Let’s take five so I can stretch out my back. Is that okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Of course.”
I leaned back against the chair and stretched my own legs out, used to being bent in awkward angles over desks and drafting tables for hours at a time. Riggs took a quick lap around the shop, and I tried to focus on the permanent lines tracing upthe length of my arm and not the corded muscles that wrapped the length of his neck.
A few minutes later, he was back on the stool, bent over my arm with warm breath puffing out against my already swollen and tender skin. He’d turned on music, I realized, an aggressive band at a low volume, and his foot started to tap against the floor while he traced lines over and around my arm.
I lost track of time, lost track of everything except myself. Getting tattooed, there wasn’t much else to do besides think, which led to some mixed results. Lunch time came and went, and I realized not only had I not eaten, but I also hadn’t had any water. Riggs grabbed me a bottle from a small fridge, and I drank it down quickly, resting my head against the back of the chair with a tired sigh.
“Do you need a break?” he asked me, not for the first time. He gave a wipe down my arm and slid away from me to study his work on my skin.
“I don’t think so,” I told him.
Riggs set down his tattoo machine and turned my arm around, checking both sides of it with a frown.
“We’ve got probably two more hours left,” he said.
“I’m good,” I assured him. “Ready when you are.”
CHAPTER 6
RIGGS
Smith was not, in fact, good or ready. He was, apparently, stubborn and silent, making it through to the very end before sweat began to bead on his temple. Even through the gloves, I noticed a change in his body temperature, and I scooted back to set down my machine and get a better look at him. His lightly tanned skin looked desperately pale and clammy, his lips pressed together.
“You’re gonna pass out,” I told him seconds before his eyes gave a roll and he slid off the chair.
Surging forward, I managed to grab him before he hit the floor, but the force of his fall took us both down, and I cursed myself for not noticing the signs earlier. I knew a whole forearm piece was ambitious for a first-timer, but I didn’t really foresee any issues getting through the linework and the black shading. I’d tattooed chests and ribs as first-time tattoos before and hadn’t had issues. There was only so much hovering and parenting I could do over my clients because, at the end of the day, their bodies were their responsibility.
It wasn’t like Rapture, wasn’t like the way I’d lived my life before when I had more ownership and directive over the body of my partner. I was a tattooer here, not a dominant, andcertainly not the caretaker of every stranger that walked through my door. But as Smith came to in my arms, a long-forgotten sense of ownership sparked to life at the base of my spine, and I quickly smothered it with a muttered curse.
