“I’d offer to let you stay here, but if you can’t stand up, you definitely can’t make it up the stairs.”
“You asshole, I don’t think I’m ever going to walk again.” He swung his legs onto the bottom of the chair and stretched his not freshly tattooed leg out. “I think I live here now. In this chair.”
“I surely fucking hope not,” I countered, wrapping and tossing the used ink caps and gloves into the trash. “I have clients tomorrow and there is a mortgage to be paid.”
“I’ll just wait it out a bit while you clean,” he said.
I stood up, grabbed a water bottle from the small fridge in the corner of my tattoo shop, and shoved it into his sweaty hands.
“Drink this,” I told him. “Slowly.”
Damon followed instructions, and I waited for some of the color to return to his face before getting back into clean up. I sanitized my station, then swept up and cleaned the rest of the small space, humming to myself as I worked. By the time I finished, Damon was upright with his ass in the chair and his feet on the ground. It was definitely an improvement.
“Better?” I asked, checking my pockets for my wallet and phone. My keys were on a hook by the door, along with my matte black motorcycle helmet and leather jacket.
“Are you throwing me out?”
“I…was planning to go out after we were done.”
Damo squinted his dark brown eyes at me, his earlier fatigue gone now in favor of a curious kind of question. I squared my shoulders and waited for him to speak his piece because I knew he had one. Damon was my best friend, and he had been for my whole adult life. He’d been on his hands and knees with me laying the floor of my shop, and he’d been on his ass in the middle of my living room, sorting through boxes of a life cut short. There wasn’t much about me Damon didn’t know, and I liked it that way. He kept me sane and he kept me grounded, which I needed.
Especially these days.
“Where were you planning to go?” he asked.
Bracing my hands against the small of my back, I arched and then bowed, stretching out my spine after hours of being bent over to tattoo. I was nowhere near as young as I’d been when I started in the trade, something that was much better designed for twenty year-old men than ones pushing forty. But I’d dumped everything I had into this dream, and it wasn’t something I would ever walk away from. My plan, although already long ignored, was to hire a few other artists to rent out the extra booths I’d deliberately built into the shop and let their booth rent cover the mortgage on the building. That meant I’d be able to work less, almost like a retirement plan. But the shop had been open for three years, and I hadn’t so much as thought about bringing anyone else in.
“Get a drink,” I said, which was a half-truth.
“I’ll go with you.”
“You’ll bleed out,” I teased.
Damon finished his drink and tossed the empty bottle into one of my trash cans.
“I don’t have to drink if you’re drinking,” he said.
“I was going to go to Rapture,” I confessed.
Damon smirked. “Planning to blow off some steam finally?”
“I was just going to get a drink and see what trouble everyone else was trying to get into.”
And that was the full truth.
There were a handful of indisputable facts about me, the first of which being that as much as I loved to make my own trouble, I also very much enjoyed watching other people get into their own. Rapture was the perfect place for that sort of observation—a BDSM club built under the rafters of a de-sanctified church—almost always filled with sweaty and gyrating bodies on the dance floor and people in various stages of undress and pleasure scattered around the upstairs choir loft. It was also a great place for me to find people who were chasing after their own interests because focusing on other people was the perfect distraction from ignoring myself.
“Riggs, it’s been?—”
I cut my best friend off with a raised hand and a frown.
“I was just going to get a drink and see what trouble everyone else was trying to get into,” I repeated. “If you want to come, you can. If you don’t, we’ll get you home.”
Damon sighed heavily and shifted his weight to ease off the leg I’d just tattooed.
“Get me home,” he decided.
It was the right choice. His adrenaline was already heading toward the floor, and I needed my best friend to be safe on his couch before that happened.
