“Fun.” Marlee did a shoulder lift and sauntered toward the concierge.
Well. Fuck.
Chapter Five
Marlee never would’ve thought dancing with a pole could be so freeing. And yet, she was having the best time with her girlfriends—and Eli. Of course, Lothario was there, too. Given the amount they’d had to drink, the dog was the official designated sober one.
They’d moved on to the next jaunt of their evening of fun, and it involved tattoos.
The tattoo parlor near the strip joint Kellie had discovered specialized in both permanent and henna tats. Also, adult toys and an impressive variety of condoms, it seemed. Who freaking knew there were so many kinds of protection? After the girls had all had a turn on the pole, Becca’s dare landed them right there in the tattoo shop.
“It says if you use a little lemon juice and salt, it’ll come right off.” Marlee searched through the Google app on her phone to find out how Eli might remove the henna facial tattoo before it wore down on its own after approximately four weeks.
Not that he’d asked her to look it up for him, but she’d seen the expression on the un-inked half of his face when he looked into the mirror after the tattoo artist was done. Red henna ink made its way across one side of his forehead, along his jaw, and down his chin in a tribal pattern.
That expression? The one on Eli’s face when he saw the handiwork in the mirror? Yeah, not a look of joy.
Then again, Eli rarely had a look of joy. He was a man with a practiced look of indifference. Like, if he were a bouncer, he would have always had his bouncer face on. You either knew exactly where you stood with Eli or had no idea at all.
She thumbed through the other ideas the Internet presented for henna removal. “You can also try rubbing alcohol, but that’s hell on your pores, so avoid that.”
When she’d been a teenager, she’d had a bout of acne that the prescription stuff wasn’t touching, so she’d tried rubbing alcohol. It’d stripped the hell out of her skin. She’d sworn never to do that again. Always go straight for the laser treatments. Don’t mess with the creams.
“No rubbing alcohol, got it.” Eli spun the display rack of condoms so that the plastic packages rattled together. He chugged a swig from the beer bottle in his other hand. “I’ll save the alcohol for my liver.”
On their way to the tattoo parlor, they’d hit up one of the convenience stores to keep the alcohol flowing, hence the beer in Eli’s fist and the vodka shooters tucked in Marlee’s cleavage. Everyone was getting matching real tattoos—a little heart right below one of their ankle bones. Everyone but Eli, who had said no to the real deal and ended up with the regrettable henna covering half of his face instead.
The whole thing was Becca’s dare, but the heart was Marlee’s idea. The henna facial tattoo was Sadie’s.
The heart tattoo meant a lot to Marlee. The official third step of Marlee’s new life plan. If there was anything she’d learned in the past twenty-four hours, it was that she couldn’t rely on a man for happily ever after. There was no great love story for her, but her friends would always be there for her. They were her happily ever after. They would have to be her great love story.
“We’ll save the rubbing alcohol as a last resort.” Marlee tucked the phone in her bra. “The pores on your face are actually really delicate.”
“My pores are delicate?” Eli leaned against the counter. Taunting. Sexy.
Blah. No.
Finding Eli sexy had no place in getting her life back in order. Besides, nothing about Eli was delicate, and she absolutely couldn’t think of him as sexy, even if he was. Her hormones were just all jacked up from the jilting. This was simply a touch of the cliché best-friend’s-brother infatuation.
The fact that the face ink was ridiculously hot on Eli was merely a universal truth. Undisputable. It had nothing to do with Marlee’s desire to rebel. Not. A. Thing.
Marlee shook off the inventory of his hotness scale.
“Not justyourpores are delicate, everyone’s are,” she said. There, that sounded normal. Not like she’d been checking him out…or thinking about how he was there, and she was there, and he was standing right next to a whole tower of safe sex, and she had vodka in her bra, and that sounded like a lot of fun.
“Your ankle okay?” Eli glanced pointedly toward the new heart.
Marlee’s ankle was the first to go under the needle, and the little tattoo hurt like a sonofabitch. She wouldn’t be getting another anytime soon. Scotty didn’t believe in tattoos. Which was—Marlee was certain—the catalyst for Becca’s dare. Marlee enjoyed looking at tats. She had been an art major in college and completed a whole paper on tattoos as artwork. That paper hadn’t been hard to write—she loved studying all the different types of ink and the process of creating something that a person would wear forever.
“It hurts a little, but not too bad now.” Marlee stood, leaving Lothario lounging in his doggie bag, and moved next to Eli. “It means a lot that everyone’s doing this. Not just the tattoos, but the weekend. I feel like I’ve been so out of touch with the world.”
“You girls know how to have a party.” Eli slung his arm around her shoulder, tucking her into his side.
“You sure you don’t want a heart tattoo?” Marlee looked up at him, her hand resting against his firm pectoral muscles. He wasn’t against tattoos. He already had a whole sleeve of tats. She’d seen him in his chef’s jacket with the sleeves rolled up during their tasting.
Whoever had done Eli’s was an exceptional artist. What started at the wrist as a tree trunk branched into a mosaic of skin graffiti that could’ve easily graced the cover ofInkedmagazine or won one of those television tattoo competitions.
“I’m sure. You girls should just enjoy your tats.” Eli smiled down at her.
