“I thought we were doing a thing.” He raises his eyebrows. “You strip, I strip?”
A breathy noise slips out of me before I can stop it.
He pulls the fabric over his head. I force my eyes away from his because looking into his eyes feels so intimate right now. If I thought the glimpses I’d caught of his bare chest before were distracting, seeing all of it at once is mesmerizing. I know I technically saw him shirtless from the front in the kitchen, but then I had my eyes closed most of the time and was much more interested in how he felt than what his tattoos looked like. Now I want to take in every detail.
“I told you this guy was the first one I did.” He holds up his palm to display the stick figure on his pinky knuckle, and I risk a glance back at him. “After that came the bones, and these nails.”
His pec muscle jumps, bringing my eyes to three iron nails tattooed there, shaded so realistically that they look like they’re piercing his skin—like I could reach out and pull them free.
“I was going through a 3D phase,” he continues. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life feeling like I had nails driven into my chest every time I thought about what happened, so I guess this was an expression of that.”
I nod, even though imagining him in that much pain makes my heart hurt. “It’s impressive you could do them upside-down.”
“It was a challenge,” he admits. His hand moves to the face of a bear on his inner bicep, and it has such gentle eyes. It’s so textured and realistic that my fingers itch to trace the lines of it, but I keep my hands firmly in my lap. “I saw a grizzly out hiking one time, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.”
He shrugs his shoulder forward, drawing my eyes to a lighthouse tattooed over his heart. Light emanates from the top in radiating lines.
“I grew up in Maine, on the coast. There were lighthouses everywhere,” he says. “This one’s for Donny. The light that guided me home.”
The grief sitting behind his eyes is so fresh it makes my own eyes burn. “I’m sorry. About Donny.”
He nods once, his throat rolling as he swallows.
I point at the grim reaper on his sternum, my finger hovering above his skin. The skeleton is hunched over a scythe, its hood obscuring where a face should be. “What about that one?”
He looks embarrassed, a faint pink creeping onto his cheeks under smears of dried blood. A lot of it has started to flake off. “Unfortunate self-portrait?”
The beginnings of a grin sneak onto my lips.
My eyes track to the lightning bolt across his left shoulder, the ink looking like black veins against his pale skin. The bolt splits into multiple branches, spreading down toward his collarbone. “And the lightning?”
“I thought it looked cool,” he says.
“It does,” I admit. “Do you have a favorite one?”
“Probably my Kermit the frog,” he says dryly, “but I can’t show you that one.”
I snort through a laugh so powerful it would be a spit take if I had anything in my mouth. I’d think he was kidding if he didn’t say that thing about the matching jumpsuits the day we met. He was telling the truth, and I assumed he was joking because it was too silly to picture.
I jut my bottom lip out. “What if I want to see Kermit?”
It feels like dangerous territory, stepping just up to the line of flirting but not going over. He holds my eyes, but then drops them back to his shoulder.
“The only person who will ever see Kermit is my embalmer,” Nico says.
The ribs tattooed on his torso came from the same desire to map his skeleton as the bones on his arms, but the barbed wire wrapping around his bicep snatches my attention. I can almost feel the sharp points digging in, constricting his arm.
He follows my eyes. “I was feeling trapped. I couldn’t escape what I’d done. Or what I am.”
I reach out and press my hand against the barbed wire. His body goes rigid under my palm. The coldness of his skin makes my pulse kick into overdrive. I should pull my hand away, but I can’t make myself move.
He clears his throat and moves away from me, threading his arms back into his jumpsuit and shrugging on all his layers.
“Let me check your arms,” he says. “You might have glass there, too.”
I’d forgotten all about my arms.
He reaches for me, hands pausing over me. “Can I look? Please?”
