“We need to talk. Can I come to the shop?”
The bell rings,and I’m around the counter before it stops.
She’s standing just inside the door—an oversized sweatshirt that must be Margot’s, eyes swollen. She looks like she hasn’t slept and she’s shaking and I don’t care what she came here to say because all I need right now is to hold her.
I cross the floor. My arms go around her, and I pull her in hard—her face against my neck, her whole body shaking against mine. I put my mouth against her temple and hold on, breathing her in.
“Are you okay?” My mouth is in her hair. “Tell me you’re okay.”
Her hands fist in the back of my shirt. She nods against my throat.
I pull back enough to see her face. My hands find her jaw. I kiss her until she stops shaking.
I press my forehead to hers. “What do you need? Tell me what to do. Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
She puts her hand flat on my chest. Pushes back—not away, just enough to look at me.
“I’m not quitting.” Her voice is steady. Not the Sunday-dinner steady—the real kind, from somewhere lower. “I want the shop and I want you and I’m done living my life by my father’s rules.”
The floor drops out from under me. I keep my hands on her face because if I let go, I’ll lose it.
“You need to think about what you’re signing up for. You’re young. You deserve better than a man your father looks at like a criminal.”
Her eyes go hot. “No. You don’t get to do that. I care about you exactly as you are. Not some cleaned-up version. You.” Her voice is urgent and intense, and she stares me in the eyes. “Don’t push me away. Don’t decide what I deserve without asking me. That’s what he does.”
I open my mouth and close it, the uncomfortable realization that she’s right hitting me in the solar plexus.
I take her hand off my chest and hold it. Both of mine around both of hers. I pull a breath and it shakes coming in and I start talking before I can build another wall.
“I grew up on a block where the corner boys had me running by twelve.” My voice is rough. “My mom worked doubles at the hospital because our dad left and never sent support. My brother Deon? He was in and out of juvie for years. Landed in prison by twenty. I learned to fight before I was in high school.”
I’m watching her face, waiting for the thing I’ve seen before—the slight lean back, the careful rearranging of the face, theoh. But her hands tighten around mine. Her thumb moves across my knuckle—the one with the letter on it—and she holds on.
“I was drawing on everything I could get my hands on since I was a kid. Walls, paper bags, the backs of test papers.”
Her thumb moves across my knuckle, and she doesn’t let go of my hand.
“I had an art teacher, Mr. Raines,” my voice catches. “He was the first person who looked at what I could do and told me it meant something. Stayed after school with me. Drove me to a portfolio review when my mom couldn’t get off work.” I stop. “Closest thing I had to a father who gave a damn.”
“After high school, I was tattooing at shops around the city. Good at it—always had steady hands. I was also getting into trouble. Not like Deon. But heading there.”
“What changed?”
I tell her about how I drifted into Jefferson, broke and angry, and met Waylon. “I’d had a bad stretch—the kind where you sit in a room and think about where you’ll be in ten years. When I came out the other side, I was done. Waylon hired me to haul lumber. Saw my sketchbook—same pages I’d been filling since Raines’s class, designs on everything.” I swallow hard. “He looked at me the way Raines did. Said,‘I’m opening a tattoo shop. I want you to run it’.”
It hits me so fast it almost takes me down. I blink and my eyes burn. I look at the ceiling because I am not going to cry in front of this woman in my own shop. I breathe until I can look at her again.
“You’re trying to get out from under what your father planned for you.” My voice is steadier now. “I know what that looks like. I’ve been the person everyone else had a plan for.”
“King Ink is the first thing I’ve ever built that nobody can take from me.” I’m looking at her face and my voice is breaking and I can’t stop it. “I’m terrified of being the man who destroys it by wanting something he never thought he’d have.”
She steps closer. Right up against me. She puts her hand on my chest, over my heart—the same spot, the same palm, and my heart is hammering so hard she has to feel it.
“We might be opposites on paper,” she says. Her eyes are wet now too, and her voice is fierce as she rests her hand over my heart. “But I think we’re the same right here.”
I put my hand over hers and choke back a sob. Never in my life have I felt the kind of connection that I do with Clarissa. All of my walls are tumbling down, and it feels like we’re building something to house the connection we share.
“I’m not going to be the reason you lose your family.”
