Page 31
“All right.”
Her eyes widened. “Yeah?”
She watched him slip his mask off with ease, amazed at how easy he felt to do so. Maybe she was wrong about his anxiety after all. “Yeah,” he replied. “Let’s eat.”
They ate at opposite ends of the table, not exchanging words as they chewed on chicken, spring mix, apples, and goat cheese. They were already out of pecans, but that didn’t stop Archer from making it every day. Tea wondered if he made the salad because he truly liked it, or if he made what Tea liked because she was working for free.
Tea bit on a slice of chicken, sneaking looks at Archer as he stared into his salad bowl, brow furrowed, and shoveled food into his mouth. She scanned the snake tattoo on his arm, then the skeleton one underneath it.
“How many tattoos do you have?”
A smirk curled at the corner of his lips. “One hundred and twelve.”
Her mouth fell open.
He chuckled, pointing to his right arm. “This arm has twenty-three.” He pointed to his left. “This one has nineteen.” He placed his hands on his legs. She ignored how big they looked on his thighs. “Forty-seven on my legs.”
She nodded. “Okay…so that’s ninety-one.”
His smirk inched closer to a smile. “Twenty on my chest, and one on my back.”
“Only one?”
“It’s…kind of a big one.”
Her eyes grew wide. “How big?”
“It’s more ink than back at this point.”
She whistled. “That’s…”
His head cocked to the side. “Too many?”
She flushed. “No. No, no. You’re just…really passionate about tattoos.”
He shrugged. “A friend of mine owns a parlor in Minneapolis. When she started her apprenticeship back in college, I was happy being a person she could practice on. Prices were a lot cheaper, and she’s never raised them on me since, even after opening up her own place.”
Tea fished her fork around her salad, pretending like she was looking for an apple or something, even though her brain was spinning on the “she” in that sentence. She tattooed him one-hundred and twelve times? That was a lot of time to spend with someone of the opposite sex.
She coughed. “Minneapolis, huh?”
He nodded. “Been there since I finished undergrad. Well, except for my summer in New York.”
She dropped her fork in her bowl. “You were in New York?”
Archer ran a hand down his face, looking like he very much regretted speaking.
“When?” she pried.
He scratched the back of his neck, then leaned his head up to look her in the eyes. “I interned at Mint Club three summers ago.”
She felt like she was going to fall out of her chair. That was why he wasn’t in those photos of Riley shaving Austin’s head. Archer was in New York. He was less than an hour’s train ride away from her all summer. They could have run into each other. Except she would have never gone to Mint Club because it was a cocktail lounge with a massive line of customers and she barely had a budget to afford it anyway.
He continued, committed to explaining himself. “I lived in this shit studio that I rented with another intern in the East Village, but I was never there. I worked all of the time, learning from the mixologists, prepping garnishes and food before shifts, then staying late to clean.”
Tea placed her feet on her chair and tucked her legs close.
“I would have called you, but I was…” He sighed, then rubbed his face again. “Scratch that. I wouldn’t have called. I thought about it, but the few times I contemplated it, I got too mad to even click on your name.”
