They were of the Garden.
It wasn’t so much that I needed to forget, more that… I needed something else. Different memories, from a different life I had yet to actually live.
So, I focused – again, on feeling it all.
Every prick.
I’d gotten much too good at feeling nothing.
Pain was a luxury I’d been mostly stripped of long ago – something to channel into a more beneficial feeling, but never sat with, or explored. Now that I was free to do and think and feel what I wanted… it was mine to reclaim.
As strange as it was.
“Never seen a woman be this serene about my needlework,” Tristan said from above me. “At least not without a little assistance.”
I shifted my gaze from the mural to his face – that frustratingly good face.
Dark brown skin, obsidian eyes, that thick, soft-looking beard that would likely feel good against the back of my hand.
Probably even better between my thighs.
“Is that a compliment?” I asked, meeting his gaze. He was looking at me, sure, but also into me a little too, in a way that was almost too much.
Almost.
I felt the invasion, but didn’t look away.
I waited.
He’d already pulled the tattoo gun away from my skin, but the motor kept buzzing as he stared. “It is.”
“Okay. What exactly do you expect me to say?”
“I tend to shy away from those, sweetheart.” Without warning, he brought the tattoo machine back to my skin, but I didn’t flinch.
Not even because he’d called me sweetheart again.
“Away from what?” I asked.
The corners of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “Expectations.”
Ha.
He was indulgently tall, sinfully handsome, an immensely talented artist, based on what I’d seen, and in high demand, if I took into account how Pri had been sure to tell me he was expensive.
Of course he shied away from expectations.
“I bet you know a little about that,” he said, when I hadn’t spoken after a moment. “I get the feeling you defy a few expectations of your own.”
“Nobody expects anything of me.”
As soon as those words left my lips, I realized how dismal they had to sound. The truth was though, that I wasn’t a woman anyone expected anything from, because… I barely existed.
I was here to fix that.
Hopefully.
I closed my eyes, and Tristan took the hint – he didn’t ask me shit else, for a while. He focused his attention on my ink – on the intricate detail work involved with turning my rose into a stylized storm, complete with lightning.
The destructive force I was named for.
At least, that was how I always imagined it, since I didn’t have a parent or sibling to ask, no box of old letters or archives to pull my history from. For as much as I knew of my own creation, I may as well have been born a fully-formed teenager, with no purpose other than earning and maintaining the rose I was paying some undisclosed sum of money to be delivered from.
Freehand.
I liked the sound of the word – freehand. It seemed fitting for the occasion – for the insane amount of gravity it held for me.
“I don’t do freehand on strangers,” he’d claimed, and yet… here we were.
In a tiny, sterile room, my breast bared down to the darkened fringes of my areola, with some rapper screaming over a beat in the background while I was reborn.
A hundred pricks, and then a wipe away of excess ink, sometimes blood.
Then another.
Then an ink refill, or a color change, and then a hundred more pricks of the needle.
The steadiness, the precision of it all, was soothing.
The sterile gloves covering his hands was a perfect barrier, making it easier to focus on the utility of what was happening, instead of being distracted by his touch.
Though, I’d quickly discovered Tristan was a hard man to completely tune out.
With my eyes still closed, I called his face to mind – I’d already committed it to memory. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the flare of his wide nose, the mid-size gauges in his earlobes, the tiny mole on his top lip – the only slight imperfection to their perfect pink-brown fullness.
And his arms.
Full sleeves covered with beautiful ink I hadn’t fully examined yet. From my short-term memory, I could pull forth landscapes and flowers, dates and names, faces, military references that made me think that like me, he’d served his country.
I mean… if you wanted to phrase it in such a polite manner.
He wasn’t touching me there, but I felt him deep between my legs – inside me.
It was… strange.
This feeling I’d heard about, been trained to emulate – the kind of profound arousal I’d mimicked but never actually, deeply, felt. Not in my time in service to the Garden, and not in the time after – the strange, meaningless year without an assignment, without instruction.
Without… purpose.
It was numbing.
Utterly, completely, but with Tristan over me, with his body heat permeating my personal space and the clean, woodsy scent of him filling my nose… I felt something.
Everything.
I opened my eyes, watching his deep level of concentration play across his features as he worked. The pink tip of his tongue jutted from between his lips for a few seconds, and his eyes narrowed, like he’d reached some difficult part. His thick eyebrows knitted together, forcing the wrinkling of his forehead in the middles as he focused.
And then, he caught me staring at him.
Again, he pulled the machine away from my skin as his lips parted, mouth spreading into a wicked sort of smile that had likely wiped away the inhibitions of a long, long line of women… maybe right here in this chair.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, studying me as he sat back. This time, he switched the machine off. “You look like you’ve got something to say.”
“Nope. Just observing.”
His gaze traveled over me, slow and deliberate.
Heated.
“Seemed like some
