“Like what you’re doing now?” I raised an eyebrow at him.
His perusal of me was far from professional, but I wasn’t bothered by that – nor was I surprised. I was well-aware of the effect I had on people – men and women. My looks were a carefully cultivated asset that had served me quite well. A face and body with the ability to straddle the dichotomy between innocently angelic and downright devilish.
And yet, even with this knowledge – this gift, some might call it… I’d never fucked a man simply because I wanted to, before.
Maybe I’ll start with him.
“What is it that you do?” he asked, finally sitting forward again, ready to work. “Like, for a living. Besides make motherfuckers crash into rocks?”
That made me smile.
He was smart enough to peg me as exactly what I was – a deadly siren, ready to lure men to their deaths – although, of course, he thought it was metaphorical.
“I’m… on sabbatical right now,” I told him.
His gaze followed my tongue as I raked it over my lips, one eyebrow hiking as he turned the machine back on. “What does that mean?”
If he didn’t have the needle on my skin, I would’ve shrugged. “ that I’m taking a break from it all. To find myself.”
“Yeah?” he asked, half distracted by what he was doing. “How is that working out for you?”
“It isn’t,” would’ve been the honest answer.
Not even in the slightest.
“I’ve been adrift, actually,” I told him, because he, like everyone else, was a stranger. “No focus.”
“I thought the lack of focus was the whole purpose of taking a sabbatical. A… perk.”
My gaze drifted up to his again, back to those beautiful dark coffee eyes. “It would seem that way, huh?” I asked, not blinking until he gave his attention back to my skin. We’d been at this for hours, but I refused to look down until it was ready. Until the rose was gone. “I guess… most people would relish the idea of such freedom.”
His mouth curved at the corners, white teeth appearing to sink into the soft flesh of his bottom lip, scolding it and suppressing a smile. “You’re not most, are you?” he muttered, more to himself than me.
You have no idea.
“What did you do before this?” he asked, reinforcing my feeling that his other question was only barely meant to be spoken aloud. “Before your… sabbatical?”
“Followed orders.”
He scoffed, chuckling a bit until his eyes drifted back to meet mine, and he realized I wasn’t joking. “Really? You?”
“Really. Me.”
One thick, barely-tamed eyebrow went up. “Wouldn’t have thought you were the type.”
“What type would you have thought?”
“I told you that already… when I asked about your job before, remember? You were cagey about it then too,” he chuckled. “What are you, some kinda secret agent or something? You did pop up in the neighborhood out of nowhere, getting’ niggas kicked out of the coffeehouse for coming at you wrong. So really, it checks out.”
“Wouldn’t I have to kill you, if I told you something like that?” I returned his smile with one of my own, mimicking that lip-bite thing he’d done. “Can you imagine how good I’d look in the outfits?”
“I can,” he admitted, after another of those heat-inducing slow perusals. “You still haven’t answered my question though.”
“I’m retired from my line of work. Prefer to let it stay in the past,” I said, in a firm tone that made him nod, and lift his tool again as his smile shifted into a smirk.
“I didn’t mean any harm,” he told me, after a few moments of silence.
“I didn’t interpret any,” I countered. “Just… letting you know.”
Just… fucking up the vibe, I realized, when he didn’t say anything else.
This was the problem, with being in the real world without a yoke.
I wasn’t “human” enough, not really, to know how this sort of thing was supposed to go. Not without a dossier with every detail about the man I might need, along with a bunch of shit I didn’t want to know. Not without a character to portray, or a script to draw from.
There was no guide anymore.
I was just… me.
No cues, no applause, no stage direction to let me know if I was hitting my marks.
“Okay… I’ve gotta go in with some white now, to layer in the details, get a little definition – this is gonna be the worst part, pain wise. I know you’re a bad ass and all that, you haven’t flinched about the rest of it, but… just a heads up,” he said, only giving me a brief glance before his brow furrowed again as he studied his work.
“Thank you,” I told him, responding courteously even though I didn’t think his little disclaimer was necessary.
It did hurt like a bitch.
So much so that I was relieved when it was over, and he sprayed my skin with the bottle from his cart before wiping it one final time, coating it, and then covering with transparent film.
“You ready to take a look?” he asked, already grabbing a hand mirror from his cart, like there wasn’t a full-sized one near the door. I opted for the larger one, accepting the hand he offered for assistance from the reclined seat. Carefully, I avoided letting my gaze drift to my fresh ink until I was fully in position, ready to take it all in at once.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, once I finally let myself look at it.
The rose was…gone.
I stepped even closer to the mirror, as close as I could get without going through the damn wall. You’d think that, having had something on your body for a decade, you’d be able to find it easily, no matter what.
But… no.
Logically, I knew it lay underneath all the fresh ink Tristan had just applied, but from what my eyes were telling me, based on what I could clearly see in the mirror… it wasn’t there anymore.
I was as free as the wild fringes of the storm he’d set against the backdrop
