I loved the thought of that, that no matter what happened next, she’d always exist in me in some way.
“Okay,” she said, sitting back and admiring the piece. “Ready to see it?”
Carefully, I swung myself off the table, following her to the full-length mirror attached to the wall near her station. She blocked my view of myself, turning around to face me and biting her lip as her eyes scanned where she’d just inked me.
“I hope you don’t hate it,” she said, and her actual concern made its way through the joke she tried to hide it with.
“Step aside, Stig,” I said, grabbing her by the arms and shuffling her out of the way. I didn’t miss the way her cheeks reddened at the nickname, how her smile bloomed with it, too. But when I saw myself in the mirror, my focus shifted entirely to the ink on my chest.
Every muscle in my face went slack, awe striking me like a lightning bolt.
“Holy shit, Mary.”
The skin was still a bit red and angry from being stabbed a million times over the last five hours, but underneath the slight swelling was the most bad ass octopus tattoo I’d ever seen.
The dark ink of the outline was clean and precise, but the shading of the head, of each tentacle, of the little suckers and the textured skin — that was what stole the show. I would never say it out loud, but it was far better than what I’d expected.
It was the kind of tattoo I’d presume to get from an artist who had been practicing for decades, not one who didn’t even officially have her own chair yet.
I lifted my fingers to trace the ink, but she slapped my hand away.
“Do not put your grimy hands on my fresh tattoo,” she said. “It’ll get infected. I need to put a second skin on it, but I wanted you to see it first.”
I shook my head as I took in every detail in the mirror, stepping even closer. It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t gigantic either. The head sat right in the middle of my sternum, with the arms stretching out over my pecs and down to touch the top of my abdomen.
“Adding to your list of regrets?” Mary asked from where she stood behind me.
My eyes found hers in the mirror, and I swallowed. Emotion gripped my throat in a tight vise.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
The corner of her mouth lifted, but then she looked down at her hands, shrugging. “I haven’t done a chest piece before. The sternum was a little harder than I thought, and the shape—”
“It’s perfect,” I said again, and this time I turned to face her, and without a second thought about who was around us or the fact that I shouldn’t have felt comfortable enough to do it, I slid my hands up to frame her face, tilting her eyes to meet mine. “I know you’ve been worried about your style, but I can tell you confidently that you have nothing to worry about. Because this tattoo is sick. It’s bad ass. Fucking incredible. Maravilloso,” I said as her eyes teared up a bit. “And I love it.”
A victorious smile found her then. “Really?”
“Really. But I hope you realize what you’ve done, because now I want you to mark every last inch of my skin.”
She laughed at that, pulling out of my grip and walking back to her station to start cleaning up. “Tattoos are addicting.”
But as she cleaned my piece and covered it with a second skin, giving me all the aftercare instructions, I watched her with the truth vibrating through my chest.
It was her who was the addiction.
Mary
After grabbing a quick bite to eat, Leo and I dragged our asses back to The Pit. The exhaustion from the night before combined with the adrenaline crash from tattooing had me yawning every two seconds, and one look at Leo when we kicked our shoes off at the door told me he felt the same.
It was quiet in the house, and I checked the time on my phone. “A little early for everyone to be asleep already.”
“Tomorrow is our first real practice with the depth chart set,” Leo reminded me. “Coach will start kicking our asses at the crack of dawn.”
“Guess that means you should get some sleep, too.”
“Shouldn’t be an issue,” he said around a yawn.
“Do you want the bed tonight? I feel so awful that you’re still on the—”
Leo cut my words off with a roll of his eyes before he reached out, snagged my wrist in his hand, and tugged me into him.
“I’m fine, Stig,” he said with a smirk aimed down at me. “And I like having you in my bed.”
Chills erupted from where his breath whispered along my lips all the way down my spine.
His body pressed against mine, his hold on me so comfortable and confident, like he’d done it a million times, like I belonged nowhere if not in his arms.
I swallowed when he brushed my hair out of my eyes, tucking it behind one ear.
“Is it okay that I call you that?”
My heart skipped a beat before picking up double time. All I could do was nod, because all my awareness was zeroed in on where one of his hands held my waist, the other cradling my jaw.
Suddenly, I wasn’t tired anymore.
I watched as Leo’s throat bobbed with a thick swallow, like he just realized how close we were, too. He slowly slid his hand behind my neck, pulling me into him for a hug.
“Thank you for tonight,” he said softly.
I closed my eyes, inhaling his scent as my fingers curled in the fabric of his t-shirt. I couldn’t be sure how long we stood there like that, but I knew when he finally put space between us, I felt so dizzy I had to brace a hand on the wall to keep from falling.
“Well,” I said. “Goodnight, then.”
Leo shoved his hands in his pockets. “Goodnight.”
I climbed the stairs in a daze, somehow managing to brush my teeth and wash my face before stripping out of my clothes and throwing on the largest t-shirt I owned. I crawled into bed, ready for exhaustion to take me under, but as soon as my head hit the pillow and the distinct smell of Leo surrounded me, every cell in my body buzzed to life again.
A deep inhale of him had my eyes closing, and I curled up in the sheets only to huff and throw them off me in the next breath. My nipples peaked under the cool air, adding to my already-over-sensitized nervous system as I stared up at the ceiling.
“Go to bed,” I told myself, like saying it out loud would give me the restraint I needed.
But it didn’t.
Instead, my breathing intensified, eyes racing over the lines of the ceiling fan above me. He wasn’t even there anymore and I could feel his hands on me, feel the way he surrounded me when he pulled me into him, how he sighed into my hair like holding me was all he ever wanted.
I could see his eyes, the way they heated when they took in my dress last night, how they dragged over me so slowly my skin burned with every centimeter of that stare.
I could hear him, all around me — his laugh, the stiff breath he held when I was pressed against him, the deep baritone of his voice when he verified what I felt to be true at the shop — that he wanted me.
All of me.
He knew who I was now. He knew me past and present, the girl he hurt and the woman who grew strong despite him.
I pressed a hand to where my heart thumped loudly under my rib cage, waiting for good sense to find me and give me some reason why I couldn’t have Leo, why I shouldn’t let him have me.