“I’ve never taken a client on as an intern before. It’s a demanding apprenticeship,” Grady warned. He pushed open his desk drawer, pulling a pile of pencils out and beginning to sharpen them. “We’re talking two years of no salary at all. I know your background and know you have means—”
“Actually, I don’t,” I cut him off. “But that doesn’t matter. I’m okay with a long internship. I have a lot of stuff in storage I can sell to pull me through. And I’m getting a part-time job in a few days.”
If someone would give me a chance.
“You’d start from the bottom up if I were to take you on,” he continued. “Taking out the trash, setting up and breaking down stations, going on coffee runs, and covering for Meadow whenever she bails on work, which is every time she breaks up with a boyfriend, which is every other month.”
I had long-suspected Grady was in love with Meadow, just by silently observing the two of them over the years.
I smiled. “I can do that. No problem.”
“The first thing you’ll do, approximately six months after you become the shop’s designated errand girl, is mix ink. I won’t let you touch live skin before the one-year mark.”
“Sounds fair.”
“You’ll do about a hundred and fifty tattoos for free—and you’ll have to find volunteers if you get accepted.”
“I have a large net and larger contact list. I can make it happen,” I said with confidence that—surprisingly—I was beginning to feel.
“And you’ll pay for the ink.”
It sounded like Grady was trying to scare me off the job. Maybe, like Keller, he thought I couldn’t do it.
But I just kept on nodding, keeping my smile intact, even when my hope began crumbling. “It doesn’t matter what you hit me with, Grady, I promise you. I want this more than anything else. I’ll prove myself to you.”
“All right.” He sighed, dropping the pencil he’d sharpened into the drawer and picking another one. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
With trembling fingers, I produced my sketch pad from my backpack, silently handing it to him. An arrow of excuses was at the tip of my tongue, tight-stringed and ready to be fired.
These are just early sketches.
Flip to the end and see how much progress I’ve made.
If it’s not enough, I can take night classes.
But I didn’t say anything. I waited patiently as he flipped through the pages, observing my sketches intently. The shackle-mouthed angel with the broken wings, the devil who laughed menacingly, the hearts in cages, and portraits of animals and dragons and warriors.
He stopped when he got to the sketch of a girl who looked a lot like me, wearing a crown of thorns. He drew a long breath, stealing all the oxygen in the room. My muscles stiffened as I awaited his verdict.
“Is this you?” he asked quietly.
The face of the girl—me—was out of proportion. It was one of my earliest pieces. I think I’d drawn it the first time Ransom and I were in Texas.
“Yeah,” I said, resisting the urge to explain I could now render a human face a lot better.
“It’s full of pain.”
My eyes dragged up to meet his. “Aren’t we all?”
A smile tugged at his lips. “When can you start?”
Three months later.
You are getting up there and opening this lock, Hallie Thorne.
I gave myself a pep talk, swinging the entrance door to my Westwood building.
Perhaps an apartment was a big name for what I was renting. The property was a two-story house that had been converted into four studio apartments—two on the first floor and two on the second. Details were dicey regarding the legality of this arrangement, but it was a safe enough neighborhood, and the rent was dirt cheap.
Leaning my secondhand bike against the wall in the dank hallway, I looked to the carpeted stairway leading up to my apartment with a sigh.
“The lock is not going to give you trouble,” I repeated sternly to myself, aloud this time.
Yes, it will. It always did. It took me twenty minutes to open my apartment every day. But I wasn’t in a position to bargain with my landlord, and living with Keller was something we were both growing to hate. I did not approve of his random hookups that never called and always grabbed the last La Croix can from the fridge before they slipped out.
He, on the other hand, was tired of someone occupying his living room and using all the hot water in the shower.
Stomping my way up, I brushed my fingers over the walls. My finger pads were so calloused, so worn-out from work, feeling any pressure against them felt good. My phone danced in my pocket, signaling a text message, and for the thousandth time, I took it out, hoping I might be seeing Ransom’s name.
Keller: Hey honey, good news. Derryck from the café across the street needs his place cleaned three times a week. Should I give him your number? X
I typed a quick yup and continued my journey upstairs.
For a while, I saw Ransom everywhere. At the discount supermarket I frequented. At the bike shop. At the movie theater, whenever I went with Keller, and even at the tattoo parlor where I interned.
Since I hadn’t been able to find any part-time job—Keller’s guess was that every time people saw my name on a résumé they assumed it was a prank—I had to resort to cleaning Main Squeeze and the joint next to it, a dispensary called High Fashion, every night. It paid the bills—sort of. And maybe it was the weed fumes, but I could swear I’d seen Ransom there, too.
But in the last few days, the situation had improved. I would find myself not thinking about him for an entire hour, sometimes even two. When my head hit the pillow, exhaustion won the war against heartbreak, and I was able to sleep instead of obsess over him—what was he doing? Who was he with? Did he think about me, too?
It was true, what they said. A life of hard work kept you out of trouble…and away from sin.
After all, I’d done the right thing. Ransom had never really cared about me. That was why he found it so easy to stay away.
When I reached the top of the stairs, I was so exhausted from my shift at the tattoo shop that I collapsed onto my door with a groan. Only, my body wasn’t met with a mass of hard wood. I fell on something softer…and definitely curvier.
“Bunny, you look like hell!” my mother greeted me in her signature, Julianne Thorne way.
Pulling back, I stumbled until my back hit the opposite wall, blinking. I was immediately alert. In front of me stood Dad, Hera, and Mom. No bodyguards. No security detail. For a moment, I was tempted to bark at them to go back to Texas. But then I remembered something Ilona had told me last week.
“You can’t stay away from your family forever. Even though they’re imperfect, and your feelings are valid, they still love you and care deeply about you in their own way. Don’t give up on them before you try to turn your relationship around.”
“W—what are you doing here?” I wrestled the words out of my mouth. Barely.
“It’s time we talk,” my father said, softly but sternly. It was his no-nonsense tone, and I hadn’t heard it in so long. I’d missed it, I realized foolishly. I missed his tough love. I missed his any-kind-of-love.