Under His Skin (11 page)

“In a minute.”

“Don’t loiter too long or the dry cleaner lady’s going to call the cops on you.”

They both chuckled. Autumn wiggled her fingers and pulled open the door. Pandora waited until it clanged shut before she blew out a breath.

Brian walking into the shop was not how she’d expected her day to go. It was easy to relegate him to a naughty dream when he wasn’t staring her in the face. The simple fact was that she wasn’t good enough for someone like him. Facing the truth of that was for the best.

Sucking in a deep breath, Pandora ignored the stench of garbage in favor of steadying her nerves. Settled, she grabbed the door handle and hefted it open. She stopped in the office to grab a Dr Pepper before facing her eight o’ clock.

Returning to the shop proper, she flashed Brian a smile she didn’t feel and sank into her rolling chair. He’d put his shirt back on, she noticed. Mary was cleaning up her client and paused to glance over at her, brows raised. She ignored her and Kellie in favor of getting her station prepped.

Warm fingers brushed her shoulders as Brian kneaded them. She didn’t want his touch to ease the knots in her muscles, but he found the spot that had been bugging her for days.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“I’m fine.” She turned slightly to look up at him. “Sorry about that.”

One side of his mouth kicked up. “Don’t be. Thanks for that.”

Her cheeks were hot and her throat dry. “Yeah, she was a bitch. Want to pop up on the table and take your shirt off?”

“Getting me naked as quick as you can?” He winked and stepped back, giving her the space she needed and lying on the padded table.

She shook her head and chuckled, helplessly willing her blush away. The tattoo machine was a comforting weight in her hand. “Okay, let’s get you on your side first, and work towards your chest.” She revved the tattoo machine. “Face away from me.”

He did as she requested, pillowing his head on his arm and closing his eyes.

She swept her gaze over him, rubbing her thighs together. He was the forbidden fruit she couldn’t have. Pushing those thoughts aside, she leaned over him, and if she pressed against him while she worked, so be it.

* * * * *

“Bye, guys,” Pandora said over her shoulder.

Mary and Kellie paused in the doorway, no doubt waiting for her to raise hell over leaving her alone. She’d figured out this was a planned setup, so fighting them was useless. She didn’t know why, or even how Brian had circumvented her, but it wasn’t as if it was hard to find the shop on the web. Mary had at least packed up the till and Autumn and Kellie had finished the cleanup, save for her station, which she would never let one of them touch. She’d worked too long and hard to get it.

“We’ll lock the door.” Kellie paused in the doorway, giving her another opportunity to protest the blatant breaking of store policy. They’d agreed never to leave someone alone at the shop, for safety reasons. “Window light’s off.”

“Thanks.” She spared a wave for them and turned back to Brian. The kind of protection she needed from him wasn’t anything the girls could give her. They couldn’t shield her heart or put up walls between them.

Brian looked a little pale, but then most people did at some point when sitting for big tattoos.

“Need anything before I start again?” She swirled the needle in water and watched his face.

The corners of his lips slowly pulled up. “Want to give me a kiss?”

Her brain scrambled for a second and she stared at him.

“Come on.” He reached out and ran his fingers along her bare arm, tracing the swirl of a banner tattooed on her forearm, the touch so light she shuddered before she could stop herself. “Don’t tell me I’m the only one that’s thought about being together again.”

She pulled her arm back, curling it against her stomach. Of all her tattoos to touch, why that one?

A flicker of hope warmed in her chest. Brian liking her was high on her list of things to ask Santa for, but the reality was that she would never possess him like she wanted to. The only place he would ever want her was in a bed, a quick screw and nothing else. While it might be fun, it wasn’t enough for her. Tamping down her emotions, she cleared her throat and shook her head.

“We shouldn’t. We had fun, it’s over,” she said, her voice unconvincing to herself.

Gripping her arm, he tugged her hard enough the chair rolled alongside the table toward his face. Her stomach hit the side of the table.

“No.” The color of his eyes deepened with anger. Sitting up, he bracketed her with his legs and gazed down at her, the damn client chair lifted up as far as it would go. “Is that what you want?”

Her jaw worked soundlessly. Of course that wasn’t what she wanted, but she couldn’t bring herself to articulate that.

Ever so slowly, he lowered his face to hers, staring deep into her eyes. Her breath stuttered to a stop. She couldn’t bring herself to meet his angry gaze, so she looked at his lips, remembering the softness, how they tasted of coconut lip balm. She closed her eyes against the memory and let her jaw go lax. She sighed softly.

“Admit it,” he whispered. “You want me to kiss you.”

She wanted what she couldn’t have.

Jerking out of his grasp, she pushed back and rolled away. Wiping her mouth with her forearm, she busied herself dipping the needle in the ink. The thin scars whispered over her lips, long since disguised by a cover up tattoo. But she knew they were there.

“Why can’t you admit that you want me?” He slapped the table, making her jump. “Don’t pretend we aren’t having this conversation, Pandy. How can you talk to me for hours and not even look at me right now?”

Her arms shook. Setting the tattoo gun down, she splayed her hands on her thighs, ignoring the ink and ointment she was getting on her jeans, and turned to face him. His gaze bored into her hard enough she could feel it against her spine.

“Is it because I’m a cripple?”

She hauled back and frogged his thigh. He doubled over his leg, groaning. Jumping to her feet, she paced away. “I told you not to ever call yourself that.” Wheeling back around, she glared at him. He’d propped himself up with an arm braced on the padded table and watched her. “Wanting you isn’t the problem. I want you like I want cheesecake.”

He blinked at her. “But aren’t you’re allergic to milk?”

“Exactly.”

“Pandy, shit, you hit hard.” He rubbed his leg. “Can’t we just have fun? I like hanging out with you.”

She stripped off her gloves and tossed them in the trash. “It’s not about what happened then, it’s about now. You like me, I like you, then what? We screw, we talk on the phone, we get on each other’s nerves and we break up.”

“I didn’t realize I’d pissed you off.”

“You haven’t.” She threw her arms up and stalked over to the desk. She absently grabbed the stack of yellow fliers and straightened them.

“Then what are we fighting about? Because I’m confused.” He pushed up to his feet and took a limping step toward her.

Why was she fighting it? Hadn’t she sat in the storage room with Mary a week ago and talked about doing exactly what she shouldn’t? She wanted to love him. To bury her face in the crook of his neck and push her fingers through his short hair. Telling herself it was a bad idea was a flimsy excuse in the face of what she wanted. It had been easier to talk herself into walking away from him when he wasn’t there.

“I don’t even know.” She buried her face in her hands and sighed.

“Come on, I’m a simple guy. Take some pity on me and tell me what I did wrong. Please?” He closed his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her forward.

Leaning against him, she indulged in burying her face against his shoulder. She liked how her body fit against his. She dropped a hand to his chest and stroked her fingers over the head of one of the rattlesnakes.

“It’s not anything you’ve done,” she said to his shoulder. “It’s what you will do that—that I don’t know about.” That she was scared of. She’d experienced heartbreak before, but he might kill her.

“Let me get this straight. You’re mad at me for something I haven’t done?”

Wincing, she glanced up at him. “When you say it like that, I sound ridiculous.”

“You said it.” He grinned. “I didn’t.”

She pounded on his untattooed ribs with her fist and pushed away from him. “Shut up.”

The grin faded. “Seriously though.” He reached for her hand and she let him take it. “I know what kind of rap guys like me have, and it’s not entirely undeserved. I was a shithead at one time, but I’m not…” Rubbing his jaw he looked past her. “I’m not Robert. I’m not the other guys in my band. I’m me.”

Her heart clenched painfully. She’d stumbled into that one. Nodding, she pulled him back to the chair. “Let’s finish up and talk about this after, okay?”

Brian let her lead him. She got herself situated with her machine again and bent to work on the last bits that stretched out over his fluttering abs.

“You’ve got to try to hold still.” She used one hand to try to hold his skin taut.

“Sorry, let me ram needles into your stomach,” he said through clenched teeth.

It hadn’t been her stomach, but she’d been scarred by tattoo needles on purpose. She swallowed down the memories and focused on what she was doing, racking her brain for a lighter response.

“No thank you. You know how ridiculous tattoos on chicks’ stomachs are? We gain weight looking at a peanut butter cup, and don’t even get me started on pregnancy stretch marks.” She shook her head. “These chicks come in after they’ve popped out a kid and think their tattoo’s supposed to look like it did before.”

He paused. “Do you want kids?”

The buzzing from the machine stopped. She slowly lifted her chin. “Uh, well, that’s a loaded question.” She turned back to the table and filled up on ink to buy a moment.

“It’s just a question.”

With her machine ready, she focused on the prow of the ship, the way it curved into a figurehead of a mermaid. Pressing the pedal, she got to work before answering. “Yeah, but it’s not simple. You’re a dude. If you get a girl pregnant and decide you don’t want that lifestyle anymore, you can leave. A chick doesn’t get that choice.”

“And women can’t leave?” His voice had dropped, completely serious.

“It’s harder for us.” She shrugged. “You carry the kid, they leech off you, finally you get to like them a bit and you can’t live without them.” She feigned an indifference she didn’t feel.

“That’s not fair.” His voice had a heated, angry quality to it. “Plenty of women have left relationships and kids. My mom left us.”

Freezing, she glanced up and met his gaze.

He shrugged and focused on the ceiling. “I was a baby and my birth mother left, but my dad got remarried when I was a toddler.”

“I swallowed my foot. Sorry.” Shaking her head, she bent back over his tattoo. “Okay, I couldn’t leave a kid, but if I were going to have one, I’d think about who I was having it with. I tattoo for a living. It’s not exactly a lucrative job, no benefits or child-care. It’s not a good idea.”

“But would you want kids? In a perfect world?”

Why was he pushing the issue?

Pursing her lips, she rolled the idea over in her head. Her as a mom, dressing a baby up in onesies with little skulls and zombies on the front. It tugged on something inside her, some inborn desire to breed and cherish something created in her womb. She shoved the mental picture of a baby with Brian’s eyes into a deep, dark closet.

Instead, she focused on memories of her mother. Alone. Raising a baby and working two jobs while cancer sucked her life away. Her mother had been an amazing woman, but Pandora wanted a different future.

“Yeah. In a perfect world I’d have kids,” she said at last. “Okay. You are done, sir.” Sitting back, she wiped up the tattoo. “Let me get you cleaned up and we can get out of here.”

She took her time cleaning off the excess ink from his skin, admiring the way the ship popped with a little red highlight added to the outer edges. Brian stood with his side toward her, his arm up and out of her way. It was a beautiful tattoo. The ship was traditional in design. Five sails on each of the three masts stretched up his ribs, set against a sky with fat, puffy clouds. One skeleton perched in the crow’s nest, a guitar slung across his bony shoulders as he waved down to where another stood on the deck.

She’d added a lot of details to the ship, small things that might go unnoticed but made the overall tattoo that much more unique. A skeleton played wooden barrels as drums while another leaned against the railing. She’d copied the pose from a popular poster of Ike, though on such a small scale it was hard to get all of the details into a skeleton. The color she’d added would make it that much better. If he remembered to take care of it.

To finish up the night’s job, she applied a salve of ointment to the entire tattoo and covered the whole thing with plastic wrap, her go-to for bandaging larger or trickier body areas. And no bandage was big enough to cover Brian’s tattoo. Medical tape secured it in place and would hurt like hell coming off.

“There you go.”

“This is so badass.”

She smiled and cherished the sense of pride. She loved to draw and paint. Tattooing was an extension of that, and if she made others happy with her art, it was just that much better.

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Yeah, down the hall, you’ll see it.”

While Brian was in the restroom, she began cleaning off her station. The needle went in the biohazard bin, she sanitized her equipment with a quick wipe down and made sure the caps were on her inks before they went back in the drawers or on the shelf on the wall. Not having to worry about the till or the trash was a nice change to the closing routine. Not that she ever closed without Kellie or Mary being there, but numbers had never been her strong point.

“Hey.” Brian reached over her shoulder and snagged the latest flier tucked into her top drawer before she locked it. He sat down on the edge of the table she’d just wiped down and frowned. “You’re closing?”

Groaning, she snatched the paper away. Crumpling it, she tossed it into the bin. “No. We can’t prove it, but we’re pretty sure that Robert spread these around. The only thing it’s done is drum up lots of cheap work for us.”