Harder (Stark Ink Book 1) (8 page)

All in all, Adam thought the meeting at the school had gone pretty well. Ava had managed to avoid the worst punishment, it seemed. He knew he had Calla to thank for that. He would have liked to thank her properly, but there hadn’t been time. Now he was watching another woman undress in front of him. He wasn’t interested in this one, however. She didn’t have Calla’s easy smile, wild hair, or soulful brown eyes. This one was just a job. He snapped on a pair of blue gloves and got to work.

The time seemed to drag on today. He suspected it was because he still hadn’t had one decent night’s sleep in almost a month. He finished the shading on the tat, forcing himself to focus on his work. No matter how he felt, he’d never let his work suffer for it. He’d built this place with his bare hands and he’d be damned if he’d bring it down with them as well. Satisfied with the final product, he held out a mirror so she could see it. Once she signed off, he placed a bandage carefully over it and shuffled the woman off to get the after-care instructions. He tossed the used inkwells into the trash and stripped off his gloves. As much as he didn’t care to clean right now, he didn’t care to put it off until tomorrow, either.

He heard the bell over the door tinkle and felt the tension drain out of his shoulders. That was it. The last client of the day. Or at least it should have been. Just a few seconds later, he heard the bell again as the front door of the shop open.

“We’re about to close,” Jeannie’s voice sounded from the next room as he swept the floor of the workroom. Nothing new there. They occasionally had people trying to squeeze in under the wire. They were typically first-timers who had no idea how long it actually took to do a tat. Jeannie could explain, make them an appointment, and show them out the door. He paused, though, when he heard a familiar voice.

“Is… is Adam around?”

He set the broom aside and crossed toward the lobby. Calla was at the door, looking hesitant. Adam could see that Jeannie was winding up for her spiel, reaching for a pen and about to offer Calla an appointment at a later date.

“Don’t worry about it, Jeannie,” he called out. “She’s here to see me.”

Jeannie looked curious as she eyed Calla standing just inside the doorway. “You can go. I’ll lock up,” Adam prompted and gave his receptionist an encouraging nod. Reluctantly, Jeannie took her purse out of the desk drawer and shut it loudly. No one spoke as she crossed the lobby, until she reached the door. “Good night,” Adam told her. Calla shuffled out of the way so Jeannie could get out. Jeannie gave the other woman one long, last look and ducked out the front door of the shop. Adam silently shut the door behind her and flipped the deadbolt.

“Wow,” Calla muttered. “Is… is she your girlfriend?”

Adam grinned. Normally he’d give her the “I don’t shit where I eat” speech, but Calla seemed just a little too well-mannered. But only just. “No,” he replied. “She’s just my receptionist.”

Calla looked doubtful. “She was staring at me pretty hard.”

“Well, I know she goes both ways,” Adam told her. Calla blushed furiously and he smiled again. God, she was cute. “So maybe she was just admiring the view.”

Calla had shed her dark skirt for a pair of jean shorts and a blue T-shirt. The shorts weren’t quite as short as Adam would have liked but the tee hugged her tits just right. She still looked just this side of wholesome. Her wild hair was the only hint of parts not yet tamed. Of all her attributes, and there were many, Adam liked her hair the best. He guessed it fanned out even more when she got fucked by a guy. And it probably plastered itself to her face and shoulders when she worked up a sweat while
she
fucked
him
.

Calla was still blushing under his lingering gaze. Adam decided to have mercy on the poor woman. “Or,” he said thoughtfully, “she was just surprised to see you, someone like you, I mean. No visible tats, no piercings. A little too clean-cut for my place—at least not without being surrounded by a posse of friends for moral support. We do get the occasional yuppie.”

Calla sniffed and actually looked a little offended. “I got my tattoo at a place like this. Actually, it wasn’t even as nice as this.”

Adam scowled. “Don’t tell me that, Calla. You don’t belong in some scratcher’s shit-hole shop.”

She cleared her throat and shoved her hand into her front pocket. “I forgot to give this to you earlier,” she said handing him a piece of paper. “I have the name of a social worker for you.”

Adam frowned at her.

“Not that kind of social worker,” she amended. “He works with the elderly, securing them services.” Adam took the card from her and glanced at it. A social worker may not be so bad. Adam had to admit he was in over his head at this point and the diagnosis had been illuminating but not all that practical when it came to the day-to-day details of taking care of Pop from now on. He pocketed the card, careful not to bend it.

“Thanks,” he told her and meant it sincerely. “I don’t exactly know what I’m doing.”

Calla smiled at him. “I thought it could help.” She glanced past him at the framed art on the walls. “Are these drawings all yours?”

He squared his shoulders. “Every last one.”

She seemed to be intrigued as her eyes swept over each frame. She walked the length of the wall, slowly making her way toward him as he stood in the doorway to his workroom. Adam stepped out of her way and gestured for her to enter the room behind him. “There’s more in here.”

Calla skirted around him, her hip barely whispering against his own. Her wild brown hair came close to brushing against his face as well. She paused frozen for a moment as she looked at the work displayed here. Adam’s pencil and ink sketchbook drawings adorned the lobby walls, tasteful and inoffensive. Here in his workroom, though, were framed digital photos of actual work he’d done. Back pieces were displayed in a montage of start-to-finish time lapses. Scattered about were photos of full sleeves and peppered in with those were the occasional nudes. Women whose faces were strategically shadowed proudly displayed themselves topless for the camera. Shiny, newly tatted breasts, rib cages, and stomachs were shown off. Calla frowned at them.

“Jeannie takes the photos, not me,” he assured her. “I’ve got better things to do.”

A long moment passed between them until she asked, “Is it just us here?”

Adam nodded. “I haven’t hired anyone else yet. I’m taking it slow. Don’t want to get in over my head. So, yeah, we’re alone. I’ve still got some cleaning up to do and nightly paperwork to file.”

Calla glanced at him over her shoulder. “All business, huh?”

“Absolutely. I
am
the boss after all.” He cocked his head to the side and scanned the length of her. “So… are you going to drop your drawers?”

Her jaw dropped. Adam grinned. Before she could respond he said, “If I had to guess, you may be a guidance counselor but you’ve still got a wild streak in you.” He smirked. “But it’s just a small one. I doubt you’d let a strange man handle your tits while he worked on them.” Adam made a show of looking her up and down. “So I’m guessing it’s on your hip. Just low enough so your waistband covers it. Otherwise Mom and Dad might have seen.”

Calla continued to gape at him. Adam guessed it was because he’d nailed her—her personality at least.

“So, are you going to let me look at this monstrosity?” he asked.

For a moment he thought she’d say no. Maybe she’d been a guidance counselor now for longer than she’d been a rebellious teen and she just wasn’t that kind of girl anymore. She surprised him, though, when she slowly reached down and unbuttoned her shorts.  Unzipping them she turned slowly, giving him her back. She pulled her shirt hem up and her waistband down. Adam might have been a few feet away, but he could spot a thong from a mile away, in the dark. A black smudge marred her otherwise smooth skin on the right hip, just below the waistline. He moved forward slowly.

“I need a better look,” he said gently. He put his left hand on her left hip and slipped a fingertip into her shorts. He pushed them down just a scant inch, not enough to reveal anything but the old tattoo. He heard her gasp anyway. He swiped his thumb over the faded ink. She shivered and watched him out of the corner of her eye.

“Can you fix it?” she asked. “Cover it up with something else?”

Reluctantly Adam let go of her. Her half-wild hair brushed his face before he could step back. He didn’t swat it away.

“I don’t normally advocate covering up mistakes,” he told her. “But you’re too damn beautiful to have something this ugly on you.”

He turned away from her and walked to the counter. As he picked up his sketchbook and pencil, he nodded at the chair. Calla refastened her fly and sat down.

“Did you always want to do this?” she asked as he sketched.

Adam nodded. “Pretty much. Knew I had talent and I knew there weren’t a whole lot of options. I get to make my own hours, be my own boss. It could be a lot worse.” He grinned at her. “Did you always want to be a guidance counselor?”

Calla lay back in the chair and sighed. “No. Not really, but I really did like my own counselor. You’re right, I was kind of wild,” she told him.

Adam snorted.

She laughed. “Okay,
relatively
,” she amended. “My parents split up when I was in high school. I took it pretty hard. Neither of them wanted to talk about it. My friends had their own stuff going on, so one day I skipped yet another class and my guidance counselor, Mrs. Shreve, called me into her office. I thought I’d get suspended, but instead she just asked me how things were at home. She was the only person to ever ask, so I told her. And I kept telling her. About my mom crying in the bathroom every night. About my dad getting remarried. Mrs. Shreve kept listening, so I kept talking.” Calla plucked at the brown leather seam on the chair and looked up at him. “Do a lot of people confess their sins in this chair?”

He smiled. “More than a few. Why? Do you have anything you want to confess?”

She held his gaze a moment then looked away. “I lost someone. A kid, last year.”

“Oh, God.” He hadn’t meant to make a joke of something so terrible. “Calla, I’m sorry.”

“Bullying issues,” she said. “He was a nice boy, didn’t talk a whole lot. The last few times I saw him, he seemed happier, better. I thought he
was
better, but he just… had a plan, I guess.”

Adam blew out a harsh breath. “Suicide?”

She nodded. “No one
said
it was my fault, but everything changed. They looked at me differently, talked to me differently. I still go over it in my head, how much I missed. How sad was too sad? Why didn’t I know?”

Adam’s pencil slowed to a halt. “Sounds familiar.”

“I quit just after New Year’s and transferred here, but I still can’t let it go. I know I’m being pushy with Ava but with all she’s going through…”

Adam reached out and took her hand in his. He knew what he’d felt these last few days and he couldn’t stand it if Calla had been feeling even a fraction of that. She was too good for that. “Sometimes things get past us,” he told her gently. “But sometimes there’s just nothing to see, Calla. What happened before wasn’t your fault. And Ava’s alright. I’m not going to let her fall through the cracks.”

“I hope you don’t resent me for sticking my nose in.”

Adam shook his head. “No. I like knowing you’re around. Believe me, it’s comforting to know I’m not doing all this on my own. I’m absolutely unqualified.”

Calla squeezed his hand gently. “You
are
qualified. No one loves your family more than you do.”

“We took Pop to the doctor today,” Adam said miserably.

“What did they say?”

“Most likely it’s Early onset Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh, Adam. I’m so sorry.”

He nodded. He wasn’t used to feeling sorry for himself, but then again he wasn’t used to having someone around who gave a shit, either. “Every time I think this is as bad as it could possibly get, something else goes wrong.
I
can take it. But Ava and Jonah, they’ve been through enough. And Mom didn’t deserve to die the way she did. Dad… he’s slipping away and he
knows
it. He knows it, but he can’t stop it. How is any of that fair to them?”

Adam couldn’t tell if Calla was holding on tightly to him or him to her, but he couldn’t bring himself to let go of her hand just yet.

“I’m here,” she told him.

It wouldn’t fix anything, but it seemed like enough.

Finally, reluctantly, he let go of her hand, leaned back, and tore off the page he was working on and handed it over. Calla reached out to take it from him. “Oh, wow,” she breathed as she stared at it. Adam had shaded the black band logo into a flower stem, above it a white calla lily wrapped itself around a yellow spadix. “It’s…”

“Georgia O’Keeffe,” he replied. “I’ve seen enough of her work.”

Calla blushed again at the vaguely erotic drawing. Adam couldn’t help but smile. “It’d be a bit larger,” he told her. “Not sure you can handle something that big.”

Calla raised an eyebrow at him and he fought the urge to laugh. It was such a nice break from the shit he’d been dealing with these last few days, apparently they’d both been carrying a heavy load. Calla seemed just as relieved to set it down, at least for a little while. “Oh, I can take it,” she assured him.

Adam smirked at her. “It’s gonna hurt.”

“Will it look as good as the drawing?”

He sniffed and pretended to be offended. “I can see why you’d ask,” he replied, nodding at her hip. “Given
that
masterpiece.”

Calla wrinkled her nose.

In this light he realized she had faint freckles that he’d never noticed before. “You ready?”

To her credit, Calla only hesitated the barest of seconds before she stood up and unzipped her shorts again. As tempting as it was to watch again, Adam snapped on some blue latex gloves and set about opening ink bottles on the counter. He stocked the rolling tray with the necessary white, black, gray, and yellow bottles and affixed a new needle to the gun. When he turned back to her, she was already lying face down on the chair with her T-shirt pulled up around her ribs and her shorts pushed down. This time Adam could see the red lace thong that snaked across her hip and dipped in between her—appropriately—lily-white cheeks. He blew out a harsh breath. It was going to be a long evening.

He took a paper drape in one hand and tugged on her shorts with the other. Calla sucked in a sharp breath. As he tucked the sheet into her waistband to protect her clothes, he leaned down over her. His lips brushed up against her wild hair somewhere in the vicinity of her ear. “Relax,” he told her. “We’re not at the sinning part.”

Calla watched with curious fascination as he swabbed her hip then prepped the needle with fresh, black ink. He turned back to her, comfortably settled onto his stool, and pressed the fingers of his free hand against her pale skin. On more than one occasion, he regretted having to wear the gloves. This was no exception. Calla was warm and smooth and beautiful and about to wear Adam’s mark for the rest of her life. Even if he never had her, and he was reasonably certain he would, she’d carry something of him on her forever. He leaned forward and grimaced at the tightness in his jeans. His cock wanted the tat to be over already, but Adam was willing to stretch it out for a little while. Penetrating her with the needle, filling her with ink, there wasn’t much in this world that was more sexual than that.

Calla whimpered just a tiny bit, but didn’t flinch when the needle touched her skin. Blood welled up and Adam expertly wiped it away with his left hand. Some people hated the sight of it. Adam had even known some artists who hadn’t been able to deal with it, but it had never bothered him. Blood made sense. Blood was necessary. Anything permanent, in his opinion, required an appropriate sacrifice.

He dipped and re-dipped the needle as he created the stem of the flower while the thumb of his left hand skimmed the dimple of her cheek. Adam had never molested a female customer before, but damn if he wasn’t tempted to now. He pressed his palm to the small of her back and spread his fingers. Calla gripped the edge of the seat firmly. The tips of her fingers dug into the leather. Adam ignored his raging hard-on and swapped the used needle for a fresh one. He ripped open the plastic packaging with his teeth and spat it on the floor. He told himself he’d throw it away later. Right now he wanted his hands on her. He held the skin taut once more and pressed the sharp edge into her. Her flesh tore again, her blood rose to the surface, and Adam replaced it with his ink.

Calla moaned as he shaded the flower’s spadix, that yellow stalk cradled by folds of white petals.

“Adam!”

“We’re almost done,” he growled and wiped a bead of sweat on his forehead with his sleeve. He was losing patience but he struggled to maintain control. He’d be damned if he half-assed her ass. He filled in the shading with a gray/white mix, enough to give it depth and the illusion of brush strokes on a skin canvas. Finally satisfied that it was worthy of her, he tossed the gun onto the metal tray. It clattered loudly. He stripped off his gloves and snatched up a tube of ointment. Despite how he was feeling, he gently applied it over the fresh wound, taking care to cover every line. Calla craned her neck to see it, but couldn’t quite manage it. He handed her a mirror while he retrieved a square bandage from the cart.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

“Damn right it is,” he replied. She looked up from the mirror, duly impressed, and he could tell she knew he wasn’t bragging about his work. Adam carefully applied the large square bandage to the shiny, damaged flesh. She winced a bit. “You’re going to feel it for a few days,” he told her.

Calla laughed and stood up. “That’s what she said.”

She winced as she tugged up her shorts and the denim came up against the bandage. Unable to help himself, Adam reached out and took a length of her kinky hair in his fingers. She looked up at him. “You might want to leave them off,” he said quietly.