Say it Louder (7 page)

My flesh prickles with goosebumps and I feel my cheeks heat, the color climbing down my neck in parallel with his gaze. I’ve never been inspected like this before. Even when other people look at my tattoos, and many of them do because it’s some of Thomas’s best work, I never see this hunger behind their eyes.

Dave swallows, his tour of my left arm complete. “Which one do you want to see?”

“Your favorite.”

He smiles, and it’s an easy smile, relaxed, like I’ve just asked if he likes ice cream. He stands up and turns around, draping himself across my bed so I can see the magnificent back piece that spreads across his shoulder blades.

It’s an owl, wings spread in full flight, its legs extended forward as if it’s descending to grab its prey. It’s almost a blackwork tat—the only color in the intricate design is the owl’s yellow eyes.

It feels so
Dave,
so commanding and sharp-eyed. Like if you peeled away his poor-me routine you’d get a wise creature ready to capture exactly what he wants.

What if I were exactly what he wants?
The thought of that thrills and frightens me.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” he mumbles, his face in my pillow as I bend over his back to get a closer look at the ink. “I have a second mirror in my bathroom so I can see it. It’s my favorite, but I can’t even look at it straight. Kind of stupid, huh?”

I trace the curves of it, my fingers skidding lightly over the owl’s feathers on his muscular back. “Not stupid at all,” I whisper.
No. Not stupid in the slightest.

He just lies there and lets me touch him. Lets my fingers wander, up his back and down it, from the crease of his spine to his muscled shoulders, from the cords of his neck down his lower back, and the elastic top of his boxer briefs.

This is shifting fast, changing from tattoo talk to something entirely … other. I’m afraid my lack of experience is showing, and I’m grateful that he’s lying face down and can’t look at me. I don’t want him to see the embarrassment and curiosity and craving written all over my face.

“Take your time.”

Dave’s comment freezes me. Does he want me to stop? I play his three words back in my head and decide his tone is genuine. He’s OK with this. Maybe he even likes it?

I trace his tattoo lines again—the primaries, the first ones a tattoo artist inks. These are my guidelines for everything going forward. All of the shading and subtlety is built off them, so if primaries go down wrong, the tattoo is virtually guaranteed to be a disaster.

Most people have seen bad primaries and don’t know it. They just know something’s off. It usually happens when somebody gets a Yosemite Sam tattoo, or a person’s face, or some other really literal tattoo that requires precise work. If the artist can’t lay down the primary lines right, everything else looks wonky.

Dave sighs and his breathing evens. I press my fingertips to his primary lines, then trace the spiderweb-thin secondary lines. It’s good work. The fluidity of the lines feels like a drawing rather than a tracing, which is another mark of a bad tattoo.

I work my fingertips across the tattoo, up and down Dave’s back, until the last traces of pretense that I’m just looking at his tattoo are gone. I’m just touching him to feel his skin, to learn a little more about his body with every stroke.

I take a risk and shift to my hip, leaning down on my elbow, chin to the back of my hand. My breath feathers the hair on the back of his neck. I touch him in slow, even strokes, sometimes letting my fingernails scrape his skin to draw little white lines that turn red with heated blood.

Dave turns his head on the pillow and suddenly our faces are a few inches apart. “Thank you for tonight,” he says, his voice low and husky.

“Thank you—for the quick save in the alley.” I force an awkward laugh, embarrassed that I can’t just own that I made him kiss me. For every time I’ve been pissed off and cranky at him, I’ve been wondering and watching. This lost boy has intrigued me from the moment he walked into Violet’s apartment, and I selfishly turned his quick save into an opportunity to explore him.

And here I am again. Exploring. Wondering. I don’t know if this is what normal people do, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t. Don’t they kiss (and not in an alley), and then make out, and then go home and fuck like bunnies?

Dave’s in my home but I honestly have no idea what to do with him.

He sighs and reaches for me, curling one arm around my waist and nudging his knee between my legs. He pulls me closer and inhales.

Is he smelling me?

Now I’m all kinds of self-conscious about how I smell, but Dave’s got a half-smile on his face. He’s watching me.

“I’ll save you anytime you want,” he says, “but you don’t seem like you need much saving.”

My lips turn down. That’s about right. I’ve saved myself, handled eight years on my own. I climbed my way from being a broke, homeless runaway to a gainfully employed girl with enough clients to this apartment stocked with groceries and art supplies.

I got everything I wanted.

But that comes at a price: flying solo. Dave’s arm tightens around me and his breathing evens. The clock ticks toward five a.m. and I’m painfully aware of this truth: building a solo life doesn’t leave any room for this.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gangsta rap pulsing through a wall wakes me in Willa’s bed. I roll over and reach for her, but there’s no Willa.

Disappointment knocks me down. What happened last night? I remember every minute clearly, but I can barely wrap my head around what it means. Why she’d touch me with such tenderness and purpose. Why she’d let me pull her close at night when she’s prickly during the day.

She has my brain in knots, but my dick has absolutely no doubt about what it’s supposed to do. I grab my morning wood and breathe in the scent of eucalyptus on her pillow, tugging on my shaft as I remember what her fingers felt like on my flesh.

What her lips felt like on that darkened side street. The curve of her ass and the heat of her center beneath thin leggings as she pulled my hips to hers.

I stroke harder, faster, as I imagine what her lips could feel like wrapped around my cock. How she’d taste, rich and full, how sinking into her would feel. I imagine the grip of her as I slide in all the way to the root, as I pump myself with my hands, and her eyes, wide and clear blue when we’re joined.
 

Equal parts wanting and trusting. And that deep belief is my undoing. My body clenches as an orgasm shakes me, and I’m flying on this fantasy of her.

Stunned.

That’s the only way I can feel as I pant through the aftermath. I drag myself and my mess out of her bed to the bathroom and clean up, but images of Willa are everywhere—visions of taking her in the shower, bending her over the table, hoisting her on the kitchen counter and rocking into her again and again.

I’ve got it bad.

The light in her apartment is so bright that I know it’s late morning even before I find my phone in my discarded jeans. I dress quickly, disbelieving that I slept so well. I’m normally restless in bed, unable to sleep long or deeply, but some combination of staying up almost until dawn and Willa’s scent and skin pulled me under into a dreamless darkness that left me fully rested.

And alive.

I pace through her apartment looking for a note, but there’s nothing on the pillow, the bedside table, or the kitchen counter. She must have gone to work—her messenger bag is gone, her scuffed Doc Martens too.

I feel a sting of conscience, knowing that rock stars have the luxury of sleeping late, while people like Willa are getting up and going to work no matter what.

Or else they don’t eat. Or else they can’t pay rent.

My father was up before dawn every morning, spring to fall, to work on road crews. My mother took swing and graveyard shifts at a 24/7 diner and caught catnaps instead of really sleeping.

Something as small as the privilege of sleeping in a warm, safe bed hits me, and as I piece together more about Willa’s life, I realize that she doesn’t take this for granted.

I power on my phone and it makes a bunch of demented beeps as a slew of texts roll in.
 

Gavin:
We’re out at the White Rabbit. Want to join us?

Kristina:
Where the hell are you?

Gavin:
Kristina called. She. Is. Pissed.

Gavin:
Better call her back before she blows up NY.
 

Kristina:
The bars are closed and you’re not home. If you are shacking up with some skank, I’ll know. You can’t just disappear.

Tyler:
What’s the deal with Kristina? She called me and Stella looking for you. Watch your back, man.

Kristina:
None of your bandmates know where you are. Your phone’s in some Lower East Side slum. What the fuck?

Jayce:
If Kristina ever calls me again, I’m going to kill that bitch. I thought you DTMFA?

Kristina:
I’m outside the door.

Kristina:
Open the fuck up!

Kristina:
We have to talk. We’ve got history. I demand you talk to me.

Gavin:
Haven’t heard from you. Text me to let me know you’re OK. We’ll talk at practice.

Kristina:
I went home, and you better come home too. If you keep making me wait, you’ll be sorry.

I fire off notes to the guys, assuring them I’ll be at practice tonight. But the messages from Kristina spell trouble. I can hear her voice under the texts, angry, stubborn, confused, conciliatory, vengeful.

What’s worse, at some point last night she said she was outside the door.
Willa’s door.
Maybe she showed up when we were out last night.

But the more important question is how she found me. I realize with sinking dread that Kristina must have loaded some tracker on my phone. It doesn’t take long for me to find it and delete it, but the damage is done. Now I’ve brought the worst kind of trouble to Willa.

I know I’ll have to go back to face the music with Kristina at some point, but the tracker sends a bolt to my gut. If Kristina can figure out that I’m at Willa’s home, she can figure out the other places I’ve been—like Righteous Ink.

I have to get to Willa before Kristina does.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I ditch my keys on the counter, hit the light panel to illuminate the shop, and head to the back to start a fresh pot of coffee. The doorbell’s jingle as I’m fitting in the filter, but it’s ten minutes too early to be my first client of the day. I pop back out of the break room.

“Hey lady!” It’s Stella, and bless her, she’s got two cups of fancy expensive coffee in her hands and a magazine rolled up under her arm.

“If one of those is for me, I love you.”

She laughs and puts it on the counter for me. “You’re really going to love me when you see this.” She lays
Atlantic Arts
next to my coffee.

A teaser headline on the cover catches my eye: GET THE LADY BANKSY’S FRESH TAKE ON STREET ART.

Stella instantly flips to the story: it’s big, bold and spans ten pages. I flip through the article as Stella stands by and sips her coffee, and the reality of what’s happening sinks in.
 

This is real.

This is important.

I made art, and somehow, perhaps for the first time, it mattered.

That’s why I’m a tattoo artist—because ink shot deep beneath skin is one of the most intense, lifelong, permanent statements a person can make. It’s a commitment. And while I know my work affects that person and maybe the people they’re closest to, it never really feels like it matters beyond them.

But when I make art on a wall or on canvas, it’s possible that my art can live for generations. For centuries.

Violet’s photos of my street art feel as fleeting as the work itself. One reveals a large stencil painted near a tree cloaked in intense fall plumage. Another shows small children running in the foreground, their faces and bodies a blur except for primary-color clothes, and my stencil punctuates the stillness in the background.