Tyler & Stella (Tattoo Thief) (5 page)

I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—betray them again. But I also have to push him, make the story vivid so it doesn’t look like a sanitized press release.

I feel his hot breath on the back of my neck and goosebumps rise on my arms.

“Facts
are real, Stella,” Tyler says, and I swivel on the stool to face him. His eyes travel across my bare shoulder, down the curve of my waist and land on my crossed legs, one knee on top of the other.

He brushes one finger across my kneecap, close to where his hands held me when he climbed the stairs. I hold my breath to see what’s next.

“Facts are real,” he repeats, “but
stories
are whatever you make of the facts. Stories are what we tell ourselves and each other.”

I hear his breath hitch as he touches my knee, trailing his finger across the top of my thigh where it meets the hem of my dress.

“A story might be true. It might not. You can have the same set of facts but two totally different stories. And stories can point to truth, or to lies. Don’t forget that.”

Tyler’s fingertip lights a fire in the path it traces on my leg. I drag my eyes from watching the progress of his one long finger to meet his molten brown eyes.

His pupils are dilated and I feel like he could devour me at any moment. I raise my hand, touching his chest through his thin T-shirt. I want to strengthen our connection and find out what his touch means.

But my touch breaks the spell.

SIX

Tyler turns from me and takes a long pull on his beer, coughing slightly. “So, uh, I’m going to show you the practice space now. OK?”

I swivel my stool back to the bar in disappointment, feeling cold without his presence. I down another vodka shot and it helps numb my throbbing feet. I’m growing to hate these shoes.

I grab my notebook and pen, trying to shake off the awkwardness and get on with the interview. Even if this isn’t going where I thought it might, it’s still an amazing opportunity to have this kind of access. I’m going to make the most of it.

Tyler puts plenty of distance between us and I follow him around for the tour. The space is about twice as long as it is wide, and Tyler explains that the hundred-year-old warehouse is basically cut in half, with two tenants on each floor.

“How long have you lived here?” I ask.

“A couple of years.” He shrugs. “The band needed a space to practice, somewhere neighbors wouldn’t complain about noise. Most of the other tenants don’t live in the building; they’re artists or fashion designers who want lots of space and light.”

“It’s really nice.” I mean it. On the long wall with windows, three slouchy couches cluster around a big-screen TV. There’s a distressed boardroom-style table past that with ten mismatched chairs.

We pass an elaborate setup of weightlifting equipment and move toward the largest area, which overflows with musical instruments. Cords snake across the floor between monitors, a soundboard, a drum set, and other expensive equipment. That probably explains all the locks.

“The loft didn’t always look like this. It was full of pigeon droppings and trash when I found it. Some of the windows were broken when I moved in,” Tyler said. “But once I cleaned that shit up and put in a bathroom, I started liking it here more than the band’s old place in Brooklyn. Plus, it’s quicker to get home after a gig in the city.”

“What’s up there?” I point to the loft along the back wall.

“Just my bed and my clothes. I built it when Jayce lived here for a couple of months. I was upstairs and he was downstairs.” Tyler points to the storage area beneath the loft. “Let me tell you about the practice space.”

I follow him, feeling the shots work their magic in my body, unraveling the tension from our awkward moment. I’m a little pissed that Tyler didn’t follow through with his teasing finger’s promise, but I try to focus on building a story.

Tyler points to various instruments and describes who plays what, but I know all of this. I take notes half-heartedly, pressing him for details, looking for something juicy that I can use. It’s got to drive fans wild without undermining Tattoo Thief, but I’m at a loss for how to do that.

“Tell me about your songwriting process.” That starts Tyler on a more productive path. He acknowledges the influence of Lulu Stirling, Gavin’s late muse, but now that Gavin’s given an interview about her death it’s no longer news. The fans want something fresh—they want a taste of what’s next.

I sit on the stool by the drum set and take page after page of notes while Tyler talks about how he found Gavin busking on a street corner and convinced him to join the band, and how they signed their first record deal after four years of playing together.

Now the band’s been together more than seven years and Tyler says they’re like brothers.

“Brothers fight sometimes. Do you guys ever fight?”

“All the time.” Tyler laughs.

“About what?”

“You know—band stuff. The direction of a song. Set lists. What shows we’re playing. But that’s cool. We handle it with majority rule.”

“What if you’re deadlocked two to two?”

“Eh, flip a coin.” Tyler shrugs, unwilling to dish me drama.

I frown. Another dead end.

Tyler picks up his electric bass, plucks a few bluesy chords, and explains that a lot of his solo practice involves anchoring his hand behind the fretboard and making his fingers stretch for the right chords.

“If your hand’s not sliding around, you make fewer mistakes,” he says. He lays several tricky chords down on top of each other and they’re glorious.

“It’s not a song yet.” Tyler shrugs. “But I have an idea for where it might go.”

This is cool. I’m learning. I ask him about the future.

That’s where Tyler balks.

“I can’t predict that, Stella. Who knows where we’ll go next? But what I do know is that we’re more solid and healthier that we’ve been in a long time. Lulu’s death was a tragedy, but it was also a gift. It brought back our perspective, which has gone pretty haywire in the past year.”

“How has your perspective changed?”

“I think we’re different people now that we’ve been through all of that. Gavin especially, but all of us. It made us wake up and realize what’s important.”

“And what’s important to you?”

Tyler thinks, really thinks, before he answers. “My family—my mom and my band mates. I like that the band’s had success, and making it was always really important to me…”

He trails off, so I supply the “But?”

“But the price is really high. There’s not much privacy, and no margin for error.” Tyler looks haunted, like some unknown demon is pecking at his flesh. It makes part of me want to hold and comfort him, but the reporter in me pushes that girl out of the way and presses the issue.

“Error? Like what?”

Tyler sighs heavily and sets his guitar back on its stand. “It’s hard to know who to trust. When you get success, it paints a giant target on your chest. Everyone wants something.”

I stop taking notes. Does Tyler trust me? After what I’ve done to Beryl, I doubt it, so I change the subject.

“Why do you have all the tattoos? Are you just cultivating a bad-boy image or do they mean something?”

Tyler grins.
This
is something he wants to talk about. He squats close to the drum set stool to give me a closer look at his long, muscled arms.

“They all mean something,” he says. “They’re not about being a rebel, they’re about my history.”

I shudder. My history is not something I want to remember, much less ink into my skin. On one of his forearms I see a raven, a fingerprint, twined bass and treble clefs, and a handful of snowflakes. Tyler shows me his other arm and explains a stylized compass rose—he and two friends got lost on a hike and spent an unexpected night in the woods.

“It’s like wearing your heart on your sleeve,” he says. “This one’s my favorite.” He pulls his T-shirt to the top of his shoulder and points to a retro sailor tattoo, complete with an anchor, a heart, and a scroll that says
Mom
.

The vodka makes me brave and I run my finger over the anchor. His skin is hot and electricity zips up my arm. His coffee-brown eyes darken and I swear he felt that current, too.

“How—how many do you have?” I stutter.

“Nine.”

“Can I see more?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” His grin is rakish and tempting.

“I don’t have any.”

“Yet?” Tyler cocks his brow.

“I don’t want to
wear
my mistakes. When I get a tattoo, I want it to be about the future.”

“See? You said
when
, not
if
. You’ll get one. Then you can show me yours and I’ll show you the rest of mine.”

Unnnh
. My mouth goes dry. Is he flirting?

“In one interview, Gavin said you copied someone’s tattoo.”

Tyler frowns. “It’s the only tattoo I regret. I was trying to be tough, you know, when I started the band. Gavin and Dave and Jayce were cool. They had game. They had girlfriends, even when we weren’t famous. I could barely talk to girls.”

My heart warms to the idea of this deliciously muscled man in front of me squirming and striking out with the ladies. “So you decided to get a tattoo?”

“Yeah. There was this guy—he was a senior and I was a freshman in college—and he had this gun on his arm. I thought it looked edgy. So I got one, too, but when he saw mine, he got all pissed that I copied him. A few nights later he spray-painted
TATTOO THIEF
across my mom’s garage door.”

My eyes widen. This isn’t a story I’ve heard before. I scramble to jot down details in the notebook I’d forgotten in my lap, but Tyler touches my wrist lightly. “Can we keep that part off the record?”

I know this bargain: either he’ll tell me more and I can’t write about it, or he won’t tell me. My insides are at war—I
love
this detail, but I have plenty of other stuff for my story. My curiosity wins.

“OK. So what did you do?”

“My mom came home, and I was freaking out she’d be angry. But she said, ‘Tattoo Thief? That’s a cool name for a band.’ And it stuck.”

I hoot with laughter.
“What?
Your mom wasn’t pissed about the spray paint?”

“She was at first, but she told me later she wanted me to repaint the garage doors anyway. Gavin begged her to let it stay, like advertising, so she did for almost a year.”

“Your mom is cool.”

“Seriously.”

***

I want to ask Tyler more questions but my bladder won’t allow it, so I excuse myself to the bathroom. My jaw drops when I enter—twin basin sinks rest above a poured-concrete counter and the glass-walled shower enclosure is bigger than Neil’s whole bathroom. There’s even a heated towel bar. This is
sweet.

I finish in the bathroom and do another quick shot in the kitchen. I cross what feels like miles of wood floor to join Tyler on the couches. It only takes me a moment to decide to sit on the same couch he’s on.

“What’s with the bathroom?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s, um, ridiculously nice.”

Tyler chuckles. “I know I went overboard. We’d just got our first big royalties and I really had no business spending that kind of money.”

“What pushed you over the edge?”

“I got sick of short showers. Seriously. I grew up in a house where the showerhead barely reached my shoulder blades and I had to duck my head every time I washed my hair. And the apartment in Brooklyn was worse, because it had practically no water pressure.”

I giggle and stretch out my feet, wincing because I can still feel the abuse I put them through today. “How tall are you?”

Tyler sees my grimace and grabs my feet before I can stop him, pulling them into his lap and easing off my shoes. This is horrifying. My feet probably reek and most of my bright orange toenail polish has chipped off.

Tyler’s looking too closely at my toes and I want to recoil. “Six-three-ish,” he says absently. “You?”

“Me what?”

“How tall are you?”

“That doesn’t matter. I’m not famous.”

“It’s still a question. How tall are you
without
these shoes?” Tyler presses his thumb against the ball of my foot and I’m in ecstasy.

“Five-two-ish.”

“That sounds like it’s maybe not quite the whole truth.”

I duck my head. “I’m allowed an ish if you are. Does that mean you’re a little taller than six-three?”

“Maybe. Maybe closer to six-four. But I’ll never admit it. It sounds too freakish. In high school, I looked like a flagpole, because I grew really fast but I was only a hundred and twenty pounds. I was
scrawny
.”

“I find that hard to imagine,” I say, appreciating his lean, muscular body as I relax into the arm of the couch.

Tyler’s long, magical fingers stroke my gross feet. I can’t believe I’m letting him do this. I should straighten up and grill him about something else important for my story, but the motivation has left me.

“It’s true. My body only caught up to my frame in the last year or so.”

“Is that why you have all the weights?” I watch his tattoos dance on strong arms as he kneads my feet.

“Dave makes us work out after band practice to blow off steam. Most bands just drink or get high.”

“Working out doesn’t hurt your record sales, either. All that muscle on display.”

“Mmmn, no. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a motivator.” Tyler pushes back the dark brown hair that’s flopped forward on his face. “So why orange?”

“Huh?” The non sequitur snaps me out of the drowsy place I was sinking into, courtesy of the squishy couch and the vodka. I need more vodka.

“Why orange? On your toes?”

I shake my head to clear the cobwebs from my mind. “It’s my favorite color.” Also, that’s the only color of polish I can find among my stuff right now and I can’t afford a new pedicure. I hope the rest of my nail polish ended up in one of the boxes Blayde packed when he threw me out of his place last month. Sooner or later, I’m going to get them out of storage and into a real apartment.

Tyler hits a sensitive spot on my instep and I moan involuntarily. Oops. His expression sharpens and his hands still, but they don’t release my feet in his lap. His hand caresses my calf and I don’t know what to make of it—is he interested? Is he exploring?