Everlasting - Christine Michelle Page 0,53
them a squeeze. “You know, Moo Juice, for Archer?”
“Oh my God! You did not just do that, you dirty little bitch!” Erin squealed out amidst her laughter.
I just shook my head at my sister. “Not you too!” The groan that followed my complaint reverberated through my body. The men at the club had nothing but jokes about my milky tits and now my sister was adding to that. Jesus. I really needed to think about a breast reduction when I was done being an all-you-can-eat buffet for my son.
“There’s plenty of breast milk in the fridge,” I told my sister before I rolled my eyes at her and walked away.
“Well, that went better than expected,” I heard Erin say to Anna. “Now, tell me everything.” I wasn’t even mad that they were about to talk about my life behind my back. I knew it was all in love and that Erin just needed to be filled in on the details so that she knew how to handle me throughout the day. I loved my girls. The one thing I never had to fear was not having someone to take my back when shit got real. I’d been there once before where the only people I could rely on had been Erin and my mom. Now, I had more people added to that list and it felt nice to know that I wasn’t alone. They all managed to help, even on the days when all I felt was lonely because I was missing my husband.
It didn’t take too long to get dressed and for us to drive over to the studio. What surprised me, when we got there, was that Gretchen was seated in a chair about to get some work done. Despite working in a tattoo studio and having a husband who was an award-winning tattoo artist, Gretchen didn’t have a whole lot of ink on her. “What’s going on?”
“Hey, Ever!” Sarah remarked as I stood there watching her apply the transfer to Gretchen’s shoulder blade area.
“Sarah,” I called back in greeting. Sarah Pienaar was the woman who had taken over a lot of my work when I had to lessen my hours at the shop after Deck went missing. She was originally from South Africa, though her mom was of mixed heritage, stemming from both France and South Africa. Sarah’s father had been a mix of African, Hispanic, and something else. She was never certain though because her father died before she was born, and his family refused to claim her and cut all ties with her mother after the incident. When we had talked about it before, Sarah had joked that she just claimed a little of everything thanks to her parentage and the little bit of mystery surrounding her father’s background.
I leaned over and took a look at the transfer Sarah had applied. “Oh, wow! That is going to be amazing. I want to see immediately when it’s done.”
“Why don’t you guys just hang out and watch then. You can keep me company. I hate going under the needle,” Gretchen whined.
Sarah smacked Gretchen’s ass and laughed at her. “Going under the needle,” she repeated as she chuckled. “You make it sound like you’re going into surgery.”
“You are, in fact, altering my appearance with a needle, so I think it’s a perfect description.”
“So, what does all of it mean? I assume if you don’t actually like getting tattoos, that this has to mean something to you.” Erin’s question and her reasoning for it brought me up short. She was right about all of that, which made me wonder how far off my game I was because that was something I usually tried to puzzle out when I first saw people’s ink.
“Well, the cherry blossom tree is to represent my journey in life. The two King cards are pretty self-explanatory, I think.”
Erin nodded her head. There was one for Toby and the other for Kane. I could have hugged her right then for not leaving Toby out of her journey, but that wasn’t necessary. Gretchen may have moved on after my brother’s death, and rightfully so, but she had never forgotten him. I had to hand it to Kane, because he made sure that Toby was never forgotten too. Each playing card dangled from a branch on either side of the tree. Then, right in the middle of the trunk of the tree there were two angels and one set of angel’s wings carved into the wood.
“The angels are