kiss just below my ear before tightening his arms around me.
“You’re not drunk,” he said softly.
No, not on alcohol. Tipsy? Sure. But I was more drunk on all of them.
“Never have I ever been this happy,” I said when they cued up the movie and passed out the popcorn.
No one reached for their drinks, and I grinned before tucking my head against Coop’s shoulder. I thought the trip couldn’t get more perfect.
I was wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Happy Holidaze
The tattoo artist eyed all of us as we stood at the counter. Coop had a couple of sketches out, and Archie had some images up on his phone. Jake and Ian were studying the pics on the walls, and I was studying the layout of the shop. This place was by appointment only. You were supposed to do a consultation on one day and then come in on another to get the work done.
I didn’t want to ask how much money Archie had thrown at them to change the rules. He didn’t say a word about it either. It was just Archie. Always fixing things. But it was also Jake’s birthday, so I would not make a big deal out of it. As it was, I woke to Jake curled around me this morning and full of affection. Not sex, just cuddling and kissing and petting. It had been nice.
Sex would have been good, too, because apparently, I had an insatiable appetite for these four, and maybe it was a good thing I’d waited so long to discover this. I didn’t know how we would have managed before now.
A shiver raced up my spine at the very idea, and Jake slid his hand over my lower back, then around my middle before pulling me back against him. “Cold?” he murmured against my ear, and I snuggled into him. I’d had a coat on when we got here, but we’d all shed them inside the warmth of the shop.
“No,” I told him. “Not anymore.” He chuckled and tightened his arms around me as Archie and Coop glanced over at us in between their conversation with the artists.
“You guys going to jump in here?”
“I know what I want,” I told him. It had been simmering in the back of my mind for the last few days, ever since Jake and Coop brought up tattoos.
“Care to share?” Ian asked, and I stroked the back of Jake’s hand to get him to let me go. He still followed me over to the counter as I pulled out my phone.
“I want a combination style tattoo, if that’s okay.” I tabbed over to the pictures I’d saved. I’d spent some time skimming the web in between hangovers and drinking and edibles and making out. What did I do over my winter vacation?
Had a hell of a lot of fun.
The first image was a heart with an infinity symbol looped through it, and the second was a fancy block number with images inside of it. The artist leaned over my phone and then eyed me.
He wasn’t a bad looking guy, but I didn’t think there was an inch of skin on him that wasn’t decorated. It was beautiful in its own way, but really distracting because I wanted to study each piece and not stare at him at the same time. “Can you do this as a number five, then the infinity symbol weaved through it with their names on each loop?”
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” the guy said. “You want colors?”
“Or something prettier?” Jake asked carefully. When I glanced up, they wore varying looks of neutrality.
“I think this could be really pretty,” I argued, then glanced at the sketchpad the guy was drawing on. The lines he made were flowing, and curvy. The five was pretty.
“Names?”
He added them as I spelled them, and I kept it Ian and not Bubba. When he was done, he turned it around to show me, and I grinned. Simple. Elegant.
“What do you think?”
The guys stared at it a beat, and then Archie rubbed the back of his neck. “Tattooing our names is pretty permanent.”
“So is our friendship.”
No matter what else, I wasn’t giving them up. Even if I had to fight tooth and toenail to hang onto them in the long-term as friends, if we didn’t work out. But I wasn’t thinking about the future beyond that. We’d just decided that we were making this a real relationship—they were my boyfriends, and I was their girlfriend. The five of us.