want to scream into a microphone until my voice gives out.”
The fucking part—that was a pass. He liked sex, wanted sex. He’d had sex a couple of times, but it just…never felt right. But the rest? He rubbed at the blank skin on his forearm. “How bad does it hurt?”
Damien raised a brow, and it was there Adam saw the puckered scar where there had been a piercing. “Tattoos?”
“Yeah. Or—” He gestured toward Damien’s lower lip which sported a single, silver hoop in the corner.
Damien snorted. “What’s the worst pain you ever had?”
Adam’s cheeks went red-hot with fear because it was an easy question to answer, but a hard one to give to a total stranger. He rubbed at the side of his chest, an absent gesture that Damien didn’t miss. “I had a surgery. It had a fucking long recovery. It sucked.”
“Worth it?” Damien asked.
Adam had to nod—anything else would have been a lie.
“Tattoos are like that. And piercings. Hurts like a bitch, but it’s worth it if you want it bad enough.” Damien sucked his lip ring between his teeth, and Adam heard a clinking sound as he bit down. “You wanna come play with us sometime? We’re not much right now—keyboard and drums. I sing, and I’m alright on bass.”
Adam jolted. He hadn’t been expecting Damien to say that. “What uh…what sort of music do you play?”
“I like the real old school punk shit. You know, seventies basement DIY. I write my own songs, but we’re missing something.”
“A guitar?” Adam shot back, and Damien laughed. “I’m not great.”
“None of us are great. Being great isn’t the point, man.” Damien dug into his pocket and pulled out a palm-sized notebook with a pen tucked into the spine. He scribbled something on a page that was littered with stick-figure sketches lighting square cubes on fire. “We set up here, usually Wednesday and Friday nights around seven.”
He had work, but Adam knew instantly he’d blow it off for them—for all of it. He took the paper, then rubbed his arm again. “If I wanted some ink like that…”
“Come over early on Wednesday,” Damien said with a wink. “I’ll hook you up.”
It was a bad idea—hindsight would teach him that six weeks, lanced skin, and two rounds of antibiotics later. But that filthy scratcher tattoo that would be more scar than ink for the rest of his life started something big. It started something important.
Even when Stella’s phone call had him packing up and moving six hundred miles away from his band and home to give her support and babysit her kid, nothing really changed. He was who he was because of that moment, that handshake, that smile.
He still had his dark days, but none of them were filled with regret.
After he got home from the gym, Adam hopped in the shower, then strolled into the living room to find his niece with her feet tucked under the coffee table. She had a chocolate milk mustache and jam on her right cheek, and she gave him a toothy grin with her tiny teeth as he sank onto the sofa cushion behind her.
“Morning, Monster. What are you drawing?”
“Ummm… some dinner,” she said. The paper in front of her had a brown blob in what he guessed was meant to be a turkey shape, and then some red and blue squiggles in the background.
“Looks delicious. Where’s Momma?”
Evie shrugged and sighed. “Outside.”
He debated going out there after Stella, but before he could make up his mind, she walked in with a storm-cloud on her face. Her eyes zeroed in on him, and he knew what was coming before she asked it. Not so much a twin thing, either, but the fact that it had been happening like clockwork since he moved in.
“She’s busy again,” Stella mumbled.
“You know I don’t mind taking her to work with me,” Adam told his sister. “Just…it’s a weird place for a kid to hang out all day.”
“She likes it. There’s paint and markers everywhere,” Stella protested, and he knew her protests were to calm her own guilty conscience at the fact that she was sending her four-year-old daughter to hang out in a tattoo and piercing shop all day.
“Tattoo ink is not paint,” Adam reminded her, mostly for Evie’s sake, because the shit did not wash off, and after one unsupervised ten minutes and an entire dyed forearm, Stella was pissed for weeks. “Anyway, the guys love her, and it’s always slow as hell on Tuesdays. It’ll be fine.