Carefully, I avoided letting my gaze drift to my fresh ink until I was fully in position, ready to take it all in at once.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, once I finally let myself look at it.
The rose was…gone.
I stepped even closer to the mirror, as close as I could get without going through the damn wall. You’d think that, having had something on your body for a decade, you’d be able to find it easily, no matter what.
But… no.
Logically, I knew it lay underneath all the fresh ink Tristan had just applied, but from what my eyes were telling me, based on what I could clearly see in the mirror… it wasn’t there anymore.
I was as free as the wild fringes of the storm he’d set against the backdrop of a beautifully setting sun – fiery reds and golds breaking through the swirled black and gray accumulations of angry clouds. He’d used negative space, and that painful white ink to create fractured lighting bursts, juxtaposing that destruction against the peace of the sun as it disappeared behind much quieter clouds.
“It’s exquisite,” I whispered, wanting to touch it, but not daring to disturb it, even though I knew how ridiculous a thought that was.
Just in case, though.
“You’re happy with it?” Tristan asked, and I blinked hard, trying to fight back the sudden, unexpected surge of emotion.
I nodded. “Yeah.” I cleared my throat, then looked at him in the mirror, not realizing until that moment how close to me he was. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Ms. Not Interested,” he teased, breaking the unexpectedly thick tension in the room. “Seriously though… never seen you around here before. You from the city or something?”
“The city?”
“Blackwood,” he said, doing that thing again where he gestured in some nebulous direction like I was supposed to know what that meant.
I did, however, know I wasn’t from Blackwood, which was adjacent to the Heights – the neighborhood that had been my destination in the first place, by recommendation of my mentor.
“No,” I answered, but didn’t offer anything else, which made Tristan’s smile even broader.
“You’re really committed to this mysterious shit, huh?”
I returned his grin as I carefully fixed my shirt, taking pains not to disrupt the plastic covering my tattoo. “Yep. How do I settle up my bill? With you, or at the desk?”
“The desk,” he answered, tipping his head in that direction. “Pri will get you squared away, and give you a kit with some aftercare information, products, all that.”
“Nice. Well… thank you, again, for making the time. And for swooping in the other night, although I could’ve definitely handle it myself.”
He shrugged. “You shouldn’t have to handle it yourself. Shouldn’t have been shit to handle, really, but… such is life, right?” he asked, carefully peeling his gloves off to dispose. “In any case, I was doing my job. On both counts.”
“Too many people don’t do their jobs for that to go unappreciated, so again… thank you.”
This time, he nodded. “You’re welcome, swee—Tempest,” he remembered, grinning. “Will you at least tell me if I’ll see you around?”
Instead of a direct answer, I hiked my shoulders as I moved toward the open doorframe, knowing now that it was definitely time to move on.
“Maybe.”
Rain messed up my people watching.
Instead of congregating on the sidewalks and restaurant patios, everybody was driven inside, traveling in cars or under umbrellas, protecting themselves from the late spring downpour.
For three damn days.
Finally, sheer boredom drove me downstairs to the abandoned candle shop I’d been largely ignoring, mostly because it confused me.
What was the point of a whole shop for candles?
It struck me as kinda creepy, honestly.
From the front-facing store portion with all the half empty shelves and dust-covered merchandise wallowing in what seemed to be signature black jars, to the deserted workshop in the back.
There were boxes and boxes of the same jars from the front – empty, of course. Dozens of cartons filled with soy wax that was probably expired, fragrance oils well past the “use by” dates printed on the bottoms.
But, even in all its abandoned eeriness… it was kinda intriguing, too.
I opened all the scent oils, breathing them in and almost knocking myself out with the stench of several that had gone putrid. Looked in all the wax cartons, noting how the color of the wax seemed to correlate with expiration dates long passed. I examined the jars of different sizes and shapes, wrestled with spools of candle wick molded together with age. Wondered over what all the different accessories and tools