Tattooed Troublemaker - Elise Faber Page 0,25

shadows. “Oh! I bet I could work their names into the petals, maybe into the design at their centers. Something small but in there so you’d know, even if no one else could see it—”

All of a sudden, I realized she wasn’t talking, wasn’t jumping into the conversation as a client typically would—though it wasn’t unheard of for me to get carried away and go off on a tangent.

But this wasn’t a client.

This was Charlie.

Who hadn’t asked me to design a tattoo for her.

Who was clearly hurting and heartbroken over what had happened to her and who—

Fuck.

I closed the cover on the notebook with a snap. “Never mind. I . . . um . . .”

She reached over, rested her palms gently on the backs of my hands. “Garret.” I glanced up, felt my lungs freeze when I saw the emotion on her face, blue eyes almost unfathomable as a mix of grief and joy tangled with pain and memories and love. She tugged the notebook out of my grip, gently opened the cover and turned the pages until she’d found the drawing I’d begun. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, tracing a finger lightly down the page. “Will you show me more?”

I nodded. “Is it—” I cleared my throat. “Will you tell me their names?”

“Helen and Steve.”

“Okay.” This time I placed my hand over hers. “You’re sure?”

She released a shuddering breath. “I’m sure.”

“Want to sit?” I said, gesturing toward the chair in my station. “That way you can tell me everything you don’t like about it.” I kept my tone light, wanting to take away the grief in her expression, to replace it with only levity.

Charlie turned to look at me. “I’m okay, Garret.”

She held my eyes for a long moment, long enough for me to understand that even though the pain was there, even though it would never fully go away, that she really was okay.

Then she slipped her hand free and smiled at me. “And you know I have absolutely no qualms about telling you what I don’t like, so no worries on that front.”

“My favorite part about you.”

Her breath hitched again, but this time her eyes were bright with laughter.

Get on with it, Thompson, I thought. Don’t make this weird.

Mentally nodding, I picked up my pencil and got back to work.

I don’t know how long I drew, how long I spent tweaking the image, adding a shadow here or there, subtracting a petal before putting it back, playing with the length of the stem and the placement of her parents’ names. I just put pencil to paper and worked, and when Charlie mentioned an idea, I didn’t hesitate. I drew it in, adjusted the scale, and made it work.

But she didn’t talk much, didn’t ask me to take off parts of the image.

She sat in the chair next to me, the smell of the tropics wafting over me, her hair occasionally brushing my arm as she leaned closer to see the smaller details I was drawing.

When I finally finished, I sat back and stretched my arms above my head, tilting my head from side to side, shaking the tightness from my fingers, rolling out the ache in my shoulders. Charlie had her gaze on the page, and she didn’t say anything for a long time. Eventually though, she looked up at me, and the intensity in her eyes took my breath away.

“Can you do it?” she asked.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

I nodded.

The shop had been closed before I’d even begun drawing. Tig had been the last one standing, his final appointment finished just a few minutes before mine. He’d been wiped, leaving everything that wasn’t critical to clean in his station for the following day. I hadn’t blamed him one bit. The client he’d been working on had annoyed the shit out of me, and they’d been all the way on the opposite side of the room.

Sometimes you got good ones. Sometimes you got bad ones.

Tig had gotten a bad one.

Anyway, he’d waved goodbye, eyes tired, brows creased, then had gotten the hell out of there.

Now, several hours had passed and it was fully dark outside, only the odd set of headlights illuminating the quiet sidewalk on the other side of the windows. And Charlie was in front of me, hope on her face, asking me to put my needle into her skin. Life was like that sometimes, huh? I could think I knew exactly where it was leading me, and then it took a sharp veering turn.

Like that morning and learning