Believe (True Believers #3)(41)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“It is. It will be.” He touched my chin with the latex glove he had pulled on. “Do you want to watch or close your eyes?”

“I want to watch.”

He laid the image onto my skin and rubbed, then pulled it off. The black outline of the bird was there, looking adorable. “He’s so cute.”

“Don’t say like me,” Phoenix said. “Because I won’t believe you. Okay, first touch. Take a deep breath and let it out. Relax.”

He bent over me, and the buzzing increased. I couldn’t help it, I let out a hiss at the first contact.

Holy shit. That hurt. It felt, well, like a needle being dragged through my flesh.

“You okay?”

“Yes?” I didn’t say that with a huge amount of conviction, but then I looked down and watched the black line tracing over the outline of the bird and I saw that he had already done one wing and the bottom. It clearly wasn’t going to take too long, so I could deal.

He wiped away the splatters. “I’ll go as fast as I can while still making it look good. Though it is distracting to be doing you . . . I’m not usually attracted to my clients.”

“Don’t make me laugh. I don’t want to move my arm. And you can be doing me later. It is your birthday, after all. You totally get birthday sex.”

He glanced up at me. “And today would be different from any other day, how? We have a lot of sex, babe, for which I’m very grateful.”

Hopefully no one in the shop was listening to this conversation. “But today you can put in any special requests you might have.”

“Oh, yeah? Anything goes? Or are there, you know, boundaries?” He wiped my arm and rolled a foot away on the chair, cleaning the needle to get the blue ink.

“No boundaries.”

His eyebrows shot up, disappearing under his hair. “Now that’s f**king hot.”

“No boundaries, unless you want a threesome or something. I’m not doing that.” I wasn’t sharing him.

Phoenix made a face that had me relieved. “Fuck no. Why would I want that? You’re everything I need and want. Though I would not say no to a strip tease and a lap dance combo, that’s for sure.”

All of a sudden I was feeling a hot rush of blood in my face, and I didn’t think it was from the pain. The thought of doing what he wanted made me super excited, but a little nervous, too. “I’m not a very good dancer.”

Phoenix glanced up at me. “Baby, that is not the point. Naked enthusiasm is all that’s required.”

“Oh. I can do that.”

He made a sound in the back of his throat. I watched the blue appearing on my skin, the sensation a sharp scraping, but I was thinking about sitting on Phoenix’s lap. It was a pleasant distraction. Did I have the guts to strip in front of him? It was his birthday. I had offered for his choice. And I was getting a tattoo, which proved I had some form of bravery in me, no matter how small.

I pictured the look on his face.

I could totally do this.

He wiped my wrist again and said, “All done. If I could, I’d kiss it better, but you’ll have to settle for me kissing you other places.”

My skin was stinging and red, but there was a perfect little bluebird on my wrist. My thoughts were torn from the image of him kissing me here and, uh, there by the sheer adorableness of the tattoo. “Oh, he’s awesome!”

“Is it a he?” Phoenix asked in amusement as he sprayed my wrist, then sat back and peeled off his gloves.

“Of course.” I held my wrist up and turned it around and around to admire it. “It’s supposed to have your energy and you are very masculine, in case you haven’t noticed. So weird that this wasn’t here ten minutes ago and now it will be forever. Sort of like how a month ago we didn’t know the other existed and now I can’t imagine life without you.”

Phoenix stood up and moved between my legs to kiss me. “There is no life without you,” he said.

Chapter Thirteen

Phoenix

Ten o’clock and nothing. No phone call, no text, nothing.

It was stupid, I knew that, to think that my mother would remember it was my birthday, let alone an important one like my twenty-first. Hell, she probably didn’t even know what day of the week it was. She probably didn’t even remember the exact date of my birthday.

Not hearing from her was no shocker.

Yet it still hurt.

Frustrated, I finished sweeping up the shop and waved to the guys, two still doing tattoos. Bob was letting me leave early since it was my birthday and I had Robin waiting at her place for me. It was only a fifteen-minute walk and I’d be with someone who did love me.

So why did I give a shit about the woman who didn’t love me?

Because I was a pu**y, apparently.

Feeling my mood darkening, I tried to shake it off, touching my side where my new tattoo stung. I decided to take the bandage off before I left and I peeled my shirt off and removed it, yanking hard on the edges, enjoying the sting as the tape tore at my skin. Not many people understood that I didn’t mind the pain from the needle during a tattoo. I kind of liked it. It made me feel sharp, alive.

Tossing the bandage, I ducked into Paul’s open cubicle to check out his work below my ribs. The skin was shiny and red and swollen, but damn, it was a f**king amazing tattoo. Robin stared back at me in the mirror, her eyes big and raw. It was a sketch I’d started the first day we’d spent together, at the park, while she had leaned on her arm and stared out across the grass to the fountain, lost in her thoughts. Then she had turned and glanced at me, and I had seen something even then that had told me there was a connection between us.

It had grown stronger and stronger and now she was with me all the time, literally and figuratively.

The placing of the tattoo was the opposite side from my bleeding heart tattoo, because I didn’t want them to be in the same line of view at the same time. Two different meanings. Two different women.

“You done admiring yourself?” Paul asked, bent over a girl’s rib cage.

It looked like she was getting a dream catcher tattoo, which seemed to be in the top five tattoos for girls eighteen to twenty-three. It rivaled flowers, stars, and hearts for first place. I wondered what nightmares pretty young girls had that they seemed to think they needed to tattoo on their bodies as a way to capture them. Or maybe they wanted to hold on to good dreams. Funny how I always went to nightmares.

“Not yet,” I told Paul. “Not to brag or anything, but this is a sick tattoo. I love it.”