Page 62 of Cross To Bear

“Most of them? Just a tattoo from someone who isn’t going to try and molest them. Someone who does good work and keeps a clean studio. There’s a big difference between a client and a groupie.”

“Is that what she was? A groupie?”

I grabbed at that term, wanting to pore over it, understand it.

“That’s what we call them. It’s not a kind term, but some girls…” He looked around him, straightening up and raking his hands through his hair. “They get off on it all. It’s like the studio becomes a scene, one I didn’t consent to join, and they use you to get off in a way that I don’t enjoy.”

“And how do you tell the difference between one woman or another? Which one is a groupie and which one is just a girl wanting a tattoo?” He didn’t answer, not as I slid my ankles either side of the tattoo bench. Bjorn watched the dress hike up over my knees like all the world’s secrets were contained there. “How do you know?”

I stopped moving, waiting for him to answer and he flushed then and shook his head.

“We should go to brunch. If we don’t leave now, we’ll miss our reservation.”

“We could go through a drive-through at Macca’s afterwards for all I care,” I replied, because it was now that it rose: a sense of possessiveness, raging hot and wild, a need to drive Tiffany out and to replace her with me. It didn’t make sense and wasn’t even fair. A girl could shoot her shot, especially with a guy who was still unattached…

My mind stumbled on that adjective, as if it was a shoe that didn’t fit, but I was still persisting—trying to shove it on his foot. That resulted in me glaring at him, as if it were Bjorn’s fault.

And it wasn’t.

I was making this more complicated than it needed. I could go with him, have breakfast and a nice lazy morning, before staggering home for a nice nanna nap. There was no need for any of this. But my heart beat too fast in my chest, unable to exorcise the image of Tiffany sprawled across the bench from my mind. She wasn’t to blame. He was hot and so was she, so it made sense she’d make a play for him. What was important was that he’d made clear that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with him.

But hearts don’t make sense and neither do brains sometimes.

“Show me,” I insisted. “Show me how it goes. How a tattoo consultation turns into something else. Show me that.”

He reared back, red spots forming in his cheeks, and for a moment, I thought I had him running scared. Part of me wanted that and part of me didn’t. What I didn’t expect was for him to stab his finger in my direction.

“Stay right there.”

He swept out of the room, the thump of the studio door then the click of the lock on the front one made me jump, but not more than this.

“You want to know?” he demanded, his tone of voice making me shrink back against the bench. Rather than throw himself at me, he grabbed up a sketchbook and a pencil. “So…” He peered at the blank page. “Maddie, was it? What did you want to get done today?”

Chapter 36

Bjorn

What the fuck did Maddie want from me? I asked that most days, but today… I gripped the pencil so damn hard. Harder when I smelled the stink of fear, though she wanted to play this game, so I was determined to play it to the end.

“You’ve got an hour’s session booked,” I said in my coolest, most professional voice. “But unless it’s a piece off the walls”—I pointed to the framed flash art hanging up around us—“it’s gonna take some time to design as well as apply, so…?”

Because that’s what she needed to understand. I wasn’t like the other dickheads she’d settled for. I did my job well. I kept my hands to myself and I thought about her, a lot, and not necessarily in that order. My thumb rubbed the gold lettering embossed into the side of the pencil, consciously loosening my grip.

Maddie needed reassurance. She’d come in here smelling sweet, but that had soured the moment she saw What’s Her Name, and Mongrel and I were going to have a very frank conversation at his earliest possible convenience. We all lived in a semi-symbiotic relationship, the MCs, the bike shop, the bar and the tattoo studio. They sent business our way, put coin in our bank accounts and we tried to accommodate them in ways human run establishments might not. I would burn every petty alliance we’d forged if it meant that Maddie was happy.

“No,” she said, her chin tilting upwards. “I want something you designed yourself. Something small.” Her focus shifted around the room. “Somewhere private. I’m an accountant. Having tattoos openly displayed in the office wouldn’t go down well.”

“Private, small…” I noted this down in the corner of my sketchbook. “Got it. So that covers placement and scale, but it doesn’t tell me what you want in the design.” I smiled, that small reassuring one I used with nervous customers. At least I think it was reassuring. “If you give me some parameters—”

“You choose.” She said it so boldly, with an air of challenge. “I want you to choose what you mark me with.”

Fuck…

Beyond the whole mating mark thing, this was my deepest innermost fantasy. When I was bored or business was slow, I went to a place just like this, where Maddie was on my bench and I was given carte blanche to tattoo her how I saw fit. Right now, I had to wonder if she’d worked that out. There was no evidence of that in her eyes, so my pencil moved of its own accord, not to draw the design that was kept locked away in my desk, in a drawer no one else touched. Instead just this.

A simple silhouette of a bear.

It wasn’t much of a tattoo, but this wasn’t real. We were just playing a game, exploring something we couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about, so I went along with it. I drew him tiny, little more than the size of my smallest fingernail, a design that would only take minutes to do. Not that I actually would tattoo her with it. This was enough to fulfil her demands.

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