Page 36 of Dirty Ink

“Sixty.”

I snorted and turned to leave. “Nice try, asshole.”

“We’ll get you a robe,” Mason shouted after me.

I turned back again. Damn me, I didn’t keep walking. His eyes were on my body. Trailing up. Trailing down.

“Yeah,” he said, licking his lips. “Something silky. Something that falls open a bit when you run in here with that wild hair of yours. Give the girls a little peek on the way out.”

“Why exactly?” I asked when I absolutely shouldn’t have.

Mason inhaled and exhaled slowly.

“Because it’s better that way,” he said, eyes locked on mine. “The sex, I mean.”

I just stared at him, not understanding. He grinned and explained, “When they know I’m used to a much hotter woman. Girls will do the craziest shite when they’re overcompensating.”

I rolled my eyes and this time I left. Slammed the door behind me. Stormed down the hall. Slammed my door.

But he’d gotten to me. Mason, that fucker. He’d gotten to me.

The bedsheets weren’t silk, but they felt like it as I squirmed to get comfortable. Nobody was there to see my nipples. Not some chick. Not Mason. But they were hard like they were. Like they’d slipped from a silk robe. Like the town of Dublin would hear all about them. And say, “Good lord almighty, Mason’s wife’s tits…”

Like this was all real.

Which it wasn’t.

It wasn’t…

Mason

Conor, Rian, and I all had our different styles of tattoo. Conor was all black and white and symbolism and pain here and more pain. Rian was our experimental guy: any and all styles were welcome. And encouraged.

Me, I liked big and bold. The bigger, the bolder, the better.

We also, the three of us, had different ways that we worked on our different styles. Conor worked best with churning grey clouds and a bottle of whiskey. He liked peace and quiet because there was more than enough shouting in his head, I was sure of that.

A tornado could have been sweeping through Dublin and if Rian was drawing (or even just staring at the wall) he wouldn’t notice. Not even as he was lifted up from his drafting desk stool and carried away to Oz itself.

And then there was me. I was the distractable one. I got most of my best work done in the middle of the night in bed because there was no one around. Not many sounds. And little to vie for my attention.

I say all this to explain why later that day, as I was supposed to be sketching out a design for a new client, I was really watching the boys eye each other across the studio, straining to hear what they were whispering in the kitchen over tea that I was not invited to, trying to figure out what the fuck was up with them. By mid-afternoon I had gotten no work done and was going insane.

“Alright,” I said at last, throwing down my unused pencil, “someone spill it.”

Conor sipped at his whiskey and glanced over at Rian, who was pretending—badly—

to be engrossed in his half-finished painting of a young woman with dark hair and striking eyes; when Rian was really painting he looked lost, like a little kid, wide-eyed and distant. Even Aurnia ducked out of the room under the excuse of “emptying the trash”, something she despised doing now that she was a tattoo artist “like us”.

“Well?” I said. “Did someone die or what?”

“Oh God, I hope not,” Rian said to the ceiling.

“And that means?” I pressed irritably.

Conor cleared his throat and set down his glass. A second later he picked it back up and drained it in one go. “Look, Mason, it’s just…we’re a little…worried is all.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Worried?”

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