Page 12 of Silent Is The Heart

I never miss a chance to call him out when he gets lazy with the speakage. He’s the one who taught me ASL, after all.

Shoving at my chest, he snickers. I shove back, but we give up our playful wrestling within thirty seconds. He’s too eager to return to packing this damn brag box for our festival appearance. Freaking Wolf. Total softy.

Sighing, I step out of the closet and back into our office. He doesn’t need my help. He can totally handle being an idiot all by his lonesome.

Dropping into my chair, I kick my booted feet up on my desk and tug at a snarled string hanging from the rip in the knee of my jeans. It’s humid as shit today. I can feel it in my leg. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it’ll rain tomorrow for this festival. Anything to get out of the four-hour shift Wolf made me swear to work would be fine by me. I don’t feel like sweating my ass off under a tent while listening to people probe their partners over what tiny butterfly would look good and where they should put it ontheir bodies. Or the inked people who ask a million questions about designs and costs, want you to sketch something custom for them, and then come up with some story about how they need to think about it or save up to pay for it down the road. People who really want a tattoo come to us. Plain and simple. We don’t need to make fools of ourselves at the last hurrah of the fall festivals to drum up more business. We’re doing perfectly fine. Our business account and the safe that’s chock-full of emergency money in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet say so.

Wolf wants to become a chain, though. I don’t doubt that he’d shit himself if we were offered some reality TV show either. Anything to embarrass us. I know he inks for the love of it like I do, but he’s more ambitious than me; like he always has something to prove. I have nothing to prove to anyone and am perfectly content living my best life as it is.

Except my mood seems to be teetering now. Freaking Wolf. His talk of the past dug up more than just memories of fixing up that motorcycle Jasper helped us with. It hasn’t escaped me that Nancy’s been gone for a year next week.

If someone had told me years ago that I’d get attached to a foster parent, I’d have told them to keep dreaming. I can’t deny it, though—she was one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. Okay, maybe not totally cool. Her obsession withBeanie Babieswas not healthy, but she was always behind me a hundred and ten percent, and she always kept her word. Those are rare qualities in a person.

When I told her I had no intention of picking back up at some new high school after I got out of Hampton, she got me a tutor for my GED. When I asked to borrow one of her cars so I could get a job, she obliged and circled every want ad shethought I’d be interested in. In the end, I wound up finding work cleaning Jasper’s shop, which was like not having a real boss at all because I already knew him as Nancy's neighbor. It was perfect. Wolf attended his tattoo school program during the day while I went to some art classes at the local college that Nancy had recommended. At night, we hung out in Jasper's motorcycle repair shop where I slowly picked up ASL from him. We worked and learned about bikes from Jasper until we found jobs interning under the old owner of our tattoo shop.

Nancy cheered me on even though I wasn’t going for an art degree or to become a mechanic. She never pushed and never set goals for me. I think she knew from the get-go that I wasn’t the kind of kid who vied to fulfill goals set by other people. Maybe it worked, simply because she knew I was no longer a kid, even though, technically, at seventeen, I still was.

How lucky was I that Jasper was her neighbor? If he wasn't, I may have never met Wolf that first summer when I saw him over there working on that bike. The only way things could have been better was if Nancy and Jasper had gotten together. We would have been this eccentric little found family. It wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t into men.

‘Promise you won’t spend time crying over me,’she demanded at one of her chemo treatments. ‘I’ll beat this. I’m a tough old broad.’

Not tough enough, apparently.

She kept all her promises, except that one. I can’t begrudge her for dying. When I think about what she did, sometimes it makes it difficult to keep my promise. The zany broad, leaving me all that money. I know she’d be stoked that I was ableto buy this place with Wolf because of it, but still—I never imagined she’d leave me something.

Laughing, I can still recall her cringing whenever she’d come in and watch me ink someone back when we were just renting the place. Tough my ass. How can you go through chemo and be afraid of tattoos? I’ll never understand her. I guess I don’t really have to. She didn’t try to understand me. She just let me be who I was. That’s more than I can say for most people who came before her in my life.

Listen to me. Freaking Wolf dragging me down memory lane.

I’d better either get off or get drunk before I have to deal with this shit show tomorrow. It’s the only hope I have of surviving it.

Digging out my phone, I creep through the social media profile of a guy who’s been eye-fucking me the last few times I’ve been at Pulse. I put him on my mental list of options. It’s not my fault he has to wait in line, but I scroll, considering moving his number up the list of hopefuls who’ve hit on me at the club.

Blond. Full lips. An eagerness to please in his eyes. Totally a bottom. Yeah. He’ll do.

A snort tears my eyes from my screen.

“Really?” Wolf asks in his mottled tone. “Dude, it’s only five o’clock, and we have shit to do tomorrow.”

“Andwe’re young and healthy,” I digress, getting up and grabbing my keys.

His eyes grow wary, and he shakes his head. “No, man. Come on.”

“We’ll grab dinner first.”

Wolf’s weakness is the home cooking he never received from his mother when he was a kid. I can see him wavering, deliberating, but then his mouth sets in a firm line.

“No. Melissa wants to spend time together tonight.”

“Fine. Bring her along.” I shrug, heading to the door that leads to the studio.

“Not that kind of time,” he protests. “Alonetime. She wants a romantic evening at home.”

His phone dings just as he says it. Judging by the sappy grin on his face when I turn back around, I know who it is.

Ugh. Him and Melissa. Two years I’ve put up with them, attached at the freaking hip. I’ve suffered through every conversation about possible themes for their potential wedding, the names of their future children, and countless arguments over the dumbest shit known to man. They can detach themselves from paradise for one evening to help me get laid.

“Come on. You owe me for this festival. Tell her you’ll blow her mind later.”

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