Page 5 of Fox
Do I kill her? I mean, I understand how one might think that murder is a little extreme. Hell, usually, I would be the guy who says that there might be a better way. But right now, at this moment, this woman holds my dream and my future in her freckled hands, much like a baby bird. And she is strangling my bird to death.
I let out a small, stunned laugh while staring at her in disbelief. “Janie, you told me this shop was mine. I have texts to—”
“I’m well aware of what I said, Simmons. Believe it or not, I don’t require you or any man to explain anything to me.”
“Then what the fuck!” I snap, slamming my fist on the table. “What? You aren’t selling? You’re just going to set fire to the place your dad and all of us artists poured our hearts and souls into? God, you’re even more selfish than I—”
She holds her hand up, silencing me once again. Her eyes trail down to her nails and she winces before showing them to me. “Red nails, and I wore a green shirt. It’s summer, Janie. What the hell, right?”
Yeah, I’m going to have to kill her.
TWO
janie
Iswear to god, I will die with this smirk plastered on my face. And to think, I almost completely lost out on this absolute high by just signing my rights away. Going into that conference room this morning, I was ready to give my father’s tattoo shop to Fox and wash my hands of everything. I mean, I still will, but he doesn’t need to know that just yet. First, Fox is going to have to suffer if he wants my signature. He has no idea I overheard the conversation between him, Frank, and Atlas before the meeting. My boyfriend had called me—a complete rarity—so I assumed something had happened and excused myself to the call. On the way back into the room, I heard them laughing about me, so I hid behind a wall and listened to their comments.
I would be lying if I said they didn’t hurt. Not because I thought those guys were my friends. I rarely ever spoke to them, and when I did, it was barely more than ahior a grunt. It hurts because I’ve always felt like everyone saw me as some dimwitted content creator, and until now, I’ve never had any proof of it. And it sucked, mainly because my dad was just like those guys: big, tattooed, temperamental, and tough. Hearing them confirmit makes me wonder, if Fox and Atlas think I’m some selfish idiot, did my dad believe that as well?
I know what people see when they first meet or find me online. I’ve been in the influencing world since the early days when social media first blew up. It’s easy to look at my content and read me like a dating profile.
Jai
25 years old - Leo
5’3” Slim build, minus the boobs
unmanageable red hair and blue eyes.
The rest doesn’t matter.What do I like?Easy, whatever’s currently trending.My dislikes?Whatever’s currently trending.
Most would define my job as a content creator or influencer—fancy words for dancing on apps for likes and promoting products to my followers. What I genuinely like or enjoy is private and irrelevant; it always has been. My dreams, ambitions, and goals have always been on the back burner because it’s not trending or because of that shop. The shop is my dad’s favorite child, the sibling I can never measure up to. Whatever my wants or needs were, the shop came first.
My dad isn’t,wasn’t, a bad father, and I’ll take on anyone who dares to speak of him in a negative light. My mother died while giving birth to me, leaving him alone with a newborn. Having no family of his own and my mother’s side wanting nothing to do with a struggling tattoo artist who had a criminal record and a motorcycle ora baby that caused their daughter’s death, Dad took a risk and opened the shop within a few months of my birth. He used the tiny amount of money that his artist buddies had given him to help us financially and threw it at abroken-down shop so that he could continue to work and have me there.
I grew up there. Seven days a week, fourteen-plus hours a day from birth until I turned fifteen. At fifteen, I was the shop hand in the back. Always the back. I rarely ever saw the front of the shop because Dad said it wasn’t appropriate for a teenage girl to be running around in a shop full of strange, grown men. So, I stayed in the back, ensuring we had supplies, cleaning, restocking, and doing whatever else needed to be done, and eventually started my social media channel.
The channel originally started as a way for me to stop feeling so lonely. Friends have always been hard for me to come by. The kids in my school had parents who were doctors and lawyers, not tattoo artists. Besides that, unlike the other kids, I was expected to leave school and go straight to the shop to help clean and restock the supplies. But also so Dad didn’t have to worry about me.
Then there was the dating scene or lack thereof. I never had prospects for a boyfriend because my dad was massive; he rode a motorcycle and owned a shop full of other huge tattoo artists who would gladly beat or intimidate someone if he asked. So, safe to say, no one wanted to risk dating me.
When I was fifteen, my dad tattooed some actor who ended up landing their breakout role in a movie the next day, and the guy said later in an interview that my dad’s tattoo was his good luck charm. Seemingly overnight, the shop went from a decently busy, small tattoo shop to a fully booked place where the celebrities went to get their work done. I thought my dad was overworked in the shop before it blew up. But it was nothing compared to his obsession with his business after it blew up. It took less than a year for Hel’s Ink to go from a small local shop to a place where people would come from all over the world to get tattooed.
After the success started, he was rarely around. Constantly tattooing the rich and the famous at all hours of the day and night. Some weeks, he would sleep in the back of the shop because an A-lister would be booked to arrive at four in the morning.
At my sweet sixteen, I remember sitting at a reserved table at a new restaurant I’d been dying to try. It would just be me and him, and then he would take a vacation for a week, and he and I would go to Maine. I was so excited; I sat at that table in my special dress and birthday sash, waiting for him for three hours, but he didn’t make it. One of his clients went longer, he forgot, and no one at the shop told me, so I sat at the restaurant alone, looking like an idiot as I cried into my birthday cake.
After that, I rarely went to the shop. I made my dad let me stay home. I was sixteen, a brat, and, more importantly, I was mad at him. Until then, our relationship had been great. Even though I hated being at the shop all the time, I understood that it just was the way it was, and this is what family does. But it broke our bond when he forgot about me on my birthday.
That Halloween, I went viral for dressing up like an Irish princess from a kid’s movie. Once that happened, my social media persona, like Dad’s shop, became another monster whose needs had to be fed before mine. What I wanted, liked, and disliked could no longer matter to me. No one wants an authentic you one hundred percent of the time, regardless of what is shown on the internet. Instead, you become entertainment to the viewers and fake to the real world. You are a puppet, and your viewers hold the strings. You will do what they ask; if you don’t, you will become irrelevant. From the time I blew up until now, I have accumulated millions of followers, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I am lonelier now than ever.
Yawning,I slip my green pajama bottoms and black hoodie on after toweling off from my shower. Walking through my sparsely decorated apartment, I go to the kitchen and grab a drink. There are two options: a bottle of wine that some company sent me to express their bullshit sympathy for my dad’s passing or water. I’m not big on wine, but I also need to unwind. Grabbing the bottle, I snort at the note tied around the neck.
Jai-
Sorry for your loss. Hope you enjoy this. Our handle is @fitinflx.
Of course, they want a shoutout; it’s all anyone wants from me. Looking around my empty living room, I decide that lying in my bed will be far more comfortable than sitting out here. The number one question asked when I rarely, if ever, entertain here is ‘Oh, did you just move in?’
