Page 63 of London Inked Boys: The Complete Trilogy
I’m going to have to touch her, I know that. There’s no way I’m going to be able to tattoo her skin without placing my hands on her. Even though I wear gloves, I’ll still be able to feel her body heat through my fingertips, and I feel myself responding to the thought alone. Fucking hell, I can’t get turned on simply by thinking about touching her ankle. That’s insane. We aren’t living in Victorian times. But just being near her takes me back to being a teenager again, how obsessed I’d been with her. No, not obsessed. I’d been in love with her. A crazy, perfect love that had stemmed from two people knowing each other as deeply as they knew themselves, and who had grown up together to discover all the things that teenagers eventually learned about themselves.
We’d been each other’s first kiss at age eleven, both awkward and shy, telling each other that we were friends so this was the best way of getting it out of the way. That had been it for a longtime, but then we’d hit fourteen and a new kind of tension had sprung up between us. All it had taken was some stolen alcohol and a night sitting in a park, and that first kiss had become the first of too many to count. And how we’d kissed. We’d been able to kiss for hours without stopping for air, leaving us hot and panting, and me with an erection that sprung to attention at even the thought of Sophia.
And here I am now, ten years later, and it seems she still has exactly the same effect on me.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
I’ve just been standing here, staring at her ankle. Jesus. I need to get a grip on myself.
I clear my throat. “Yeah, just making sure I get the positioning right.”
She’s watching me, too—I can feel her gaze on my face, her pale-blue eyes exactly the same colour as I’ve always seen in my dreams.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” she says, as though plucking the thoughts from my head. “Seeing each other like this again.”
I nod. “I’m not sure my brain has processed it. I feel like I’ve jumped back in time.”
“Like a wormhole opened up in the studio and we both dropped through it.”
I grin. “Exactly.”
“I missed you, you know,” she says softly. “I’m sorry I ghosted you, and that I didn’t come back.”
I turn my face to look at her. “Why didn’t you?”
“It was complicated. We were young.”
“I worried about you, for a really long time. And then I got angry.”
She glances away. “I can understand that. I’m sorry, Ri—Rocco.”
I note how she’d gone to call me my old name—the name I shared with my father and that I no longer use—but she’d stopped herself in time.
I shrug, trying to appear nonchalant. “It was a long time ago now.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “It was.”
It’s impossible for me to explain to her how much I’d hurt all those years ago. How abandoned I’d felt, how I’d tortured myself with the idea of her having found someone else, and that was why she’d ghosted me.
That night, when she’d run over to my house in tears to tell me she was leaving, I’d wanted more than anything to tell her she should stay with me, to ask her to come and live with me rather than leave with her parents, but how could I? My dad was a drinker and my only parent, and I didn’t want anyone else to see that. My dad wasn’t a bad man, but when he’d had too many, he shouted and had tried to take a few swipes at me. I had been as big as him by that point, and had held him off, but I had no intention of exposing Sophia to that. Not my Sophia. Not the girl who was sunshine and light and everything good in the world. I didn’t even want her to know that such behaviour existed. Her parents had always seemed so perfect to me—a mother who stayed at home to take care of Sophia, and a father with a respectable job. My family of two people had been quite the opposite. If I’d been able to see into the future, however, and had known saying goodbye to her that evening would have been the last time I’d see her in ten years, I would have done things differently. Every day that went by where I hadn’t heard from her, I’d wished I’d just grabbed her and told her we were leaving, together.
Still lost in memories, I do my best to focus on the reason she’d come here—for a tattoo. I put the transfer onto her skin and then get the ink ready.
She lies back on the bed, and it’s all I can do to stop myself covering her body with mine, kissing her beautiful mouth and lacing my fingers in her gorgeous red hair, just like I’d done all those years ago. But she isn’t a seventeen-year-old girl who’s madly in love with me anymore. She’s a woman, who, for all I know, is married with children by now.
“Just shout out if you want to stop,” I tell her. “It shouldn’t take long. The outline is always the worst—especially on the ankle.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Is she feeling the same way as me? Is she conscious of my fingers pressed against her skin, the wave of memories sweeping over her like a dam that’s been opened and now can’t be shut? The buzz of the needle fills the room as I switch it on and get on with my work. I still haven’t gotten my head around the idea that this really is my Sophia. Her skin I’m touching.
My heart races, my mind spinning. No other woman has affected me the way she did, and I’ve had plenty of women over the past ten years. None of them made me feel as though the entire universe has shrunk down to one tiny spot, and now she’s all that exists for me.
“What have you been up to all these years?” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant. I don’t want to come right out and ask her if she’d got married.
She gives a strange kind of laugh, and I look up with a frown. “Not as much as I would have liked. My parents are still around. They live in Windsor now. I’m staying with them at the moment.”
“With your parents?”
