Page 62 of Finding Fate

He stops at the staircase and turns around with a murderous glare. “You still want a trophy piece? I’m about to give you a shiner.”

I grin. “All you have to do is say you like her and I’ll shut up.”

“You’re a dick.”

“No. You’re in denial.”

“I fucked her more than once. Happy now?”

I roll my eyes. “She’s not the first girl you’ve gone back for seconds with, dumbass. I’m one of your best friends. I know you. You let her sleep with you and drove her to the airport. That’s the difference.”

He opens his mouth but remains silent. Yeah, I know about her sleeping in his bed . . . with him in it. “How do you know about that? It started as a bet. We usually had sex when everyone else was going to sleep. It was just easier to end up that way. It means nothing, but still, I was careful. I set my alarm to get on the air mattress. If I woke up before it went off I stayed up.”

“I get up earlier than most in this house. My body is still on a logger’s schedule. I left something down here I had to get one morning and was using my flashlight on my phone to see. The air mattress was empty. I was curious.”

His jaw locks for a minute. “I got her number, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet. You go running that mouth of yours to Riggan or anybody else and I’m going to break your nose, Maddox. I don’t need people in my ear. Unlike the rest of you, I’m not looking for marriage and kids anytime soon, if ever.”

He turns around and stomps up the stairs, clearly angry. I shake my head with a smile on my face as I follow behind. He doesn’t ask for girls’ numbers. They ask for his or get it from someone else. Don’t have feelings for her. Yeah fucking right.

Thirty-Six

Gabby

Iglance at the sign on the building of the address Riggan gave me to verify I’m at the right place. Sayler said she’d meet me here after her last final before the holiday break, so I took Maddox’s truck. It’s right at sunset, which is Riggan’s last appointment of the day. When you’re getting a free tattoo you take what you can get.

I grab the handle of the glass door and pull it open, listening to the bell chime as I walk through the doorway. Riggan is bent over the register counter at the front with his cell phone out in front of him as he types away on it. I guess he’s waiting on me. He looks up as the door shuts back and pockets his phone. “You ready to do this?”

Excitement fills me and suddenly there is a little pep in my step. It’s been a while since we talked about it in the jacuzzi that night, and many back and forth ideas have been thrown around in spare time to make sure it’s something Maddox and I both like since he wants to get the matching tattoo, which makes my heart happy. Designing it has been something the two of us have done together, and that makes it more meaningful. It will be on our bodies forever, so it should be. I love that about him—that he’ll do things like that with me. He’s always been an all-in kind of guy, and maybe that’s one reason I fell so hard. “You know it. I’ve been waiting impatiently since you showed me the final sketch last week.”

He smirks. “Maddox didn’t take off early to come with you and babysit my hands? I’d rather do them both at once while it’s in my head.”

I laugh, remembering that very conversation this morning before he left for work that he was going to try to get here after work and see if Riggan would go ahead and just do his too. “He’s most likely going to pop in at the end.”

“Figured as much,” he says on a laugh, before bending down to get something behind the counter, and then comes back up with a clipboard of forms and a pen. “Even though I’m doing the ink for free, you still have to sign the waiver, release forms, and I have to make a copy of your license. I’m not the owner. It protects the shop. It’s a rule I have to abide by. Konnor had to do it the first time too.”

I pull my license out of my wallet and trade it to him for the clipboard he’s handing my way. Placing it on the counter, I quickly fill out the information and sign my name on the signature line of each page while he makes a copy of my ID to keep on file, not reading any of the policies or legal verbiage. Does anyone ever? I finish within five minutes after he’s done, and we exchange again.

He nods his head for me to follow through the door after putting up my paperwork. We come into a studio with several tattoo stations in no particular order it seems. The building is nothing fancy and in dire need of some remodeling. It’s not all that organized like some tattoo shops I’ve seen, each station covered in supply bottles for easy reach versus visual appeal. I’m assuming everything else is in the drawers.

He grabs a pair of black, latex gloves from the back station and sits on his stool, already pulling them on when he looks at me. “Any chance you could be pregnant?”

I blink at him, a little taken aback. “Is that a trick question?”

“Shop policy to ask. I take it a little more serious than most. I unknowingly tattooed someone pregnant once.” He smirks. “And I happen to know after a certain night in a Tahoe that Maddox isn’t wrapping it up or pulling out. Can’t say it surprises me. He’s been pining away over you for years. You leave him and I’m coming after you.”

My cheeks heat, and it takes a lot to embarrass me. That night had sort of migrated to the back of my mind. Mine and Maddox’s sex life used to be so secretive I tend to forget we’re public now. We live in our own world; always have. “Isn’t there always a chance when you’re having sex? It’s not likely, though. I’m not.”

He grabs a new needle and opens the package. “Tests are in the bathroom cabinet. Take one so I can mark it on your forms. Owner’s rules. I think some chick tried to sue him once. Bitch didn’t get a cent since she signed the waiver. One ruins it for everyone. Now every girl gets fun paperwork with an extra signature line and to take a pregnancy test in a tattoo shop bathroom.”

I laugh. “Has anyone ever gone in there to take one and actually come out pregnant?”

He smiles. “More than you think. Had one just last week. She walked out crying. Guessing it wasn’t good.”

“Damn. That sucks.” His smile falls as I walk to the tattoo chair to put my stuff down, but his eyes remain on mine. “What?”

“How did you find out?”

I like that he’s not afraid to ask questions like the girls in the house. They rarely ask me anything to do with mine and Maddox’s son, even when I can tell they want to. I can see why him and Maddox are such good friends. They balance each other in a lot of ways. “I was in the mall shopping, trying to stay away from my dad, and when I passed by the pretzel shop the smell made me sick to the point that I threw up in the nearest garbage can. I was already late but didn’t think anything of it. I was only fourteen. Thought it was a virus ‘til a week later when I was still throwing up at random. It finally crossed my mind and I went to Wal-Mart. Did the self-checkout and took the test in the bathroom. I was still in denial. I didn’t actually expect it to be positive.”

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