Inked

by Drew Elyse

  What I needed to do was keep on keeping on and let life play out as it would.

  Which was the exact type of blasé attitude I’d been faking for years, but never actually been any good at. I was a control freak. It was what made me good at my job, and not great at a lot of other things.

  Like letting go.

  But I’d keep faking it and maybe someday I would manage being normal and adjusted.

  Step one: ignoring weird, baseless needs to figure out if someone was watching me.

  “Jess.”

  I turned to see Sketch, my boss, near the mouth of the hall that led back to his office and got the gist. Standing, I lost the battle and glanced out the front windows. I told myself it was to be sure no one was about to walk in as I abandoned my post.

  I lied to myself like that a lot.

  When I turned back, Sketch was already headed to his office. Not surprising. My boss was far from an asshole. He didn’t need to stand there and stare me down like I might not follow his command. Hell, even if I didn’t jump up and follow, he’d probably be back in his office assuming there was a reason. I’d come when I could, and he’d talk to me about whatever he had to when the time came.

  Sailor’s Grave wasn’t Sketch’s brainchild. It’d been opened up and made into the shop it was today by Carson. What was impressive was that Sketch took over when Carson left the place to him and not only upheld the reputation for excellence Carson had honed but surpassed it.

  The talent on staff was better than ever, and that was saying a lot.

  More proof he wasn’t an asshole since any of the artists here could walk out tomorrow and be hired on just about anywhere. Sketch wasn’t the type to try and keep anyone here by kissing ass, so he had to do it by keeping this a great place to work.

  Entering the office that hadn’t changed a bit since Carson’s time—the only exception being the framed pictures of Sketch’s wife and two baby girls all over—I plopped down on one of the leather chairs facing the dark wood desk.

  “What’s up, boss-man?”

  He smirked.

  Most people would probably find Sketch intimidating. Aside from the tattoos covering every inch of visible skin—and obviously much more beneath the clothes—there was the fact that he was far from lacking in muscles. Or, better yet, the leather cut for the Savage Disciples MC he wore at all times. His whole look screamed rough, tattooed biker. Even that smirk was tinged with danger. What those people that made assumptions didn’t see was the devoted husband, the adoring father, the friend who wouldn’t hesitate to put his own life on the line for any of his club brothers or any of us here at the shop.

  He was easily one of the best men I’d ever known.

  So I felt perfectly comfortable giving him shit as I pleased.

  “Did you finalize all the paperwork we needed for the Days of Hoffman shit?”

  I raised one eyebrow.

  Days of Hoffman was a multi-day festival the city had come up with to highlight local businesses and celebrate everything we had to offer. Businesses were invited to set up themed tents with food, games, whatever the hell they wanted, to entice new customers. Since Sketch’s club also owned a garage, Savage Restorations, one of his brothers, Jager, owned a local boxing gym, and Avery, a brother’s woman, owned a hugely popular local bakery, the idea had come up to combine all four with a theme, and be able to have all the Disciples brothers on hand to man it. Ember—who was Jager’s woman and partner running the gym as well as my friend—and I had come up with a classic carnival theme that we knew could highlight all the businesses in a way that’d be family-friendly and attention-grabbing.

  Sketch had asked me to handle the paperwork to submit our concept for all four businesses over two weeks ago, so it’d been done for about two weeks and he knew it.

  “Right. The clowns at city hall can’t find it. I won’t ask if you’ve got back-ups of everything, but can you take it down there so we hopefully won’t have to deal with it again?”

  “Do I get combat pay for going in there?”

  “How about you do this, and I’ll tackle Jerry by myself next time?”

  Jerry was the shop’s tax guy. He was the best around, but I would very honestly rather watch paint dry. At least that happened faster than Jerry spoke. Usually, I was in the meetings with him since I helped do a lot of the bookkeeping, but it always drove me up a wall. The last time we’d met with him, I’d ripped up sixteen sheets of paper from my notepad just to keep from losing it.

  Even dealing with the general incompetence of city hall was better than that.

  “Deal.”

  Since it was already four, and God only knew what hoops I’d have to jump through to talk to the right person about the forms, I needed to get to it.

  “That all?”

  “Carson wants to do a couple days next month. He’ll call you to start getting that all set.”

  The old man found pretty often that retirement didn’t suit him as well as he thought. The couple days—which usually turned into a week or more—in the shop every few months kept him sane. It also wasn’t a bad thing for the shop, since Carson still had an amazing reputation of his own, and people were always gunning at a chance to get work done by him when the opportunity arose.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “And the girls are getting pissy. Want you over for dinner ASAP.”

  Sketch’s daughters, Emmy and Evangeline, were the cutest things. I loved them both to death, so that was hardly a hardship. “Wednesday?”

  “I’ll check with Ash.”

  “Let me know when you hear from the real boss,” I said as I left the office to his chuckle. He didn’t deny it because there was no point. His woman owned him, and he was perfectly happy with that.

  Forty minutes later, after re-printing the filled out forms and driving over, I felt that same prickling-like eyes on me as I entered city hall. I nearly made it to the door before I gave in that time, but couldn’t resist as I turned to head up the steps. To my left, was just the visitors’ lot mostly full of cars. To my right, the main roadway, and just beyond it the police station.

  And there, right out front and heading toward a squad car, Jackson.

  No, that wasn’t even his name.

  I didn’t even know his real name.

  But there he was. Not with some drug ring pretending to be one of their own. Not in hiding because his identity was leaked. Not anything that would keep him away.

  Right there, in the middle of Hoffman, not fifteen minutes from my work, hardly more from the apartment where he fucked me like I meant something after telling me as much—a bunch of shit apparently just meant to get him that opportunity.

  He looked different in the uniform. Although his hair was still done up in that semi-pompadour and there was no changing the fact that his arms were heavily tattooed, he looked more clean cut than he had in the clothes I’d seen him in. Tattoos were hardly counterculture anymore.

  Shaving half your head to tattoo it, that was different.

  And I couldn’t help but wonder if that was it, the reason he was right there instead of fifteen minutes away at the shop.

  “See, that is precisely what you always want to avoid,” Mother hissed, looking at the girl on stage. Her bikini had enough lift to do great things for her chest; it also showed the surprising belly button ring that almost certainly meant she wouldn’t be impressing the judges. “Being whorish gets you nowhere. Being trashy with piercings like that gets you nowhere. Men like to look at that kind of thing, but they marry something virginal every chance they get.”

  I tried to shake off one of the lovely pieces of advice she’d given me over the years, but it lingered.

  Standing there, with a road and what felt like a million lies separating me from the man I’d let get far too much of a claim on my emotions, I couldn’t dismiss it the way I usually did her bile.

  Because this time, I wasn’t so sure she was entirely wrong.

  Chapter Five />
  Jess

  “Tell me you aren’t driving home, gorgeous,” Tamara, my bartender ordered.

  Tamara was great. She’d taken a shot early on, asking if I wanted to go out with her even though she admitted she suspected I didn’t swing her way. Then, she very thoughtfully kept me in tequila while she listened to my whole pathetic tale of why it felt so good that she’s been interested and asked. For what might be my own safety and security as well as his, I avoided the whole undercover cop detail, but I laid the rest on her in an increasingly drunken rant.

  Tamara, lovely Tamara, she listened through the whole thing while she mixed up other people’s drinks. She even filled in the necessary “is he a fucking moron?” and “what an asshole” type interjections.

  I’d never been in that bar before that night, but it would definitely be my spot from now on. I’d even exchanged numbers with Tamara so I wouldn’t run the risk of blacking out later and forgetting where I was.

  Honestly, even then I couldn’t remember the name.

  Usually, I got my night out drinking with Ember, Ash, and the rest of the Savage Disciples club ladies. The club owned a strip joint in town that had a ladies’ night monthly—complete with dudes shaking their junk around—that tended to be our night out. Mostly because it meant none of us paid for drinks and we always had the best seats in the house.

  Alternatively, there was a dive bar near work that I’d sometimes hit with any mix of the Sailor’s Grave team after closing down, which was mostly about the killer burger they had on the menu rather than it being the best place to drink.

  But this place—I’d just call it Tamara’s place until my brain was less pickled—was going to be my place.

  Because drinking your frustrations down totally worked.

  Obviously.

  “I promise, I’m not driving.” Fumbling with the touchscreen a bit, I pulled up the app to call a car. “See?”

  “Good. Contrary to the stereotype, I’ve never been the field hockey or rugby type. Usually, I prefer women just lay down on their own accord for me, but I’ll tackle you if I have to.”

  I wondered, growing pissed just at the thought, how often she had to deal with assumptions like that. Or, since she was every bit the hot blonde bartender any dude would wander in here and be pleased to find, if she got a lot of assholes thinking her saying she was a lesbian was just a brush off. She’d made a few jokes about it that made me think the humor was a response to the very real shit she’d heard.

  “Stereotypes are a bunch of bullshit,” I not-so-elegantly put it. But hey, point made.

  “You aren’t wrong.” She put a couple glasses under two taps, pulling them forward to start filling. “Now get out there before your driver takes off without you. But I’m texting you tomorrow, and you better remember me.”

  “Deal.”

  I wasn’t so drunk that I’d forget. No, even in that moment I remembered everything. Dealing with the paperwork at city hall, looking around for Jackson on the way out, driving around pissy until I decided to try out a bar off my beaten path so I hopefully wouldn’t run into anyone close to me. The only thing I didn’t remember was what the sign had said on my way in, because I’d been too focused on my own shit to pay attention.

  I was even together enough to watch from the back seat as I drove away and catch the sign that read Delilah’s.

  Though I might have started to drift off on the way home after that.

  When I got to my apartment, I realized I might have been a little drunker than I thought. Mostly when it came to getting the damn door opened. Somehow, I was pretty certain that my first turn of the key in the deadbolt did nothing. But I always locked the door when I left, so I proceeded to turn it back and forth a few times, trying to figure out what the heck I was doing wrong.

  “Bed,” I muttered to myself as I shifted to the knob. “Makeup off, water, then bed.”

  There wasn’t a level of drunk that let me pass out with my makeup on. If not because of how bad that was for the skin, then because of the mess of pillows that made up the top half of my bed. While all of them could be washed, some were lighter than others. I didn’t need makeup stains ruining any of them because I was too much of a shitshow to wash my face.

  My plan of action before me, I trudged inside. I bolted up the door behind me but didn’t bother with the living room lights. The overheads only had a switch at that far end by the door, and the lamps were all operated individually. No way was I coming back out to deal with all of that.

  Taking off my shoes proved a task I was barely capable of. The tiny clasps on the outside of my ankles mixed with balancing on one heel, alcohol, and darkness proved more a challenge that I could handle. After a few minutes of struggling, I started to pitch backward, ass on a collision course with the floor.

  But I didn’t get there.

  Because I hit something else on the way down.

  I screamed when the hands closed around my arms, flailing them uselessly and kicking out my legs.

  “You shouldn’t be here. I was watching. Your car didn’t come. I would have seen it.”

  I didn’t recognize his voice. My blood ran cold, and I fought harder, but his grip was too much.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  He dragged me, even as I scratched at his arms and kicked at his legs. I felt my heels connecting with his shins, but he didn’t stop. I screamed again, trying to get every bit of sound out that I could muster, but he released one of my arms, wrapping his own across my face until I could hardly breathe.

  “Quiet.” It was almost like it was meant to be reassuring, calming, not an order. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t.

  I thrashed my head around, hoping for room enough to open my mouth and managing to find it. Without hesitation, I bit down on his arm with all I had, gagging when the tinny taste of his blood hit my tongue. His arm jerked but didn’t release me.

  “That was a mistake.”

  With a hard yank, he turned my whole body to the side, moving his now bloodied arm from my face. I gasped in a breath, my lungs pulling it in desperately, but the relief only lasted a moment. Before I could get my bearings, his hand gripped the back of my head hard. There was no stopping before I hit the wall.

  The pain that exploded through my head muted the feeling of my body collapsing to the hard floor, but only just.

  “You did this. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You weren’t supposed to come in. I was watching.” His frantic chant barely reached me beneath the throbbing pain from my head.

  I couldn’t move, couldn’t manage to do anything but lie there when the next blow came, and then another.

  All the while he kept on repeating that same thing.

  “You did this.”

  It was the last thing I heard before everything went dark.

  Chapter Six

  Jess

  The noise was the first thing that I was aware of.

  The pain followed a second later and drowned it out.

  Nothing penetrated but the ache that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It was all-encompassing. Every part of me was screaming out even as I stayed still. Just the movement of my lungs sent sharp, stabbing sensations through my abdomen.

  It seemed impossible, but I knew I had to move. I had to get out of there. I couldn’t take anymore and if he came back…

  The noise penetrated again, a pounding louder even than my heartbeat.

  I opened my mouth to yell, but froze.

  What if it was him?

  I tried to open my eyes, but one wouldn’t budge. That side of my face hurt worse, a throb permeating from it. From the other eye, though, I saw I was still in my apartment on the living room floor. It was hard to tell in the dark, but I couldn’t see him anywhere.

  Knowing then what way I was facing, I realized the sound was coming from the door. I held my breath as the knocking at it continued, waiting to see if he would appear.r />
  He didn’t.

  Outside, whoever it was stopped, and I feared for a horrible moment that they’d left.

  “Police!” a deep voice boomed before the pounding started again. “Open up!”

  Even as the fear set my whole body shaking, I knew this was a shot. If he was still here, they could get him. Sucking in all the air I could, even when it hurt, I cried out, “Help!”

  Again and again, even as I grew hoarse and out of breath, I begged for them to come. Even as the noises at the door became louder and the darkness started to creep in on me, I kept calling out. Anything to keep them from leaving, especially if that might mean leaving me with him.

  I flinched back from the deafening crack and the flood of light in the room. Someone came to me, but the brightness was too much to look. I prayed it was a cop, that they’d gotten to me first.

  “Ma’am, can you hear me?”

  I didn’t know that voice either, but it wasn’t him. I tried to respond, but everything felt too heavy, too hard to move.

  Distantly, I heard other voices.

  “Bathroom clear!”

  “Bedroom clear!”

  The one close to me spoke again, his voice gentle. “We have paramedics on the way up. You’re going to be alright.”

  I hoped that was true. Right then, all I had left in me was to choose to believe him. He was gone, and I was safe. Before I let myself slide back into the welcoming dark, I let myself believe, even if it was a lie.

  It was the pain that filtered in first when I woke again, though it seemed less intense than before, almost like it was dulled at the edges. Prying my good eye open, it didn’t take long for me to understand why.

  I was in the hospital.

  I knew it just by the look of the ceiling. The clean, clinical white and the fluorescent lights that had me squinting my eyes back closed to avoid them.