“Are you putting lotion on?” I asked.
Those true blue eyes flickered up to mine. “Yeah. It preserves the colors. See?” He slid the sleeve of his t-shirt up to his shoulder, pointing at the solid shiny black ink of his right arm. “Gotta be careful with all this black. I don’t want it lookin’ gray in a few years.”
“Oh,” was my brilliant response. I blinked. “How many do you have?”
Dex smiled, that slow creeping smile that I recognized as a sign that he was amused. “Only five.” He watched me standing there for a minute longer. “Wanna see 'em?”
No.
Who was I kidding? I nodded anyway.
He slid forward on the edge of the bed, his hands dropping to his knees before he started yanking up the material on one side of his shorts. Heavy muscle filled in his thigh covered in black ink. A tattoo that looked like the outline of a sugar skull—the ones I'd studied in my Mexican Folk Art class in high school—stamped his leg. The letters 'WMC' and 1974 were tattooed in individual banners directly below the figure with loose, almost loopy lettering.
“This is my club piece,” he explained.
My eyes were glued to the huge skull that wrapped around the side of his thick thigh. “Why'd you do your thigh?" My Dad and Sonny had theirs on their arms. I'd caught the bottom of Trip's on his back.
Dex shrugged. “I had other plans.”
I coughed. "So... where are the rest of your tattoos?"
Oh boy.
His mouth slowly melted into a smile, that unblinking gaze absorbing everything in its path—me. After a minute, he sat up and held his arms out in front of him. “You’ve seen these.”
I had but not in great detail and not without checking them out on the sly.
“What are they though?” I asked him, genuinely curious.
Dex looked down at them. “Different ideas I came up with.” Flexing his right wrist, and his left, he looked up again and shrugged. "Sometimes I'll get ideas from random shit I see. Like this one,” he held out the arm with the configuration of fading triangles. “Went to the planetarium with my niece and I just couldn’t get it out of my head.”
He then held up his other arm, the one with the wing wrapped around it. “Other times I'll dream of stuff."
But it was more than that. He dreamed of things that looked angelic? I had dreams of zombies chasing me and breaking into houses, not things like his. Not landscapes of abstract colors. Then again, maybe an artist had thoughts like those and I definitely wasn't an artist.
He started tugging his shirt up and over his head, and I had to physically tell myself not to say anything stupid because I’d gone brain dead. All I could think of while watching Dex sitting there with his bright, beautiful tattoos and his equally beautiful but tired face, was that the world was unfair.
“This was my first one,” he said, pointing to the infamous Captain America shield on his left pectoral while I ogled his six-pack instead. Or was it an eight-pack?
“And this is Uriel,” he explained, pointing at a huge red octopus that wrapped over from his back to the right side of his chest. The same one I’d seen framed in his office. Shirtless, I could tell that the red I'd seen on his neck was a tentacle so detailed it almost looked alive.
Uriel was forgotten the moment I saw his flat, dark nipples. I didn’t think anyone could blame me for caring less about his tattoos when I could use my eyes to visually molest the definition of his bare chest and the two friggin’ rings he had through his nipples.
“You don’t like ‘em?” he asked.
I couldn't remember how to speak.
“Uh…” I blinked, searching for those things called words and sentences that people had been using for millennia to communicate. “Wah… why Uriel?” I somehow managed to ask.
But really, I was still looking at his upper body and not at Uriel, his red octopus, specifically.
And as hot as Dex was, when he smiled broadly it was enough for me to tear my eyes away from the dream he was half-naked. Because Dex’s smile was the nicest I’d ever seen. It was wide and genuine and playful and so rare. And it made my insides flare.
“It's my favorite animal,” he answered casually.
“An octopus?” I’d figured he’d go for something different. Way different. Maybe a tiger? A dragon?
Dex nodded, not disturbed at all about my confusion. “They're smarter than people think,” he explained. “They know how to problem solve. They’re curious little fuckers—“
“And they squirt ink,” I told him with an understanding laugh, though I had no doubt he knew that already.
Another glorious smile lit his face. "Exactly.”
“Huh.” Feeling just a little like a jackass, I smiled back. “That’s pretty perfect.”
He shrugged, just a hint of color on his tan cheeks. “It’s all right.”
“It’s really cool.”
Dex grinned even wider. “Ritz—“
“Why do you call me that?” I finally asked him after more than a month of silently letting him get away with it.
Another slow smile welcomed me. “That day you got hired? Sonny called to rip me a new one, I couldn’t hear him well when he called you Ris. I thought he called you Ritz. By the time I figured it out,” he shrugged, “I’d already gotten it stuck in my head.”
Another brilliant response. “Oh.”
When neither one of us said anything, and suddenly uncomfortable, I walked over to the pullout bed I'd left a mess and fell onto it. Yanking the covers up and over my body with a yawn. I could hear Dex settling onto his bed, the springs on the mattress creaking under his weight, the sheets shuffling every which way.
“Dex?”
“Yeah?” he answered.
I yawned again, rolling to my side. "If you feel another Northern wind coming on tonight, aim it the other way, will you?"
The laugh that blasted out of him put a smile on my face as I fell asleep.
Chapter Fourteen
By the end of the second day at the expo, I would have bartered my first born for some sort of cloaking spell that made me invisible to douche bags.
My brief conversations with the drunkards that stumbled to the booth with one hand wrapped around a beer bottle and another shoved down the front of their pants usually all went along the lines of:
"So if I get this expensive ass tattoo, do I get you for free?"
"No."
"How about a kiss?"
"No."
"Just a little one."
"No."
"A hand—"
The time Dex was around when a guy started going down that route had ended with Dex grumbling out, "Fuck off."
Oh Jesus.
He didn’t even spare a glance behind him to see the man who was bothering me, but apparently, the drunk idiot didn’t even need to see his face to get the message.
“Dex!” I hissed at him for being so rude when the guy only partially deserved it.
“Babe,” he responded, completely unapologetic and not giving half a shit. Then again, when did he? If I thought he’d pay attention, I’d try to give him a lesson in being polite.
Pointless, right?
Then there was Shane. Shane who came over every chance he got and what felt like every chance he didn't have. If I wouldn't have heard so much about him sleeping around with random women the day before, I would have sworn he had a man crush on Dex.
Maybe he did.
He must have warmed up to me after the night before because he'd make his way to the counter and look me right in the face or down at my chest. Blatantly.
Like there was anything there to look at.
It had first started off with him, smiling, and leaning in. "Can I see your ink?"
Before we left Austin, I'd been mentally prepared for how hot and humid the city would be when I'd stuffed elbow-length sweaters and cardigans into my duffel bag. Neither one of the guys had said anything but I didn't want it to be completely obvious to a crowd of body art l
overs, that my skin was naked.
"I don't have any," I told him in a low voice.
He totally didn't believe me at all because he frowned but mysteriously let the question go. "Got a boyfriend?"
I'd been busy organizing invoices from the day before, so I only bothered to glance up at him before shaking my head. "Nope."
"You really aren't fooling around with Dexter?"
"Nope."
"I don't believe it."
He left and came back a couple hours later, this time Dex had run to the bathroom between appointments. Slim was busy with a client and I'd been sitting there, people-watching.
The first thing Shane did was tilt his chin up. "You sure you aren't...?"
Wanting to hide my irritation because Jesus! How many more times did he have to kill my self-esteem by reminding me that a man that looked like black sin on tan skin didn't like me in that way? There was only so much my pride could handle.
"Nope." I popped the last consonant to emphasize the fact that I wasn't and would never ever sleep with my boss.
“I don’t get it,” he murmured like he was trying to disprove a mathematical theorem.
A groaned sigh managed to escape from my mouth. “I’m not his type.” Okay, wrong thing to say. I amended my words as quickly as I could. “He’s not my type.”
The noise he made in response sounded like a mixture of a hiccup and a snicker. “You need glasses?” His eyes drifted to my cleavage again. "He threatened to break my fingers if I made a move on you. We’ve never had a problem sharing before..."
There went my appetite.
Before he had the chance to make my stomach roll, I spotted Dex coming down the aisle, wiping his hands on his jeans as his eyes locked in on Shane's form. The minute he was within speaking distance, he darted his gaze over to me. His gaze dipped down to my collarbones in annoyance.
"Babe, button up your fuckin' sweater. Everybody can see your tits like that."
Holy crap.
I glanced down to make sure that my boobs weren't hanging out for everyone to see, and they weren't. My shirt was racerback tank, the scooped front hit clearly above my bra-line for the friggin' record. I opened my mouth to argue with him, and then closed it. The last thing I wanted was to argue with him back and forth, then have Shane assume that that was... foreplay or something ridiculous.
I buttoned up the length of tiny buttons, looking everywhere but in front of me. Dex was talking to Shane in a low voice. His lips were moving but I couldn't hear what was being said between the two of them.
After a minute, Shane inclined his head and took off in the direction of his booth. I'd walked past it a couple of times already and I knew exactly where it was.
When he turned around, Dex glared at me. It was immature but I was irritated by what he'd said though I really would prefer not getting hit on by drunk strangers. The look I gave him in return was scathing. Well, as scathing as I was capable of.
~ * ~ *
There were a great many things that I learned in the three days we spent in Houston. Some things were more informative than others. Some things I would have rather not learned. And, a fraction were inevitable in this path called life.
I learned more about tattooing techniques than I could ever have imagined. With Slim and even Dex leading me around to different booths on Saturday and Sunday, they showed me the best and unfortunately, the worst too. The best: creativity. The worst: inexperience. The inexperience was spelled out with sloppy letters and terrible outlines. Another big thing I learned that seemed essential: Pins was well-known. There was a constant stream of people looking at the binders we’d brought and asking to see who was available. I was surprised by the pride nipping at my chest when I saw how respected they were.
I also learned that there were a lot of exhibitionists into body art. A lot. I hadn’t seen that many half-naked women in my life and that included the time I spent trolling porn websites when I was itching to relieve some tension. I also learned that there was no inch of flesh on a body that couldn’t be tattooed. For example, an armpit. A penis. Balls. Palate. Tongue. The inside of a lip. Downtown lips! Face! I mentally made a decision that if I ever did get a tattoo, it wouldn't be in any of those places. I'd leave that to the souls that were way more brave than I could ever be.
Lastly, the thing that was slapped in my face over and over again was that Dex was a vagina magnet. I already knew that from the conversation I’d overheard with Shane, but I swallowed it and shoved away. He didn’t stop to speak to any of the women who dropped by our booth, and I wasn’t sure how to take that, so I didn’t. Back in Austin he'd kept that part of his life private at least since I'd run into him at the body shop. I refused to waste a minute wondering what his numbers were like.
It wasn't any of my business but lord knows I would have paid for his ass if he wasn’t my boss and I wasn’t confused with the way I felt about him.
After an exhausting Saturday, where we spent more than thirteen hours at the Expo, we ate dinner at some Chinese restaurant nearby and then promptly passed out watching Rush Hour in the hotel room with Slim narrating the entire movie perfectly.
Sunday was just as hectic. It seemed like every other person who had bought a ticket to the convention wanted Dex or Slim to tattoo them, so I had to balance out the requests as well as I could while also taking advantage of watching them work. It’d always seemed weird to me when we were at Pins to look at them but in Houston our proximity was so close and it was different circumstances, that it felt fine. If you were shy then you wouldn’t exactly get tattooed in the middle of an expo, right?
Just before we started taking our stuff down, Slim let me tattoo the tiniest heart in existence onto his wrist bone in celebration of our successful visit to Houston.
“But what if I mess up?” I’d asked him in a panic, holding the gun somehow without shaking.
Dex was sitting next to him, wrapping a client’s new inner bicep tattoo.
Slim grinned. “Iris, it’s a little thing. I’ll fix it if you mess up or Dex will. It’s not a big deal.”
My mouth curled down into a grimace. “I’m scared.”
“Just try it,” he insisted.
I shot a glance over at Dex who was looking at me in amusement. “Can you fix it if I mess up?” I asked him in a whisper.
He gave me the most indulgent smile in the world. “Course I will, babe.”
“You’re sure?” I asked Slim, who waved me forward. I blew out a deep breath and nodded. “All right.” A few minutes later, I’d somehow managed to hold down the right amount of pressure, follow the outline better than I expected, and then I thrust the gun at Slim. “You finish it, I can’t do it.”
He blew out a raspberry, shaking his head. “You can finish it another day. Deal?”
“Maybe,” I offered him.
He winked. “Deal.”
Dex leaned over to inspect my job as he plucked the gloves off his hands. “Nice work.”
These guys did the most intricate, multicolored pieces I’d ever seen and they were complimenting me on a simple heart shape? Guh. I think I was kind of growing fond of them and that only made me feel worse about putting in my notice when we got back home.
We packed up our crap, hauling it back and forth from the convention hall to the truck in what seemed like a million trips. After the last one, Dex waved me into the front seat while he got into the driver side. “Ritz, you can sit in the front since you aren’t gonna sleep.”
I shrugged, thinking that made total sense. Slim didn’t argue or bat an eyelash as he got into the backseat. They talked about the things they’d liked the most, the people they had seen, and chatted about how popular fluorescent tattoos had gotten and how they might have to look into the ink needed for them.
“Rainbow-Ris, did you have a good time?” Slim asked, adding in the nickname he’d picked up from a client on Saturday.
Shifting in the seat to look at him from around the headrest, I nodded, smiling b
ecause he’d been the one that went out of his way to make sure I did. “A lot of fun even though you snore.” I tilted my head in Dex’s direction, waggling my eyebrows at Slim, “and this guy's gas could fuel my car.”
"I don’t snore," Slim argued, but I was too busy looking at Dex over my shoulder while trying to hold back a laugh. Dex smirked, keeping his attention straight forward.
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