Rites of Passage

by Catherine Gayle

  This was the first time since my divorce, though, that I’d wanted something more. I still hadn’t settled on how much more I wanted, but damn. A one-night stand or a quickie wouldn’t be enough to satisfy me.

  “Want a hand with that?” I asked, dropping into a crouch next to her and resting my elbows on my knees.

  She shot me an annoyed look, but then recognition dawned in her eyes. “Yeah, if you can. I managed to get it apart, but now it doesn’t want to go back together.”

  “Don’t think it’ll be much use to London that way,” I said, cracking a grin. Not that I expected my smile to have any effect on her at all. Ravyn seemed completely immune to my charm. “Although I think it wants to go together just fine, as long as you put everything where it goes.”

  “Did you…get her here in time?” she asked, ignoring my attempt to flirt.

  Maybe I was more out of practice than I realized.

  I took the base and one wheel from her and gave them a once-over to determine how they connected. “She didn’t give birth in my car if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Ravyn nodded, looking more relieved than I could understand. She’d only spent a grand total of five minutes in London’s presence, as far as I knew. Why was she so worried?

  Once I had the first wheel in place, I reached for the other and repeated the process. “There we go. All set now. I’ll get Dima to make sure we didn’t miss anything before she uses it, but I think the two of us have successfully put a wheelchair back together.” I straightened and reached out a hand to help Ravyn to her feet.

  “Not sure I had much to do with that,” she said.

  I winked. “Our little secret. No one else has to know it wasn’t all you.”

  She didn’t take my hand, though, pushing herself to her feet on her own and wiping her hands on the butt of her shorts. Damn, back to the cold shoulder.

  “Why don’t we take this in and find out where they’ve taken her?” I suggested.

  But Ravyn shook her head. “Like I said earlier…I’ve got to go. I just— I thought I’d help you get this here. But I can’t stay.” She kept passing anxious looks toward the entrance where I’d dropped London off moments ago.

  So much for hoping I’d get a bit more time with Ravyn to wear her down. “Right,” I said. “You’ve got to work and run errands.”

  “Exactly.” Her gaze was transfixed on the hospital entrance.

  “So I’ll see you next week at the support group meeting then?” I asked, despite the gnawing suspicion that I’d never see her again.

  Her throat bobbed as she swallowed hard, and damn if there weren’t tears in her eyes. What the fuck was that about? But she nodded and backed away from me, and I knew it was a total lie. She wasn’t coming back again.

  I pushed London’s chair out of the way and waved as Ravyn drove off. I hadn’t made it three steps before Razor and Viktoriya Chambers claimed Ravyn’s empty parking spot.

  “What the fuck were you doing on the ground with my tattoo artist?” Razor demanded as the two of them caught up with me.

  “Your tattoo artist?” I repeated dumbly. I had no idea what Razor was talking about, but that was nothing new. The guy lived in his own world, and the rest of us were merely spectators to the train wreck.

  “Yeah, dipshit. Ravyn—purple dreads.” He put an arm around his wife’s back and tugged her to his side before giving me a cocky grin.

  So Ravyn was a tattoo artist. Not really a huge surprise, I supposed, considering she was covered in ink. But it rankled that Razor knew more about her than I did, since I was the one who’d just had her in my bed about an hour ago.

  No point getting worked up over that now. I shrugged. “She was at the community center when London went into labor,” I said, leaving out all sorts of details that were none of Razor’s business. “She helped me out by bringing the wheelchair, since there wasn’t room for it in my car. We were just putting it back together.”

  “Hmm,” he said, but he sounded distracted.

  “Hmm?” I repeated.

  “Guess she had to get back to her babysitter or something. She was about to pop back in December when I got her to do a new tat for me. Guess her kid’s eight months or so, now? Something like that. Anyway, we’d better get in there before one of them kills the other. Dima was such a mess when he called, I couldn’t understand a fucking word he said. Tried to get Tori to interpret for me, but she swears he wasn’t speaking Russian, either.”

  I came to a stop, pretending I needed to re-tie my shoe. Razor looked back over his shoulder, but I waved him on ahead because I needed a second to wrap my head around the bomb he’d just unwittingly dropped on me.

  Ravyn had a baby.

  She was HIV-positive, she was single—as far as I knew—and she had a baby.

  I never would’ve put it together on my own, but it made sense now that I thought about it. Her body had all the telltale signs—bigger, darker nipples that I’d stupidly assumed had something to do with her piercings, wider hips that I’d just been thrilled to get my hands on. She’d had some stretch marks, too, but how many women didn’t? So the idea that she’d had a baby had never crossed my mind.

  But now I wondered if her baby was HIV-positive, too.

  No wonder she didn’t want to talk about anything. But all of this just led me to believe she needed to talk more than ever.

  How the hell was I going to make that happen, since she likely had every intention of making sure the two of us never ran into each other again?

  A FEW DAYS later, I was in the middle of designing a custom watercolor tattoo—my specialty—for a new client when Rick popped into my room and peeked over my shoulder. Rick was the owner of INKredible Ink, the tattoo shop where I’d done my apprenticeship and where I currently rented a space. I’d apprenticed under him for several years, back when I was really just a kid. Actually, my apprenticeship had lasted longer than most do because I was still too young to get my license at the end of my two years, since I’d lied to him at first about how old I was. Granted, he’d known I was lying to him, but he’d wanted to help. Rick had always been able to see through me like that.

  He’d become something like a father figure to me in those days—much more so than my real father had ever been. So much so that when I left Jax before the baby was born and didn’t have anywhere to go, Rick had let me stay in the apartment over the shop for a while, until I got my feet under me. Oh, yeah. And he was also the person who delivered my baby upstairs in that very apartment, after I’d waited too long to get to the hospital and realized there was no way I could drive myself. I’d called him in a panic because the 9-1-1 operator told me all the EMTs near me were already busy dealing with a fifteen-car-pileup on the interstate, and I didn’t have a clue what to do. Rick had done what he always did; he came to my rescue.

  The plan had been for him to drive me to the hospital, but the baby didn’t want to wait that long. Granted, as soon as Rick had delivered the baby, on the phone with the 9-1-1 operator talking him through it, he’d tried to convince me there was no reason to give up the baby. Shannon and I can help you out, he’d said. You can find a way to make this work. You’re a hell of a lot tougher than you give yourself credit for, you know.

  Bullshit. I wasn’t tough. He had to realize the truth now, all these months later, after seeing just how badly I’d fallen apart. That little boy was a hell of a lot better off without having a basket case like me for a mother. I knew that even before I’d found out about being HIV-positive. I could barely take care of myself, so how the hell would I have been able to take care of a kid?

  I couldn’t, plain and simple.

  “What colors are you going to use?” Rick asked, doing his best to sound merely curious, even though we both knew there was a lot more behind it than curiosity. So far, my design was only in pencil, which made it a fair question. But then there was the fact that I’d been out of sorts lately, and my work had been suffering from it. My designs were usually full
of bold color choices. These days, I’d been working a lot more than normal in black and gray. Even my canvas paintings were coming out in a muddled mess that reflected the state of my mind.

  I shrugged, trying to play it off and looking down at the cherry blossom outline. “Pinks, greens, a pop of yellow, maybe a touch of purple. The usual. She wants it to be relatively traditional, even if it’s a watercolor design.”

  “Relatively traditional, hmm? So she wants some black in it?”

  “Some. Not a lot. I’m going to do most of the outline in color, then blend it in. Just a few touches in black.”

  “Well…I’m glad you’re going to use some color for her,” he said.

  I didn’t respond. Because there was nothing to say. I’d tried using color lately, but somehow I ended up doing everything in black and gray, or only with a little pop of color. My art was all coming out as ugly and dreary as my soul.

  “Where’s it going?” he asked, changing the subject somewhat.

  “Ribs. She wants a branch to curl up around a breast.”

  He let out one of his silent chuckles. I could only tell because of the huff of breath from his nostrils hitting the back of my head.

  It made me grin. “You think I have a problem tattooing a woman’s girly bits?”

  “Nope. Just thinking about the fact that she wants it on her ribs. You sure she can handle it? You could be setting yourself up for a hell of a difficult time.”

  I rolled my eyes, not that he could see it. “You know I learned from the best, right?”

  “Damn straight, you did.”

  “She’s sat through a lot before, just not for me. So we’ll see if she can be still long enough. No matter what, I’m going to give her a tattoo she can be proud of, though.” When my new client had come in a few hours ago and told me what she wanted, I’d counted no fewer than a dozen other tattoos already on her body, and those were only the ones in visible places. She had enough piercings to put mine to shame, too. This was a woman who used her body as art. I was just glad she was giving me a pristine canvas on which to work, a large space that didn’t have any other ink on it. A blank sheet, mine to fill with our combined vision.

  “If anyone can make that work, it’s you,” he said, sobering.

  Watercolor tattoos were still a relatively new technique in the tattooing industry. Some tattooists refused to do them because they said the ink wouldn’t hold up well. There was definitely some truth to that. Black lasts better than color. There’s a reason traditional tattooists use solid black outlines on all of their work, after all. But there’s a certain art to the watercolor technique, even if the recipient would need to get more touchup work done over the years to keep their ink looking the way it should. The watercolor style was a natural fit for me, though, since I had been painting in watercolors my whole life. I was one of the few watercolor tattooists in Oklahoma, so I had a steady stream of clients coming in to INKredible Ink, looking for me to produce their vision.

  Under Rick, I’d studied all sorts of styles. He was a new school specialist these days, but he’d spent a number of years honing his skill doing black-and-gray portrait work. Talk about diversity. It was hard to find two tattooing styles more different than those, but somehow he made it work. When I’d told him I wanted to try my hand at watercolor tattoos, he didn’t bat an eye—especially not once I’d shown him a few of the canvases I’d painted at home with actual watercolors. He might not do them himself, but he was one hundred percent behind me mastering the technique.

  I bent my head over my sketchpad, adjusting the angle of the table lamp so the light shone on a particular section of my page, and worked on getting the tiny details of a few blossoms just right.

  “You’ve been acting strange the last couple of days,” Rick said after a moment, and I stiffened. So he was finally revealing his reason for hovering. “Since you went to that group session.”

  Little did he know, it had a hell of a lot less to do with the group therapy session and everything to do with the things that had gone down afterward. Going to the hospital. Getting a glimpse of a nurse in the distance and thinking it might have been the one I’d handed off my son to. Having a panic attack as soon as I got back in my car. Needing to pull off the road for about twenty minutes to calm down. Not to mention the insanity of going home with Drew before that.

  I’d already lost all my marbles a long time ago, but on Tuesday, the few I’d relocated had probably left me for good. It had taken every bit of willpower I possessed to keep it together and not end up back in the loony bin after all of that, so there was no wonder Rick sensed I was a little off, as he’d put it.

  I set my pencil down and spun around on my stool to face him. “I’m not going to flip out,” I said, staring deep into his eyes and hoping he’d see the truth of my words in mine. Yes, I’d started to lose it, but I’d reined the crazy back in before anything bad happened.

  I could do this. I could function as a normal person in the real world without Rick hovering constantly to be sure I wasn’t cutting myself again. Or worse.

  The look he gave me said he wasn’t quite buying it.

  I sighed. “It was just… That meeting threw me off. But I’m fine. Or I will be fine, but either way, it’s not something for you to worry about, okay?”

  One corner of his mouth curled up, although it was hard to see behind his mountain-man beard. If I didn’t know him so well, I might have missed it. “You know it’s impossible for me to stop worrying about you, right?” he said. “I mean, I know you’ve been getting your shit together lately, but I still worry. Shannon does, too.”

  “I know you do. Wish you wouldn’t.”

  He winked. “We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we didn’t have someone to worry about.”

  Wasn’t that the truth? Back when I was still his apprentice, the two of them had spent a lot of time and effort trying to bail their youngest son—who was a few years older than me—out of the mess he was making of his life. Robbie had finally started to straighten up and fly right at about the same time my world started falling apart.

  “Well, maybe you should adopt someone new to focus it on, then. Give me permission to get my shit together, you know?”

  “Baby doll, you’ve got permission to do that anytime you see fit. Not that you need permission. You just need to do it. Grab the reins of your life and go. Don’t let the two of us factor into anything.”

  I chuckled and shook my head. “Get out of here and let me do my work.”

  He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, which damn near shattered me. “Need to go yell at Billy, anyway. I spent four hours last night fixing one of the shittiest tattoos he’s ever given.” Then he backed out of my room and left me to do my work.

  But now, Drew was back in my head again—another man who’d damn near shattered me. Those muscular arms that he wrapped around me. The deep, brown eyes always trying to see through me. The way he’d given me exactly what I’d asked him for, everything that I’d needed, even though he had no good reason to do so.

  For the past four days, anytime I wasn’t freaking out about my baby—whether he had parents who loved him, if they had tested him for HIV, if they were treating him for it whether the tests came back positive or not, whether he would hate me someday—I had been thinking of Drew.

  But that was another door I’d closed. Yeah, I could go back to that meeting, so I was sure I could run into him again if I wanted to. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to find him.

  The problem was that I’d used him and then given him the cold shoulder. The rejection that had filled his voice and creased his brows when I’d insisted on leaving that afternoon was unmistakable. And he hadn’t done anything to deserve me treating him so coldly and callously.

  I just didn’t think I could bring myself to return to that support group. It might mean running into London again. Talking about her baby. That was something I couldn’t bear at this point, because it would only make me think abo
ut my own son. Even without that, I wasn’t ready to tell a room full of strangers anything about myself, and listening to them talk about their own issues wouldn’t do a damn thing to help me get past all the shit in my head. The only positive would be running into Drew again—but would he want to have anything to do with me after the way I’d treated him?

  And even if he did…he’d be better off without me in his life.

  Just like everyone else.

  Especially my little boy.

  I finished up the line work on my drawing and reached for my colored pencils, hoping that this time, I could get out of my head long enough to give my client what she came to me to get. Bold, rich, abstract color. Shading. Color washing.

  Not a black-and-gray mess.

  I’d only been working on the colors for this design for a few minutes when there was a soft knock at my door, and Dagger stuck his spiky-haired head through the door. He ran the front and did most of our piercings.

  “Walk-in’s asking for you.”

  Automatically, I closed my sketch pad and set it aside, already standing to go out and greet my new client. The woman who wanted a cherry blossom on her ribs wouldn’t be back to see the artwork for a week, so I had plenty of time to finish it later.

  “Any idea what they want?” I asked.

  “Just that he wants you. He’s a virgin,” Dagger added.

  I couldn’t help raising a brow. Most male tattoo virgins didn’t ask for me, specifically. I got the chicks who wanted watercolor tattoos or butterflies or other soft images like those. Most men getting their first ink wanted something hard, black, and tribal—and they definitely wouldn’t come to me for something like that.