by Claire Adams
“Alex must’ve told you that Levi had no idea, though, right?”
Mom frowned. “You know, I can’t remember. I just assumed that Levi knew; it seems like the sort of thing that you would tell someone.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Honestly, Isla, I didn’t think you would give him the time of day. I know he used to make fun of you. I know how hurt you were over it, even though you tried to hide it. I wasn’t sure what his motives were, though; part of me thought that maybe he was going to try to get back the money that Alex had left for you, and then once he had that, go marry Ella. I just didn’t want to see you get hurt again, especially not by him. And I didn’t tell you because part of me thought you’d accuse me of making it up, and the other part of me thought you’d never get involved with him like that in the first place.”
“It certainly wasn’t my plan to. Well, it kind of was, but it was supposed to be for revenge.” I laughed, thinking back to when Sophie had first suggested it. “It was Sophie’s idea. Project Revenge she called it.”
Mom laughed, too. “That sounds just like something Sophie would suggest. She’s always been a good friend to you.”
“I know,” I said. “And you’ve always been a good parent. I’ve been pretty fortunate in that regard.”
“As long as you’re happy with Levi, then that’s all I care about,” Mom said. “I know I’ve been hard on you in the past, and I know that we haven’t always agreed on things, but if you’re happy, then that’s what’s most important to me.”
I looked at her and smiled. “Thanks, Mom,” I said. “And you know what? I am.”
37.
Levi
You know, I could get used to this.
I was standing out on the deck at Isla’s house, spatula in hand, ready to flip the salmon filets that I had on the grill. Isla was in the kitchen, making a salad, and dusk was falling. In the distance, I could hear kids playing outside, their shrieks of laughter wafting through the warm night air. We’d be going back to New York in a couple days, but right now, I was just enjoying being here and not having an agenda.
She came out onto the deck, carrying a ceramic bowl with lettuce and some fresh veggies from her mom’s garden.
“That looks good,” she said, peering over my shoulder. “Who knew you were so good with a grill?”
“I’ve grilled a thing or two in my time,” I said. I slid the fillets off the grill and onto the serving platter. Then Isla and I went and sat down at the table. We had the salmon, the salad, some cold pasta salad that she’d picked up at the deli, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I poured us each a glass and then held mine up.
“I’m not usually the sort who makes toasts,” I said, “but I think tonight I can make an exception. Isla, I know we’ve been through a lot recently, and it hasn’t all been good, but I realized the other day that there’s no one else I’d rather be with.” We clinked glasses together. “And I love you,” I said, looking her right in the eyes. She blinked and laughed, her cheeks flushing. She took a sip of her wine.
“I love you, too,” she said. “And there’s no one else I’d rather be with, either.”
We started to eat as the sky continued to darken, stars coming out, glittering over our heads, and I realized that I was as happy in this moment as I’d ever been, right here, with her.
Epilogue
Isla
I waited until Levi had finished getting dressed and was sitting at the table with his breakfast before I showed him.
“Hey look,” I said. I slid the magazine across the table to where Levi was sitting, eating a bowl of cereal, looking on his phone. “You made the cover of Forbes.”
He glanced at it but then turned it over so the cover was face down. “So that’s the picture they went with,” he said. “I look like such a tool. Never do a photo shoot; they’re awful.”
I turned the magazine over. “I think you look very handsome.” I sat down with my coffee and looked at the cover again. He was standing under a spotlight, his sports jacket in a crumpled heap on the ground beside him. He had on a blue button down shirt with a white collar, the sleeves pushed up, his red tie loosened and askew. He had his hands in his pockets and was looking into the camera with a half-smile on his face, one that you could mistake for a smirk but if you looked closer, you could tell it was actually more of a what the hell am I doing here. In big red serif type it said: PRODIGOL SON.
“I just got a wedding invitation,” Levi said. He put his spoon down and slid the phone over to me. There was a picture of Ella, looking incredibly gorgeous in a short, sleeveless, cream-colored frock, Grecian sandals with straps lacing up her long legs. She was holding hands with another, equally good-looking guy, someone named Alexios Giannakis. “Ella found herself someone richer than I am,” Levi said. He leaned over and looked at the picture again. “Better-looking, too.”
“No way,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s not bad, but you’re way better looking than he is. Who is he?”
“Oldest son of a Greek shipping magnate. I ran into him a few times here and there in Ibiza and Koh Phangan, all the big party spots. I’m sure Ella will be happy with him.”
I watched Levi as he spoke, trying to gauge whether or not he was feeling any sort of remorse. I didn’t want to be thinking like this; I wanted to be secure in my relationship with him, and I was, most of the time, but every so often that old doubt would start to creep back in and I’d wonder why he was with me to begin with.
“More importantly,” he said, taking another bite of cereal, “is that Frank will be happy with him. And that’s really what matters most.”
“I hope not,” I said. “She should be with someone that she wants to be with; not some guy that her father thinks she should be with.”
Levi nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I hope she’s happy.” He finished his cereal and stood up, stretched. His eye caught the magazine again and he turned it over again, so the cover was face down. “You feel like going for a walk?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “That sounds nice.”
We left our apartment and started walking toward Central Park. It had been two years since I’d put my money with BCM; in that time, Levi had sold his place in Ibiza and his dad’s penthouse, despite it being his childhood home. We purchased a more modest apartment in Midtown, and kept my house in Bel Air. I had been fine with selling it, but Levi wanted to keep it, for some reason. He said he liked having it as a retreat to go back to.
He got word last year, from an old friend, that Alfie had been killed in a hit-and-run. The police hadn’t made any arrests, but Levi had some ideas about who it might’ve been.
I could tell he felt relieved about the news. I hadn’t been that worried about Alfie after we’d gotten back to New York, but I knew Levi felt as though it were possible he could show back up, demanding more money, wanting to hurt one of us.
When we got to the park, we started walking down one of the bridle paths. It was early June, and the weather had just started to warm up, though there was still a cool note lingering in the air. The trees were beginning to leaf out and everything felt fresh and new. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs all the way with air, holding it for a second before I exhaled completely. Sometimes, I still had a hard time believing that this was the way everything had worked out.
“It’s funny the way things turn out, isn’t it?” Levi said suddenly, as though he had just read my mind. “I mean, if you’d told me three years ago that I’d be here, working at BCM, in a relationship with you, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“I know,” I said. “I probably wouldn’t have believed it either. But I’m glad. Because these past two years have been amazing. They really have.”
“I feel the same way. I always thought that I’d be one of those guys who just partied forever, even when they were way past their prime, because I never thought I could deal with a ‘regular’ life. But I actually really like ‘regular’ life. And it’s in large part
because of you.” We had stopped under a cherry blossom tree, that had already bloomed its pink flowers for the season, but was still beautiful anyway.
“I know this is probably going to look like I’m trying to one up them,” he said, giving me a rueful smile. “But I don’t care.”
“One up who?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
He stopped walking and turned to face me. From a distance, the scar on his face was not visible at all; even up close, unless you were looking for it, you probably wouldn’t notice. But if the sun hit his face a certain way, then yes, there it was, you could see it very clearly. That happened right then; I reached up and ran my fingers across his cheek.
“Being with you makes me really happy, you know,” he said. “I know I’ve said it before, but sometimes I feel like I need to say it more than once.”
“You’re allowed,” I said. “Especially because I never get tired of hearing it.”
“That’s good.” He smiled and took my hand. “Isla,” he said, and then he got down on one knee. I felt my heart begin to race and my face flush. Levi looked up at me, a big smile on his face. “Isla,” he said again, “I have a question to ask you.” He paused and I smiled back, taking a deep breath, telling myself that I would at least let him get the words out before I said yes.
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SEXY TATTOOIST
By Joey Bush and Claire Adams
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Claire Adams
1.
Graham
“A rose.” The girl gestured vaguely to her tanned, freckled cleavage, of which there was plenty. “Right here.”
I tried not to roll my eyes, which was generally a frowned upon reaction when a customer was telling you what they wanted you to tattoo on their body.
“Okay,” I nodded and tried to arrange my features into an expression that suggested I thought getting a rose tattooed on her cleavage wasn’t a completely overdone and tired idea. Not that someone like her would care—I could tell her mind was made up about it, regardless of what anyone said.
“A red one with thorns,” she said after a moment. “You know, so it’s like symbolic of who I am … I have a hard exterior but inside I’m like—”
“I know exactly what you mean.” It was two o’clock in the afternoon, but still way too early in the day for this kind of talk. “Give me a minute and let me sketch something up for you.”
“Great. I’m so excited to see how this will turn out.” She grinned, lines creasing the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t so much a girl as a woman who was still trying to be a girl, with her tight tank top and short shorts. She probably dedicated a considerable amount of time to working out, and it wouldn’t be long before she delved into the world of plastic surgery, if she hadn’t yet already. “You come highly recommended, you know,” she said, widening her eyes at me.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You tattooed my best friend, Stephanie. She got a ... like a flower or something, half a flower, really. No, it was a lotus. I don’t totally remember, but it was here,” she gestured to her inner forearm, right below the wrist, “and you did it this special way, I forget what it’s called? Jab? Stab? No, not stab—”
“Stick and poke,” I said. “Or hand poked.” That nasal, high-pitched voice of hers was starting to shred my eardrums.
“That’s it! It was so beautiful. I might get something like that next time, but I’ve always wanted a rose, so I’m going with that first. But I really do like the idea of the stick and poke tattoos. It’s like, going back to the basics or something. That’s why Stephanie said she wanted one.”
My thighs were covered with the rudimentary stick and poke tattoos I’d been giving myself since I was a preteen, sitting in my small, shitty bedroom, my stepfather, Wade, taking up all the space in our small, shitty living room, watching TV in a haze of cigarette smoke, surrounded by crushed PBR cans. I used a sewing needle, a chopstick, and some Bic ink and decorated my legs with all the things I wanted to say to Wade but couldn’t: Fuck off & die, Eat a dick, You are a cunt. Oh, I’d said a few things to him before, but that had always resulted in black eyes, broken ribs, a few concussions. The worst of it was when I was ten and he hit me in the face with a two by four. It didn’t knock me out, but it left a spectacularly jagged scar right along my jawline, which I’ve since erased by growing a beard. The last fucking thing I wanted was a daily reminder of Wade’s existence every time I looked in the mirror.
It only took me a few minutes to sketch the rose exactly to this particular customer’s liking—so she said—and then she sat in the chair and I got to work. She kept up a steady stream of chatter that was easy enough to nod mindlessly to while tuning out at the same time. I felt a building sense of discontent, some sort of strange malaise, even though I knew how little sense that made. On Point Tattoo—my very own shop—was doing better than I ever could have imagined, and showing no signs of plateauing any time soon. I’d been doing so well, in fact, that eight months ago, I’d hired a second artist, an art school dropout named Helena with an uncanny ability to recreate, from memory, pretty much anything she saw in exacting, photographic detail. She was better than I was, though that wasn’t something I was willing to admit out loud. At least not yet. She probably knew it, but she hadn’t brought it up, and she didn’t seem like she was one of those people that needed to prove something about themselves. Besides, it would be good for business, which was what I told my buddy Todd when he started giving me shit about it.
“When I think of On Point, I think of you, Graham,” he’d said. “Not Helena. Which, by the way, is way too an exotic of a name for someone with as plain a face as she has.”
It was true: Helena was a plain Jane with spaghetti legs and no tits to speak of. She had brown hair she wore in a no-nonsense braid and had a penchant for wearing baggy, skater shorts and white tank tops that only accentuated the fact that she was flat chested. I guessed she was a lesbian, but we didn’t talk about our sex lives.
But this discontentedness, I’d say that started not long after Helena started working for me, though I didn’t think the two were related. No, it had more to do with the fact that I’d broken things off with Danielle, and that Danielle also happened to be a bit mentally unbalanced. That’s putting it nicely. She turned out to be a complete psycho. Not a dangerous one, but I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that her pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage were actually figments of her imagination. There was also the fact that we’d both discussed, at length, the fact that neither of us was really interested in being in a relationship and would prefer to keep things casual. At some point, she’d changed her mind, though she hadn’t bothered to let me know it.
Other than that, though, there was absolutely no reason for me to be feeling anything but satisfaction with the way things were working out in my life so far—successful business, fulfilling work, as much sex as I wanted. Women like tattoo artists, and women like beards. Even the women that you might peg as too straight-laced to get an actual tattoo themselves. There were a couple weeks this past winter—before Danielle—when I slept with a different woman every night for two weeks straight, culminating in a face slap when I accidentally called Hattie (Night 14) “Katie” (Night 2).
“Oh, wow, that looks great.” I’d finished with the rose and my customer was beaming down appreciatively at her cleavage. The skin was red and puffy around the outline of the rose, but it’d come out as good as you could expect something like that to look. As I taped a gauze pad to her, I gave her the spiel about the “dos” and “don’ts” of caring for her new tattoo.
“I’m going to tell all my friends about you,” she said. “I hope you
’re ready for an onslaught of business.”
She reached out and touched my arm, letting her fingers linger there just a few seconds too long. Long enough for me to know I could suggest we take a detour to the back room and she’d be on her back in two seconds flat.
But ... no. I didn’t find her that attractive, and there was some part of me that had begun to suspect my feelings of ill ease were stemming from all the sleeping around I’d been doing. I hadn’t really investigated these feelings any further, mostly because I wasn’t the sort to sit around analyzing my moods and shit, but it was getting a bit harder to ignore. It was like an annoying, yappy dog, or a mosquito that kept buzzing by your ear: You’d try to ignore it, tune it out, but it was right there, demanding that you pay attention.
I didn’t want to have to think about any of that, though, and I’d put it off for as long as I could, the hope being that eventually the feeling would just disappear. Things were good right now—as good as I could really expect them to be—and I planned to do whatever I could to make sure it stayed that way.
*****
I was just adding some black power lines to one of my regular customer’s latest—an elongated koi fish devouring its own tail—when Todd showed up. He gave me a mock salute when he saw I was with a customer and sat down in one of the lounge chairs up front to wait for me to finish.
“You up for a ride tomorrow?” he asked once we were alone in the shop. “I’m thinking twenty, twenty-five miles.”
“Sure,” I said, though it hadn’t been on my agenda. Todd and I were somewhat unlikely pals, at least looks-wise: he was your typical, clean-cut jock, a category 1 mountain bike racer. Maybe more surprisingly, I was also a cat 1 mountain bike racer, though I wasn’t affiliated with any club and I sure as shit didn’t wear a spandex kit. I ran flat pedals and a rode an all-mountain, full-suspension bike, which pissed off a lot of the cross-country racers who actually took the racing circuit seriously. Todd, though, found it more amusing than anything else, and for that reason, we hung out and went riding together fairly often.