Anna Martin's Opposites Attract Box Set: Tattoos & Teacups - Something Wild - Rainbow Sprinkles

by Anna Martin

  I thought about protesting, but he was absolutely right.

  “You need to be young and cool to keep hold of your young and cool boyfriend,” Payne said, teasing me. She yelled out into the shop for someone called Chad. Another highly pierced young person appeared, dressed head to toe in black.

  “What’s my next appointment?” she asked.

  “You don’t have one,” he said with a grunt. “You wanted to finish early today.”

  “Can’t think why,” she said breezily. “Would you mind doing some research for me? Gargoyles on churches. Scottish, if you can find them, but that doesn’t matter too much. Don’t bother with anything that looks too much like, you know, ‘fantasy’.”

  “Look,” I started in my most reasonable voice. “I really appreciate you taking the time to think about this, but I really don’t want a tattoo.”

  “Of course you don’t,” she said in the same reasonable tone. “I’m nearly done with Chris.”

  After a few more minutes, she wiped over his chest with more antiseptic wipe. It looked red and angry, the black lines raised on sore, swollen skin, little dots of blood still welling from the needle. He took a look at it in the mirror and smiled, then let her wrap the skin with plastic wrap and tape.

  “Have a seat,” Payne said to me. “And take your shirt off.”

  Chris was re-dressing in his plaid shirt and smirking at me. I shot him a panicked look, and he took long strides over, catching my chin in his fingers and kissing me hard.

  I took my shirt off.

  Chad arrived with several printed pictures of the external stonework of churches, and Payne handed them to me silently to look through as she packed up and cleared away from her session with Chris.

  “This one,” I said, handing him a picture.

  “Looks like the painting in your apartment,” he agreed.

  When she was done, Payne studied the image for a few minutes and nodded. “I can work with this.”

  I was terrified to the point of raised heartbeat and sweaty palms but fortunately still had control over the most base of bodily functions. She rooted around in a drawer for a moment, then produced a bunch of Sharpies on a key ring.

  “Marker pen,” she said, selecting an orange one. “All I’m gonna do is draw it on you.”

  “You’re going to freehand it?” Chris asked, sounding impressed.

  “Yeah. It’s easier than trying to make a stencil work.”

  I hated Payne for putting me through the entire ordeal, but let her manipulate my arm this way and that as she sketched the orange ink onto my skin.

  Chris held my hand, same way I did for him when it was the needle on his skin. I startled when she reached for a red marker, and Chris assured me she was just adding the detail.

  When she was done—it took about twenty minutes—she nodded to herself and then to me.

  “Go take a look.”

  I felt silly, going to look at a drawing on my skin while others around me were making it permanent.

  And it was fairly perfect.

  Despite the fact that it was drawn in orange and red ink, the gargoyle snarled and sneered out from my skin, its neck arching and jaws wide. I could see the marks she’d done to guide the shading, and my head filled in the details, making it look like stone.

  “Can you do it?” I asked. “I wouldn’t want to disturb your afternoon.”

  “It would be my pleasure,” she said with a disturbing Cheshire Cat grin. “I always love to pop an ink cherry.”

  The feelings of nausea only increased as I watched her unwrap a fresh needle and set up the station again. This time it was for me. Chris had replaced his shirt but left it unbuttoned over his chest; he grabbed my hand and ran his thumb back and forth over it reassuringly.

  “Just relax,” he said.

  “It’s going to hurt,” I said grimly.

  “Probably.”

  “That’s not so reassuring. Why am I doing this?”

  “Peer pressure,” Payne offered. “To fight your fear. Rebellion.” She paused and tilted her head to the side. “Delayed rebellion in your case, maybe. Because you’re an independent man who doesn’t need to play by the rules. To impress your young, cool boyfriend.”

  “All of the above?” I offered.

  “Excellent,” she said. “Let’s get started.”

  To be fair, it didn’t hurt as much as I had expected. Chris and Payne kept up a seemingly unending stream of chatter, asking about my job, my daughter, Scotland and my heritage…. There were points when I winced, or the low, constant pain turned into more of a burn, but I couldn’t quite face looking at the needle, and after a while my arm ached more from holding the uncomfortable position than from the actual tattoo itself.

  “If you ever tell Chloe about this…” I said to Chris.

  “Won’t,” he promised.

  “Or Luisa. Or my mother.”

  “Are you going to introduce me to your mother?”

  “No,” I told him. “She’s the most conservative, uptight, WI woman you will ever meet.”

  “What’s WI?”

  “The Women’s Institute. Google it, you heathen.”

  Laughing, he leaned over and kissed me lightly. “It’s nearly done,” he whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank fuck for that,” I whispered.

  Payne heard me and laughed, pulling her machine away from my skin for a moment.

  “I’m just going to do a few more highlights, then we’re good,” she said. “Thanks for letting me do this. It’s been fun.”

  “For you, maybe,” I said darkly.

  The pain was starting to set in now, feeling like the worst sunburn of my life with sharp edges around the throb. Each time I dared to glance down at my arm, it was smeared with a combination of ink and red, red blood.

  “It looks a funny colour at the moment,” she was saying, and I forced myself to concentrate. “And it will until the swelling goes down. Chris knows how to take care of it properly, but I’m going to tell you as well.”

  She proceeded to give me a list of instructions on how to best care for my tattoo, to not wear anything too close to my skin for the next couple of days to let it heal and to keep applying lotion. And most importantly—to not pick at the scabs.

  “Scabs?” I repeated faintly.

  “Yeah, Rob, scabs,” Chris said, sounding amused. “They won’t last long, but if you pick them off, you’ll be left with holes in the tat.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I muttered.

  “Right,” Payne said, interrupting our bickering. “Done. Do you want to take a look?”

  “No,” I said. “Frankly, I’m terrified.”

  Payne smirked as she wiped the last of the blood away with a cloth soaked in alcohol; it stung but soothed my abused skin at the same time.

  Chris took my good arm and tugged me to my feet, lacing his fingers with mine as he led me over to a large mirror mounted on the wall.

  I didn’t have time to feel self-conscious about my semi-naked state. It was beautiful. Behind the welling drops of blood, the gargoyle clearly looked like it was carved from stone, crouching, its face following the lines of my arm so much so that it looked like it was designed to go there. Which, of course, it was.

  “It’s amazing,” I said as Chris ran a comforting hand down my back.

  “It really is,” he agreed. “I almost feel jealous that it’s not on me.”

  I tore my eyes away from the mirror long enough to look at him. “It wouldn’t fit on you,” I said, my throat somehow making my words sound hoarse.

  Chris shook his head. “No. But it’s beautiful on you.”

  He tried to pay for it as Chad wrapped dressing around my arm, claiming it was a gift, but I wouldn’t let him. Still, Payne charged me what I was sure was a lot less than her standard rate for the work she’d done on the condition that I’d go back to her when it was healed so she could take a photo and pin it to her wall.
r />   That night the sting had gone out of it, but the ache remained, and I was convinced this had more to do with the awkward angles I had been forced to hold than with the tattoo itself. It was a little thrill to think I had a tattoo. It was so, so far beyond anything that I had ever considered myself doing. Prior to this, my greatest act of rebellion had been Chloe, and even that hadn’t been calculated.

  I let Chris order pizza for dinner even though it was far from my favourite thing to eat. He seemed to live off the stuff, and I preferred to cook for myself. Even so, it was Saturday night and we were both coming down from an adrenaline high, and I wanted to snuggle with him on the sofa.

  Not that I’d use the word snuggle in his presence. He’d never forgive me for it.

  But Chris was probably the snuggliest person I’d ever met.

  He appeased me by ordering a pizza that was loaded with vegetables rather than meat and cheese. I was trying to educate him on the value of wine over beer, and he accepted the compromise of a nice bottle of red since I’d let him choose the content of our meal.

  We ate sitting on the floor leaning back against the sofa, the pizza box on the coffee table between us. There was an old James Bond movie showing on the TV, which seemed like the perfect thing to not really watch while I spent as much time surreptitiously watching the man my world was slowly starting to revolve around.

  After my two slices to Chris’s six, we curled up on the sofa. It never failed to surprise and secretly thrill me how neatly this man seemed to fit to the contours of my body. He wasn’t shorter than me by much, a couple of inches at the most, and his body was more slender because he went to the gym and kept fit and I didn’t. We were almost equals, yet he was the one who liked to be held.

  Around two thirds of the way through the film, we gave up on discussing our favourite Bond and put an equal amount of enthusiasm and energy into kissing the living daylights out of each other. I liked the way he never submitted quietly to me. If I wanted him on his back, I had to put him there. If I wanted his hands to slow down, I had to pin them to the armrest. If I wanted him to stop bloody squirming, I had to press my hips into his—although that didn’t work as well as I’d hoped it would.

  When I rocked my hardness against his, he grabbed my arm, a natural move but one that made me hiss in pain.

  “Shit, shit, sorry,” he said as he pulled back. “Sorry. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I told him. “Honestly, I’m okay.”

  He smiled at me with a slow, easy smile that liquefied my spine. “Good,” he whispered.

  Climbing off the sofa, I extended a hand to him and helped to pull him to his feet. Flea immediately relocated himself to the warm spot we’d just vacated, and I rolled my eyes at him while I locked up the front door, then hesitated.

  “You’re staying tonight, right?” I asked.

  Chris nodded. I held his hand as we wandered back through to my bedroom.

  He didn’t stay every night of the week but often enough that I felt almost confident that he’d want to sleep next to me. Mostly because him staying the night meant we’d have sex, and Chris liked sex. A lot. But also because I got the feeling he was starting to actually like sleeping in my arms.

  “We should take a shower,” he said. “Clean off the ink before we go to bed. I’ll put some lotion on for you as well.”

  “Do you want to share?” I asked as my fingers started unbuttoning his shirt, revealing his new ink.

  The slight tilt of his head was one that I recognised. It meant Kiss me, now.

  My eyes were transfixed by his, a connection between us that didn’t want to be broken. It had taken such a short amount of time for him to become so much more than just my boyfriend. He leaned in and pressed a soft, soft kiss against my lips and reached for my hand, bringing it up so my fingertips pressed against his body, over his heart.

  I was sure I was hurting him as he pushed my hand further into the red skin with black lines. I pulled away harshly, from both his kiss and his touch.

  “Hey,” I said softly. “That has to hurt.”

  His eyes flickered down to where my fingers had left little round marks, and back up to my face. He shrugged. I stripped the last of my clothes, careful not to snag my new tattoo, and, with his hands in mine, walked backward to my bathroom.

  It was imperative that the water wasn’t too hot, but when it was just right, I dragged him in under the gently falling spray. Even so, I winced when the water washed over my newly sensitive skin.

  Chris let the water pool in his hands and used soft touches to clean my arm of the dried blood and ink that Payne hadn’t caught in her clean up earlier in the afternoon. Following his example, I splayed my fingers over his chest.

  “It’s really perfect for you, you know,” I said, looking at the finer details in the thin black lines.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling. “Because it has passion and fire and freedom and energy.”

  “And love. Don’t forget the love.”

  “You’re incredible,” I said.

  Chris leaned back into my touch as I pushed shampoo through his hair, roughly, as he liked it. As I expected, my actions caused his cock to stir and grow against my thigh, lengthening and filling until he was hard. Despite his reaction, we were both too tired to do much more than lazy kissing as we finished showering and dried off.

  I let Chris slick the cool lotion over my tattoo, irrationally pleased at how much it helped ease the residual sting. After he’d done the same to his own tattoo, we both dressed in T-shirts to protect the ink and climbed into bed.

  Weeks of sleeping naked next to each other made the layers of cotton between us more of a barrier than I was used to. Still, I curled up around him and carefully laid my arm across his stomach.

  “I can’t believe I got a tattoo today,” I said against his shoulder.

  Chris laughed. “Me either. It’s hot, Rob. You’re badass.”

  “I’m far from that.”

  “Rob?”

  “Yeah?”

  “All of this… being with you… sometimes I think it all comes down to those three scary little words,” he said softly.

  “Dad, I’m pregnant?”

  He laughed and dropped his head back against my shoulder. “I love you.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d said it. Or the last. But I felt it, right down to my bones, I felt it.

  “I love you too.”

  Chapter 11

  Wednesday was my day of back-to-back lectures in the morning, thankfully all in the same room because with barely half an hour between each one, moving from one side of the campus to another would be practically impossible.

  After my last class had filed out, I allowed myself just a moment of putting my head in my hands and groaning before starting to load up my bag with all my papers.

  “Professor McKinnon?”

  “I’m sorry, my office hours are printed on my door,” I said with a touch of irritation. “I don’t have time….”

  Since my interrupter hadn’t re-interrupted me, I looked up.

  Chris was sitting in one of the seats near the back, arms folded, smirking. He was wearing a dark blue cashmere sweater and jeans, his leather jacket layered over the top and a striped scarf I recognised from my own closet around his neck.

  “Git,” I muttered under my breath, shaking my head as I finished putting my things away and swung my bag over my shoulder. Chris got up and jogged down the steps towards me. “What are you doing here?”

  “I missed you,” he said simply. “So I thought I’d come and find you and let you buy me lunch.”

  “I meant, what are you doing here,” I said, taking his hand as I reached him and pulling his body to mine. “The campus is huge. How did you find me? Have you been here the whole time?”

  The thought made me nervous.

  “For the last half-hour, yeah. And I bribed a girl at the office,” he said, raising his eyebrow as he wrapped his ar
ms around my neck. “You’re a popular man, Professor McKinnon.”

  “And you’re a persuasive one, Mr. Ford.”

  “Are you going to kiss me now?” he asked, his blue eyes wide and blinking.

  “I might,” I said softly and leaned in to brush my mouth across his.