by Rhys Ford
And now it was time to finish the dragon on his other hip, to put himself under the vibrating needles again and own a little bit more of his own body.
He’d found a spot for his convertible in the parking structure a few blocks down from the shop, a monstrous cement thing meant to suck up the congestion on Jefferson Street, but nothing could stop the traffic along the piers’ main thoroughfare. After dropping a couple of bucks into the tip cup belonging to a cowboy-hat-wearing guitarist slung against a pub’s post, Rey dashed across the busy street, dodging bodies in the stream of tourists hustling to hit Fisherman’s Wharf before the rain clouds broke open. A light drizzle ghosted over him, catching on his lashes, and he had a brief flash of regret in leaving the top of his car up when he left, since he was sick of being cooped up. After having spent the past few days either in the firehouse or on one of the trucks, heading into the flames or leaving covered in doubt and soot, the water-kissed San Francisco wind was nice to feel on his skin, even if he’d last about a second under its icy bite.
415 Ink shouldered itself into a spot between a souvenir shop bristling with T-shirts and cups bearing witty slogans and poorly drawn San Francisco landmarks and a fairly tame champagne lounge chasing after naughty-minded Midwestern tourists looking for a semi-risqué time amid the shirtless waiters, nacho fries, and two-dollar tacos. The tattoo shop was in a sweet location across the pier, the result of some deal Bear made with the owner of the building nearly ten years before. There’d been some mutterings from the owner of the champagne lounge, sour-grapes rumors spread when Bear first opened, but they quieted down after Bear had a talk with him.
Now the man avoided Bear and the rest of the staff like the plague, something that seemed to suit everyone just fine.
Rey didn’t know the details or even want to know what was said. Very few people crossed Barrett “Bear” Jackson, and those that had usually were nowhere to be found afterward. In the years since he’d known Bear and his oddball family, Rey had only heard the man raise his voice once, and that was one time too many. Still, when he’d walked into the shop earlier that afternoon, Rey only had a wide grin for the broad-shouldered man standing behind 415 Ink’s front counter and bit back a pained grunt when Bear reached over and slapped him on the arm in a hearty hello. His arm still stung from the slap after half an hour, but he wasn’t going to mention it, especially not to Ivo.
One didn’t show weakness to any of the 415 Ink blood brothers, not unless a guy was willing to hear about it for the rest of his life.
He hadn’t been in the shop in a while, but not much had changed. There was a new artist in the space next to Missy, one of the shop’s full-timers, and at some point, the poured concrete floor got a coat of something shiny on it, but the long shotgun-style space still sported a high ceiling painted black and creamy walls covered in various sketches, colored-in drawings, and the occasional photo. The shop’s eight half-wall stalls with their tied-back opaque-white curtains reminded Rey of a stable, but he was thankful for the privacy, especially since he was lying on his side with his ass half out while Ivo worked on him. The stalls were large, giving an inker space to not only maneuver around a broad massage table and worktable but left enough room for a couple of chairs or one massive, shaggy mutt named Earl, who’d only wander out from behind the reception area to visit people he liked.
Rey took a secret delight at Earl, sprawled out close enough to him to scratch at the dog’s ears.
“Okay, love,” Tokugawa murmured from the next stall. “We’re done here. Let me clean you off and you can take a look at it in the mirror.”
The familiar scent of astringent cleaner drifted over to Rey, and he lifted his head, catching a glimpse of the watercolor lotus tattoo, a spray of rich, soothing pinks, purples, and greens over a traditional Asian outline on an expanse of pale skin. The newly inked young woman met Rey’s eyes around the partially open curtain and smiled, twisting around while holding the strap of her tank top under her arm. The piece covered a broad section on her chest near her right collarbone, draping tendrils of color and connective black lines up over her shoulder.
Holding a mirror up in front of her, Tokugawa asked, “What do you think, Steph? It’s a blend, no? Henna-like outline but watercolor effect.”
She stood breathless, a curvaceous blonde with sweet face, then exhaled slowly, her voice a rough, awed whisper, “Oh man, Ichi, it’s… perfect.”
“Good, let me wrap you up and you can get dressed.” He cocked his head, a quirky smile lightening the seriousness of his Japanese features. “Well, not that you’re naked, but it is cold outside, and you don’t want any of this on your leather jacket.”
“Down, Montenegro.” Ivo tapped the back of Rey’s head, a light rap of knuckles only softened by Rey’s thick hair. “You’re fucking with my canvas.”
“Where’s the dog?” Bear called out from the front, and Earl lifted his head, sniffing at the air. “Earl!”
“Better go, dude,” Ivo murmured, scritching the dog with the toe of his red heels. His pleated black kilt shifted, exposing more of his lean, muscled shin. “Don’t want Bear to come looking for you.”
Heaving to his feet, Earl sighed, then shuffled off to the front of the shop. His toenails clicked on the floor, an echoing castanet chorus, before ending in a groaning thump of seventy-five pounds of dog slumping down on a covered piece of memory foam. Ivo’s bark of laughter was subdued but sharp enough to hook Rey’s curiosity.
Then the needles hit and Rey forgot all about the dog, Ivo’s knees, or his fuck-me red pumps.
“Shit, a little warning, bitch,” he grumbled around the pain.
“Oh, by the way, Montenegro”—Ivo’s gleeful mutter tickled Rey’s spine—“you’re going to get a tattoo now. In this tattoo shop. You know, that place that does tattoos.”
“Fuck you, kid,” Rey shot back, then gasped when Ivo did something that felt like a lick of fire along his hip bone. “Fuck you for that too.”
“Yeah, I’m not the brother you want to fuck,” the younger man replied softly. “And speaking of the prodigal son, he’s back, you know?”
Playing dumb with Ivo never worked, but Rey tried it anyway. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Gus.” Another stinging tap of needles then Ivo scooted closer, settling in to work. “He’s back home, Montenegro. Got in this morning, and from what I hear, you’re all he’s been talking about since he got off of his damned Harley.”
Two
“HEY, SLACKER.” A nudge, hard and firm, jostled Gus out of his doze. “Get the fuck up or you’re going to get eaten alive by mosquitoes.”
There was no arguing with that voice. Well, at least not with the man attached to it. If Bear wanted to, Gus was pretty sure his older mostly-brother could pick him up by the head and fling him around as easily as Earl did the flat raccoon toy he’d gotten last Christmas, and there wasn’t enough room in the Lower Ashbury house’s backyard to swing a cat, much less a full-grown Gus.
“Not sleeping,” he grumbled, shoving his hands to his sides to resist scrubbing at his eyes. He kept them closed, refusing to give in to Bear’s prodding. “Just… thinking.”
“Dog’s been licking your foot for the past five minutes, kid.” Bear gave another bone-rattling tap to Gus’s shoulder, then from the sounds of his footsteps on the back patio’s pavers, moved over to the other sofa they’d dragged out to the covered patio. “Get up. I want to talk to you.”
So not the words Gus wanted to hear after a long haul back into the city on a misfiring Harley. Especially after it began to rain and he discovered there wasn’t as much life left on his back tire as he’d thought. It’d been enough to keep him from dying, but that wasn’t something he was going to toss out in front of Bear. Not if he wanted to stay in one piece.
And damn it, his bare foot was soaking wet, sporting a sticky damp coat from Earl’s aggressive tongue.
Opening his eyes and sitting up was of a mistake. He hurt a bit from t
he tumble he took when a heavy city-owned garbage truck tapped his rear end when they were coming off the freeway and into the turn. He’d gone down, not as hard as he had before, but his leathers were shot, and the helmet he’d sworn to replace a few months ago was now scraped to shit and unusable. A piece of duct tape held the damned thing—and a few of the bike’s parts—together long enough for him to limp it home, but stashing the Harley at the rear of the house hadn’t worked out as he’d planned. From the rough scrape in Bear’s tone, there was going to be a lecture.
Maybe even two scoldings, because the first would be about him getting hurt and the second because he hadn’t planned on bringing it up to his older brother. If there was one thing Bear didn’t like, it was finding out about shit all on his own.
“City’s going to pay for everything. Helmet, leathers… bike too.” Leaping into a conversation with an offensive thrust was usually the best way to circumvent Bear. The problem—as most of Gus’s problems turned out to be—he’d chosen the wrong offensive angle, because Bear’s thick black eyebrows pulled in tight over his slightly skewed nose. Not a good sign. Finally succumbing to the scratch of grit on his lashes, Gus rubbed at them then peered out at his brother. “What?”
“What the fuck happened to your bike?” The frown moved from curious to raging fury in the time it took Gus to blink.
He should have known better. Bear’d lost his parents in a bus crash, and Gus didn’t have to be psychic to know his older brother probably panicked at the Harley’s mangled carcass. It’d been touch-and-go with CPS about Bear joining their family, but Gus’s mother—Bear’s aunt—had cleaned up long enough to give the social worker hope it would work out.
She’d been wrong, but Gus didn’t blame her for thinking Melanie’d gone straight. If there was one thing his mother had been good at, it was lying to get her way. She’d fought hard to get custody of Bear, only to discover the money he’d been awarded for his parents’ death was locked down until he was an adult.
After that, any pretense about being a good mother and role model went right out the window.
“Shit, the bike.” Gus winced. “I can explain.”
There was no yelling. Bear didn’t yell. If anything, he got quieter, a low rumble of intensity most sane people tried to avoid triggering. Gus had no such luck. Everything he said or did seemed to trip Bear’s simmering ire—or worse—set off the flat stillness of Bear’s disappointment. God knew Gus had saved up cupfuls of Bear’s quiet, damning disappointment, all ready to for the time when he wanted to mortar himself into a hole and die.
Oh, opening his eyes was a mistake. Sitting up was worse. Nothing like staring into Bear’s not-so-gentle face and finding tenderness in his strained expression.
So Gus shifted his attention to the backyard and the milky clouds obscuring the night sky.
It was late. Had to be because Bear would have stayed until 415 Ink closed, especially since Ichi was taking up a guest stall. Ivo—the only one of the brothers who was his actual sibling—was probably out prowling, doing whatever it was insane artists did on a weeknight. Or a Saturday, in which case there were places Gus could have been if only his bike wasn’t a rattling mess of duct-taped pieces alongside his helmet.
If only Bear wasn’t staring him down.
Because no one could make him feel anything like his cousin Barrett.
Home felt good around him. Even as complicated and fucked up as their lives—his life—was, the house Bear bought back when a phalanx of lawyers handed him the insurance money from his parents’ death was Gus’s home. He’d known other places, lived in a few, slept in a few cars. They all had, but the ramshackle, screwed-up, kind of wonky old three-story house on the hill was home.
His brothers who broke skin and bones to rebuild the house—brothers in both blood and something more—were the only family Gus had. Five souls, thrown together by a cracked system intent on driving its clients into death, jail, or insanity and the hard-nosed badass who’d pulled them out.
With the five of them contained in its walls, the house came alive, a vibrant stew of noise, laughter, and a bit of bickering. They’d been drawn to one another through blood and bonding over being gay or bi in a system already intolerant of anything outside of the norm. The worn-around-the-edges house was their safe place, a home where they could be who they’d meant to be, a place for their boisterous, ramshackle family, with its cobbled together connections and fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants rules.
“Tell me about the bike,” said the badass who’d done the pulling and, in Gus’s case, still yanked on his chain more often than Gus liked. He’d settled down on the longer couch they’d put against the back wall, under the kitchen’s windows, angling the shorter couch into an L to its left. Earl slumped down on Bear’s foot, gnawing at a piece of antler. “How bad are you hurt? What happened?”
Bear sat hunched over, about half a foot too big for the couch big enough to fit the rest of them. He wasn’t the tallest since Mace hit Bear’s height about the moment he’d become a fireman, but he was certainly the broadest and the fucking bossiest. But there was something comforting about having someone pushing you from behind, because when it was all said and done, it also meant they had your back.
“Garbage truck did a hydro and clipped me.” He shrugged, trying to pass it off as nothing, but there were aches along his spine, aggravated by falling asleep on a not-nearly-wide-enough couch while the cold night crept in over the city. “I’m okay. The city guy they sent over said they’d pay for everything. Popped a leak in my back tire and fucked up my front rim a little bit. I’ll get Marco to take a look at it and write up a bill. I’m fine. Pulled in here and figured I’d just sit back and wait before heading down to the shop but… well, shit, couches happen.”
“You weren’t picking up. I was going to head out to find you but I saw your phone on the counter so I figured you were here.” Bear shook his head. “Forget all the shit I’ve given you about that Hello Kitty cover you’ve got on it.”
“Yeah, I had to plug it in. Deader than a Norwegian Blue,” Gus explained, chuckling at Bear’s slight grimace. “Don’t give me that shit. They’re brilliant.”
“One step above Benny Hill. Blackadder. All the way,” Bear retorted, falling into a familiar argument they’d started years ago.
“Please, you keep trotting out Benny Hill like it was filth. You know you laughed. Shit, even Mom laughed.” Ivo’d been too young, and Puck always… Gus shut down that thought before he could fall into the darkness it promised, like he shut down every thought he had of before. His mother rarely laughed, especially after his cousin Bear joined them, straining the household further. Money was tight—it was always tight—and the state hadn’t seen fit to cough up much when they went from three kids to four. Rubbing at the five-pointed star on his wrist, he glanced toward the house, spotting the light in the kitchen window. “Is Ivo here?”
“No, he went out with Ichi and his husband. I figured you’d be here, so I wanted to come home.” His brother-cousin scratched at the dog’s ear, getting Earl to thump the pavers with a massive foot. “Got some chili in the freezer. I can toss that into the microwave. We can have it for dinner after you get a shower in. You’re kind of ripe, kid.”
“Let me unplug my phone first. Don’t want to fry it while you’re doing the chili thing.” Trying to stand up took effort, and Gus nearly bit through his cheek stifling the pained groan his throat coughed up from the moment he leaned forward. He made it halfway, then finally let go of a quiet, hard “Fuck.”
Bear tsked. “Did you go to Urgent Care? They—”
“Fuck off, okay?” The unsettled feeling in his belly snapped out, lashing at Bear, the dog, and the universe. Bear brought his shoulders up, and Gus sucked in air through his teeth, then exhaled. “Look, I’m sorry. I just… fucking hell, Bear. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing right now. It’s all just so damned… it’s too fucking big.”
“Well, first things first, You go get
into the shower and get the stink off of you. Your phone’s going to be okay. Got the house rewired, so nothing’s going to pop.” Bear paused, then hooked his hand under Gus’s armpit and pulled him gently up. “Or catch on fire. Hot water will loosen you up. I’ll get you some ibuprofen.”
“Thanks.” Too small of a word for… everything Bear gave him, everything Bear ever did for him, but it was the only one he could find in his small, closed-off mind at the moment. “I’ll come down after I get cleaned up.”
“You do that.” Bear patted him on the back, gentler than before, but the ache grabbed on to the smack and held on for dear life, reverberating into Gus’s bones. “While we’re eating, we can talk about what you’re going to do, including getting some hours in at the shop. Oh, and I almost forgot. You’re not going to guess who came in today.”
“Do I get three choices, or are you going to be nice and just tell me so I can get under the hot water?”
“Going to be nice, because man, you reek.” Bear grumbled playfully, wiping his hand on the back of Gus’s shirt. “And the guy who came by? Rey Montenegro. Ivo’s laying a dragon over his other side for him, so… he’s going to be in the shop sometime when you’re there, and when he is, I’m going to expect you to play nice.”
THE LAST person Gus wanted to think about when he climbed into the shower was Rey Montenegro, but there he was, a ghost standing next to him, a memory of a kiss he’d never have again, of hands on his body and the chill of fingers sliding off his back, never to return.
“Son of a fucking bitch. Fuck him. Just… bathe, eat, and crash.” He smeared a dollop of shampoo into his hair, scrubbing at the long sun-streaked tangle until suds tickled his lashes. Rinsing the mass seemed to take longer than usual, and Gus had a serious thought of taking a clipper to it, shearing himself as bald as he’d been in the sixth grade when they’d all gotten lice.