“Moo Juice?”
“Oh, this should be good,” Erin clapped her hands waiting for my sister’s reply.
Anna cupped her boobs and gave them a squeeze. “You know, Moo Juice, for Archer?”
“Oh my God! You did not just do that, you dirty little bitch!” Erin squealed out amidst her laughter.
I just shook my head at my sister. “Not you too!” The groan that followed my complaint reverberated through my body. The men at the club had nothing but jokes about my milky tits and now my sister was adding to that. Jesus. I really needed to think about a breast reduction when I was done being an all-you-can-eat buffet for my son.
“There’s plenty of breast milk in the fridge,” I told my sister before I rolled my eyes at her and walked away.
“Well, that went better than expected,” I heard Erin say to Anna. “Now, tell me everything.” I wasn’t even mad that they were about to talk about my life behind my back. I knew it was all in love and that Erin just needed to be filled in on the details so that she knew how to handle me throughout the day. I loved my girls. The one thing I never had to fear was not having someone to take my back when shit got real. I’d been there once before where the only people I could rely on had been Erin and my mom. Now, I had more people added to that list and it felt nice to know that I wasn’t alone. They all managed to help, even on the days when all I felt was lonely because I was missing my husband.
It didn’t take too long to get dressed and for us to drive over to the studio. What surprised me, when we got there, was that Gretchen was seated in a chair about to get some work done. Despite working in a tattoo studio and having a husband who was an award-winning tattoo artist, Gretchen didn’t have a whole lot of ink on her. “What’s going on?”
“Hey, Ever!” Sarah remarked as I stood there watching her apply the transfer to Gretchen’s shoulder blade area.
“Sarah,” I called back in greeting. Sarah Pienaar was the woman who had taken over a lot of my work when I had to lessen my hours at the shop after Deck went missing. She was originally from South Africa, though her mom was of mixed heritage, stemming from both France and South Africa. Sarah’s father had been a mix of African, Hispanic, and something else. She was never certain though because her father died before she was born, and his family refused to claim her and cut all ties with her mother after the incident. When we had talked about it before, Sarah had joked that she just claimed a little of everything thanks to her parentage and the little bit of mystery surrounding her father’s background.
I leaned over and took a look at the transfer Sarah had applied. “Oh, wow! That is going to be amazing. I want to see immediately when it’s done.”
“Why don’t you guys just hang out and watch then. You can keep me company. I hate going under the needle,” Gretchen whined.
Sarah smacked Gretchen’s ass and laughed at her. “Going under the needle,” she repeated as she chuckled. “You make it sound like you’re going into surgery.”
“You are, in fact, altering my appearance with a needle, so I think it’s a perfect description.”
“So, what does all of it mean? I assume if you don’t actually like getting tattoos, that this has to mean something to you.” Erin’s question and her reasoning for it brought me up short. She was right about all of that, which made me wonder how far off my game I was because that was something I usually tried to puzzle out when I first saw people’s ink.
“Well, the cherry blossom tree is to represent my journey in life. The two King cards are pretty self-explanatory, I think.”
Erin nodded her head. There was one for Toby and the other for Kane. I could have hugged her right then for not leaving Toby out of her journey, but that wasn’t necessary. Gretchen may have moved on after my brother’s death, and rightfully so, but she had never forgotten him. I had to hand it to Kane, because he made sure that Toby was never forgotten too. Each playing card dangled from a branch on either side of the tree. Then, right in the middle of the trunk of the tree there were two angels and one set of angel’s wings carved into the wood.
“The angels are Nate and Grace,” she told Erin, speaking of her children with that special lilt she always got in her voice when she mentioned them. “The wings are for my baby with Toby,” she went on and none of us missed the way she still choked up a bit when she talked about them or said my brother’s name. We didn’t point it out either. Whenever I think on the past, the one thing I hold dear to my heart is that she would have made a wonderful sister-in-law and addition to our family. I knew this because she ended up being just that anyway. We may not have been blood, but Kane was my brother, just the same as he was Erin’s.
After that, we left Sarah to it for a bit so that I could draw something out for her. “So, you didn’t think the tattoo was obvious?” I asked, wondering why she made Gretchen spell it out for us.
“G needs to talk about it more. Besides, she’ll be asked once in a while by people who don’t know. It’s good practice for her, being able to get out the meaning without breaking down emotionally over it. Better she do that among people she loves than with strangers.”
“You really are the best human being, you know that right?”
“Of course, I do! Why do you think we’re friends?”
“Because I’m awesome,” I joked.
“Nope, because you unfailingly point out how awesome I am all the time and feed my starving ego.”
I laughed at my best friend then. “You’re an idiot. I don’t think your ego has ever starved a day in your life.”
The smile vanished from her face as her eyes took on a distant, glazed over appearance. “My ego has been starved before,” she mentioned before snapping out of it and sighing in a loud and obnoxious manner. “Let’s not go down dreary memory lane today. Shall we draw pretty pictures and place them upon my skin instead?” The last was given in a horrible attempt to sound both British and posh. Needless to say, Erin failed, but I couldn’t bruise her ego by telling her that. Not after I had just inflated the damn thing for her.
The best part about having the women I did in my life was that they had taken one of the absolute worst mornings I’d had in ages, and they turned it around for me. For a little while, I forgot about the photo, about Deck being missing and naked in the arms of another woman, a very pregnant woman, and I just became Ever, the tattoo artist, sister, mother, and friend that told horrible jokes and laughed too much to make up for a childhood where laughter wasn’t really on the menu.
When I went to bed that night, I wasn’t thinking about all the negative things that had been killing my spirit for months. Instead, I closed my eyes thinking about my friends, my family, and the Deck that was here for me just days before he went missing. I knew, the moment I drifted off that it would be him I was dreaming about. Not the part of him I’d seen in those pictures, but the man I had fallen in love with. I could not have been more wrong though.
“Hey, Sis!”
I was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t be dreaming of Deck tonight, but that voice… I couldn’t be mad that he was in my dreams instead. I turned a genuine, wide-grin on my brother and asked a dumb question. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to help,” He told me, but he seemed oddly rushed. I wasn’t sure why since this was my dream, so I guess that meant I decided when it ended. “I need you to listen.” I nodded and stayed quiet because it was so weirdly realistic being there with Toby. “There’s a place that gets talked about. It’s a little way out of town in a damn run-down looking shack of a house. I need you to go there. There’s a person who can help you talk to me.”
“I’m talking to you now though,” I argued.
“Little Sis, I’ve been trying to do this for years. You never let me in before.”
I scrunched my brows up both at his endearment and the fact that he had supposedly been trying for years to communicate with me. “Then how did it happen this time?” I wanted answers as to why he called me Little Sis, bu
t I think I already knew. He had adopted something he’d heard the guys calling me. Which begged the question, was that because this was my dream and Dream Toby was just my imagination, or Toby had been watching over me since he’d been gone.
“You’re exhausted. I think you were just too tired to fight yourself and your belief that I’m really here.”
“Toby,” I whispered to him, “Are you really here though?”
“I am. I want to help you find Deck and bring him back home, Sis. I can’t do that without your help though. There’s something blocking me from seeing where he is.”
“I don’t know where he is,” I whined.
“I know you don’t, but I think the person you need to go see will be able to tell us how I can find out.”
“What person?”
He laughed then, whether it was at me or himself I didn’t know until he started talking. “Don’t make fun, and don’t decide it’s too stupid to go if I tell you.”. I didn’t agree or disagree with him, just waited for him to carry on. “I was told she can talk to the dead,” Toby explained.
“A psychic? You want me to go see a psychic about Deck? Are you nuts?”
“No, I’m not. Hear me out. She’s not a psychic. She can speak to the dead, that’s something different. Don’t get hung up on the titles, Ev. We both need her.”
“How do you know about her?”
“I tried to get her father to deliver a message to Jay after,” I didn’t let him finish that thought.
“After you died?”
“He refused. Said if Jay ever came looking for answers he could give them to him, but that he wasn’t an errand boy for any damn ghosts.” He laughed about the memory then and I didn’t honestly know how to respond for a minute so I left him to his thoughts, whatever they were.
“If he wouldn’t help you, what makes you think this other person will?”
“You, showing up there on your own, should do the trick.”
“If I do this, you’ll be there watching?” He agreed by tipping his head up and down slightly. “What if I get killed?” Toby laughed at me again and this time it squeezed at my heart, making it ache. God, I had missed his laugh. I hadn’t heard it enough in the years before he died.
“Ever, I wouldn’t send you somewhere dangerous. Please, you have to try to remember this conversation, and you have to go there. It’s the only way.” He repeated the address with me over and over again so that I would remember it when I woke up and just before the real world came crashing in he left me with his beautiful words of comfort. “I love you more than you can possibly know.”
“I love you too, Toby. Always have.” He bent over and kissed my cheek before he whispered, “I know.”
I woke to my daughter wanting me to go downstairs and make breakfast, but before I moved any further, I picked up my cell phone off of the nightstand and I typed the address Toby had made me repeat in my dream. It was real. There was also an ad for a psychic medium. What the absolute fuck? I had no clue what a medium was. Toby had mentioned that they spoke to ghosts, but I wasn’t sure I really believed that was possible. Actually, I felt like I was losing my mind a little bit. The only bonus to that was, debating my own sanity kept my mind off of what the clubs were doing to bring Deck home.
If my dream was real, then that meant I had spoken to my brother and he had been checking in on Deck. It took me two days to work up the courage to go see the woman whose address he had given me. During those two days, my prevailing thought had been to ask him what was really going on between Deck and the woman who kept sending me the photos. I knew it was wrong to have doubts, but I was only human, and my heart had been battered to hell and back over the past year. I honestly didn’t trust it any longer. It wasn’t about anyone else in my life. I simply didn’t trust myself, my judgment, or whether or not I was still clinging to false hope. Going to see a fucking psychic screamed bad decision. There I was though. I stood on her weather-battered porch that seemed as though it hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in more than a few decades past when it should have last happened.
“Hello, welcome and come in,” the little pixie of a woman greeted.
“Do you always just invite strangers into your home so warmly?” I asked right away, figuring it was better to be blunt.
“There are things I read about a person long before I open that door. You won’t understand them, so I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say, I have an extra set of tools I’m working with.” She winked at me then tilted her head up towards the corner of the porch where a camera pointed in my direction. “Besides, you’re on camera, and my video uploads offsite.”
I chuckled then. “Smart,” I told her while wondering if she was telling the truth or if it was just a dummy for when people like me asked her that same question.
“I have to be. I know exactly what kind of people are out there in the world. I live and work alone for the most part, so one can never be too careful.” She smiled back at me over her shoulder as she led me through the entryway and into a small sitting room. The furniture inside all seemed very old, antique quality stuff that was well kept, even if aged. I noted that there was a table in the middle of the space with a cloth across the top and fresh-cut flowers sitting in a gorgeous bowl at the center.
“You were expecting a crystal ball?” The woman asked, and there was no judgement. She was making fun of herself, not my prejudices.
I grinned at her. “Well, you couldn’t blame me if that’s what I’d been thinking, but actually I was admiring the bowl the flowers are in. It’s stunning.”
Her cheeks flushed with color. “Thank you. It belonged to my great grandmother. She used it as her scrying bowl once upon a time.”
“Scrying?”
“Mmm, yes, it’s a thing where you look into the water and see things like the future or…” she cut herself and waved the explanation away. “No matter, that’s neither here nor there because it isn’t an ability I was gifted with. I’m Avalyn, by the way. You can call me Ava, if you’d like.”
“Avalyn is a gorgeous name, unusual.”
“It has many meanings, they usually revolve around beauty, singing, and things. My grandma told me it meant ‘beautiful bird’ and since I used to go around chirping all the damn time as a child, she thought it was fitting that it was the name my mother bestowed me with before she passed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry about your mother,” I told her. “I recently lost my own.”
“Rule number one when going to see a psychic, especially for skeptics, never tell me anything personal!” She winked at me again as we both took our seats.
I laughed. “Well, I must say, you aren’t quite what I was expecting.”
“I get that a lot.”
We sat quietly a moment as I let the atmosphere soak in. “You may think I’m crazy,” I started but she just smirked at me and lifted her hands as if to show the room we were in again.
“Probably not, but I promise, I won’t judge you, if that helps.”
“I was sent here by mydeadbrotherwhovisitedmeinadream.” Okay, so I feared her judgment anyway, even knowing she was a psychic and saw dead people, or talked to them, or whatever.
She laughed. “You want to try that again, but a little slower this time. Maybe, like a whole sentence instead of the longest word in the English language type thing?”
My hands were shaking as I looked right into her eyes and then I stood and started to walk toward the door. I couldn’t do this. There was no way I believed. The address had been right though. How the hell would I have known that. I turned back and Avalyn was just standing there. “I’m afraid,” I admitted. “If this is… if you’re for real… then I – I really talked to my brother last night in a dream.” A lone tear managed to fall and I felt it as the damned thing tracked down my cheek before falling off of my chin somewhere into my clothing.
“Believe it or not, I understand. My life, I grew up in this house. With a father who could talk to ghosts and a gr
andmother who could do all sorts of things.” She smiled tightly at me. “There was a time when I wanted nothing to do with them, with this, with a world where any of it was possible. Hell, I struggled so hard that I even had myself checked out out to make sure I didn’t just come from a family of schizophrenics who made a living off of their mental illness.” She laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “So, when you tell me that your dead brother came to you in a dream and sent you to me, I believe you.”
I narrowed my eyes on her. “You did understand me,” I accused.
She grinned at me. “I figured it out about the time you started panicking. Look, I’m not going to force you to stay, but if you want the answers you came looking for, I think you should. What would it hurt?”
“It could hurt a lot if I take false hope away from here.”
“I promise not to give you any,” she said so nonchalantly that I had to do a double take. She held her hands up in the air in the symbol of surrender. “I’m not a fan of bullshit,” she finally said, and I nodded my head and turned to walk back over to the table once more.
“Honestly, I don’t know what to expect here,” I admitted.
Avalyn turned a bit, seemingly startled by something as a quick, “Oh!” slipped free from her lips. She seemed to be preoccupied with something on the other side of the table before she nodded her head and then spoke again. Only, this time, her attention was not on me as she spoke. “There’s a man here,” she claimed. I don’t know why, but my stomach flipped then flopped over again as my mind went immediately to Deck. Was he gone now?
“Your brother,” she stated while still staring off into nothing.
“My brother?” I questioned. And Duh! That’s who I came to see and I’d just told her that.
“Toby,” his name left her lips on a whisper. I was stunned, momentarily and then I got a little angry.
“Prove it!” The demand was out before I could reign my temper in.
Avalyn waited just a moment, as if she were listening to someone else, and then she turned to look at me as she recited what she’d been told. “Everything will be okay, Ever. Me and Jason will protect you. You’re my sister and that’s my job. Jay will do it because he’s my friend, so it’s his job too.”
Everlasting (Aces High MC - Charleston Book 6) Page 13