“I want mine on you too,” Lily told me, rubbing the tip of her finger over the names to show what she meant.
What she didn’t know was that I already had that booked – tomorrow.
“You already have a spot.”
Lifting her head up, she looked at me in confusion. “Huh?”
Moving so that I was helping to support her weight with my free hand in case she got tired, I used my other one to pick up the hand that was resting on my stomach, and moved it over the tattoos she’d just been talking about.
“This side was for my family. I’m going to get their kid’s names added a little further behind it, here.” I moved her hand to the back of my ribs to show her before moving it to the side that had nothing on it yet. “Here is where our son’s hand and foot prints are going to go, along with his name, weight, time and date of birth.” She was looking at the areas as I pointed them out, but I never stopped watching her the whole time. How someone as beautiful as her could be with someone like me, I’ll never know, but fuck me if I didn’t thank all that was Holy every day. “This spot right here,” I moved her hand over where I figured my heart was, but hell if I knew – I’d only just passed biology, “is yours.”
Her eyes shot up to mine, and I saw the tears building in them. Damn I hoped they were happy ones.
“Mine?”
Nodding my head, I lifted up a hand to catch a tear that escaped with my thumb. “Yours. Dean is doing it tomorrow.”
Her lower lip started to tremble hearing this, but I didn’t expect what she said next. “Please tell me he isn’t the one who did your tattoo backwards? I mean, I love that you’re getting it done, but it’s really confusing, you know? Does he do normal tattoos too?” she was sobbing by the end, and I wasn’t sure if that was because it meant something to her, or if it was because she was worried about me having another back-to-front tattoo done.
Bursting out laughing, I caught her up in both arms and lifted her up my body. Her bump seemed to have doubled in size since this morning so it was a struggle to find a position that didn’t rest all her weight on it, but we got there in the end – after about five minutes of adjustments.
“Yeah, baby, he does normal tattoos. He’ll also be sober and not feeling the effects of tequila with drugs in it.” How he’d tattooed with that shit in his system confused me, but he’d done tattoos on seven of us that night, including Dad and Gramps.
Thinking about Gramps took the humor out of the situation for me. His heart attack had scared us all, but it had also reminded us that he wouldn’t be around forever. A world without Hurst Townsend in it just didn’t seem doable. Even now he was a big presence, and a vital part of us. When we’d seen him in the hospital, Parker shocking him with the paddles and trying to save him… a piece of us all had died that day. It wasn’t meant dramatically either – it really had. You go through life thinking you had an infinite length of time ahead of you, but you really didn’t. No one lived forever, and this had shown us that. So, the naïve part of us that took it for granted had died, and now it felt like we were all sitting on the edge of our seats just waiting for that call.
Fuck, but I hoped that call never came.
Lifting my hand, I rubbed over the area with his signature and took a deep breath in. Dad had phoned Gramps to see if he’d had any tequila with us, but thankfully he hadn’t. He was on medication and still recovering, so he’d had one beer that had lasted the whole night, and that was it. This was amusing though because it meant he’d had a tattoo done by a drunk guy when he was sober. Only Hurst Townsend!
It had also made me question why he didn’t figure out that someone had drugged us. Dad had asked him the same question, and apparently we’d all just acted like we were drunk, so he’d assumed by the bottle that it was some modern over-proof tequila or something. Finding out the truth, he’d felt like shit.
“Hey,” Lily called, pulling me out of my depressing thoughts. “You ok?”
“Yeah, just thinking about Gramps.” When her face fell, knowing from going through it with her dad what it felt like, I added, “Plus I need your signature, date of birth, and blood group by tomorrow.”