“It really means a lot to me.” Ethan hugged my back against his chest, and I felt his lips against the top of my shoulder.
“Well, we aren’t that far into it yet,” I said. I placed my hands over his, still resting on my stomach. “We still have lots more reading to do.”
“I’m glad,” he said, and he kissed my neck. “You should probably take a break, though. You want to watch something and rest your voice? I didn’t know if you had seen any of the movies I sent you pictures of, but we could watch one of them.”
“I’m all right,” I told him. “I wouldn’t mind a reading break though. You want to just sit for a bit?”
“Sure,” he said. He grabbed a can of Coke out of the fridge, added more ice to my water, and plopped down on one of the bean bag chairs.
“So what’s up with the chairs?” I asked, giggling a little. “They don’t really match the rest of the décor.”
“Yeah, I know.” Ethan blushed. “I got them because I always wanted bean bag chairs, and Mom and Dad would never let me get any. Mom thought they were bad for your back or something, which I always thought was bullshit. Anyway, when I went to buy them, I started feeling guilty—I was still dealing with a lot of guilt then—and decided to get pink ones. Pink was my mom’s favorite color. You can probably tell from all the pink shit around here.”
“I did wonder a bit.” I smiled. Ethan reached his hands above his head and stretched, much like I had a minute ago. When he did, I saw more of the tattoo up his arm.
“Ethan, could I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he responded. “Anything.”
“Well…um…I can see you have tattoos. I was just wondering what they were and maybe what they meant, if anything.”
“Oh yeah, sure,” Ethan said and immediately grasped the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it over his head.
Oh my…wow.
Chapter 11—Escape
Teenager or not, Ethan without a shirt looked mighty fine. He wasn’t an overly muscular guy, but his shoulders were broad. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were defined and simply divine. I moved in front of him and knelt down to get a better look. A better look at the tattoos, of course. Well, and maybe his shoulders. And his abs. His chest was nice, too. Oh my…double wow. His nipples were pierced. They both had silver hoops that were slightly larger than the ones in his lip.
Ethan turned sideways a little to give me a better view of his bicep muscles, er, the arm and shoulder tattoo. The tail, as I had suspected, belonged to a dragon. It curled around his bicep and met with the body and claws up around his shoulder while the neck curved over the top of his shoulder to the head splayed over his right pectoral. The lettering right underneath the spiked tail read Carpe Diem. The other tattoo, up near the left side of his chest, was of a stylized pair of roses: one was large with the smaller one beneath it. A ribbon wrapped around the stems, with the names Bryson and Grace scripted right over his heart. I reached out and stroked the image of the roses for a moment before looking up into Ethan’s eyes.
“That one is pretty self-explanatory,” he said with a shrug. I nodded in response. “The dragon just reminded me of Dad because he loved dragons in every form—books, paintings, movies—whatever. It’s over my shoulder because he was always coming up behind me and watching whatever I was doing. It also makes me feel likes he’s still watching me, you know?”
“That makes sense,” I said. I ran my fingers up his arm and followed the path of the tail until I reached the dragon’s head. Then my fingers headed back down again to the lettering. “Carpe Diem.”
“It’s pretty much my motto.” Ethan smiled. “Tomorrow is too much of an unknown. If there’s something you want to do, always do it today.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever really looked at tattoos up close,” I said. “They’re more colorful than I thought they would be.”
“It depends on the design,” Ethan said. “Some are; some aren’t.”
“When did you get these?”
“I got the roses on my eighteenth birthday because no one would let me get it before then,” he said. “The dragon was just a couple months ago, about a year after the first. I saw it in a tattoo art book of Gwen’s and took it into the tattoo place near their apartment. Like I said—it reminded me of Dad.”
“Did you get your piercings then, too?”
“No,” Ethan said. He reached up to his right ear. “I got them the year after my parents died. I had kind of a breakthrough—I was still in weekly therapy then—when I finally let go of all the guilt I was feeling just for being alive when they weren’t. I realized they had already taught me everything I needed to know. I just needed to figure out how to apply it to my life.”
“Are the earrings significant, too?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t pressing too much. He nodded.
“These three are me and my parents together,” Ethan said, letting his fingers glide over the three silver rings in his right earlobe. He pulled each of them out of his ear, and showed me the names engraved inside each ring—Ethan, Bryson, Grace. He put them back through the holes in his ear in the same order and then moved his hand over to his left brow where the single ring was. “This one is me, alone. It’s up on my head because I had to learn to think for myself and make my own decisions even if they weren’t what everyone else wanted me to do.”
I had to swallow hard at the thought of him considering himself to be so alone. I found myself wishing I had been there when it happened so I could have helped him through it at the time.
“These,” Ethan said, placing the tips of his fingers against his bottom lip, covering the rings there, “are my parents again, because as long as their names are on my lips and their memory in my heart, they’ll always be with me. I’m a little into symbolism, I guess.”
“Ethan that’s…beautiful,” I whispered. I blinked a couple of times to push back the tears threatening to form.