When I hesitate, he looks back over his shoulder, and suddenly it feels like he’s telling me to do more than follow him for atattoo.
But I don’t understand what else it could be. I raise a brow at him, and his mouth quirks into a half-smile, all the patience in the world on his features.
“Do you want to look at Ashe’s designs more? He’ll be back in a little while, and my feelings will only be hurt a little if you want him to do your tattoo instead of me,” Arlo offers, his posture and tone the epitome of relaxed and at ease.
“Don’t you need my ID? My debit card? For me to sign a contract or whatever?”
Amusement colors his features, but he pushes it away a moment later, like what I’ve said is the funniest thing he’s heard all day. “Look, I don’t think you’re going tosue mefor a tattoo you don’t like, are you?”
“Well…no,” I admit, especially since I don’t even know what Iwant.
“And, no offense, you can’t pass for under eighteen, Ari.”
I reach up to touch my face, pushing my full cheeks upward. “Liar,” I tell him flatly. “I have a baby face and a youth that screamsageless.” There’s humor in my voice when I say it, and some of the unease from his words melts off of me.
“Yeah,okay,” he says like he’s humoring me. “I won’t argue with you. That seems rude. Anyway, I’m not really worried about it. Areyou?” he asks, challenging me for the words.
It feelsweird. I’m not sure why it should matter if I sign the papers or not, sure, but he’s making it seem like ameissue instead of a liability and don’t-get-sued issue. Shouldn’thebe the one to care if I do the things other shops have always made me do in the past? I sure as shit don’t feel likeIshould be the one bringing it up or pressing it as an issue.
“It’s your shop,” I shrug, and a peal of thunder shakes the glass door, causing me to flinch from the surprise.
And why does that make him lookhappier? Is it my words, I wonder? Or my reaction.
“Don’t like storms?” He reaches out and crooks two fingers at me again, and I follow him with a one-shouldered shrug.
“I love storms,” I argue walking down the narrow hallway and into a wide room at the back of the building. Throw rugs cover the floor, giving it a cozy feeling though the smell of a sanitized workstation chases out the homeyness to an extent. A tattoo chair sits in a small cubicle surrounded by half walls on two sides, the main wall on another, and multiple sets of drawers and a table are beside it.Finally, this is something that looks familiar. Another station is set up on the other side of the room, and two couches sit interspersed on either side of an end table against the far wall, long windows above them that show the darkening, rain-heavy sky.
The walls here are covered in designs as well, and a few pictures of different people or places. I don’t recognize any of them, except for one that shows Arlo and Ezra, arms around each others’ waists, as they stand in front of the tattoo shopgrinning.
“You can sit down,” Arlo tells me, gesturing to the black chair in his cubicle.
I do so, hesitating before I sit, though I’m not surewhymy body is telling me to hold my horses and slow the fuck down. But I don’t listen and sit with my ankles crossed off the side of the chair while my stomach does anxious flip-flops like it always does before a tattoo. I take a deep breath, hold it through a roll of thunder, and let it out slowly.
The sound causes Arlo to glance at me, and he does so with a small smile on his sharp features and runs a hand through his hair. “Are you nervous?” he asks, absently getting a sketch pad out of the drawer.
“A little,” I admit. “I always get nervous before I get a tattoo.”
“Are you a flincher? A wiggler? Ascreamer?” He wiggles his eyebrows at the question, and I can’t help my snort.
“No. I’m a sit-stiller who doesn’t understand how some peoplefall asleepwhile getting tattoos,” I reply, flexing my feet, so my toes point at the floor in front of me.
“Ezra falls asleep,” he informs me. “He says they don’t hurt at all. Not even the ones on hisribs.”
I wince at that, baring my teeth in sympathetic pain. I don’t have anything on my ribs, and I’m not sure I’m ever going to go down that route. It definitely doesn’t seem like something I’d enjoy, for one. And while my pain tolerance isn’t bad, I don’t think it’s good enough for aribtattoo.
“So you don’t know what you want…but can I see your other tattoos?” Arlo hums, sitting down on a small, rolling chair beside the bigger one that I sit in. He folds one leg over the other and stares at me, still smiling politely as I think about it.
I’m certainly notstrippingto show him the one on my thigh. But I nod and toe-off my shoe enough to show him the snake on my foot that’s coiled in pale flowers.
He hisses in sympathy. “You gotthat,and you flinch at a rib tattoo?”
“I was a little drunk,” I laugh, pulling my shoe back on and gently tugging on my sleeve that’s already hanging off my shoulder.
Arlo helps, his fingers cold on my skin as he pulls the fabric out of the way to look at the swirling flowers in pinks and reds that go over my shoulder, down my chest, and the fox that peeks out from them on my arm. When I go to move, he catches my wrist, pulling it toward him to look at the tattoo there as well.
The one that covers the scars underneath. Though I know that he can see them, and it’s probably pretty obvious what the swirling flowers and crescent moon are covering with the way they’re placed.
He reaches up with his other hand and trails his fingers over the tattoo, making my fingers clench as my stomach does the same. My breath catches in my throat, but before I can tell him to stop, he pulls away and smiles at me sweetly. “Sorry,” he says. “They went a little deep here; it looks like. I can tell by how the ink feels in your skin.”