Every ounce of cockiness I had drained out of me the second the needle buzzed across my sternum.
Mary had started whatever she was inking into my flesh on my upper chest, and while it had stung, it was manageable — an almost pleasant, little bite of pain that had me feeling like I could sit in this chair all day without so much as a little squirm.
Now, it felt like she had a vibrating knife in her hands and was dragging it through the skin and bone, gutting me like a fish.
I hissed in another breath that I held until she took a little break to drag the folded paper towel in her hands over my skin, and I swore that hurt almost as badly as the tattoo itself. My flesh felt raw, almost like I had a fresh sunburn and she was rubbing sandpaper over it.
“You’re such a baby,” she said on a laugh, and the easy way her lips curled told me she was enjoying seeing me in pain.
Not that I blamed her.
“It feels like you’re scraping the bone.”
She laughed again, but I was too busy holding my breath to join her as she started in again. “Just don’t focus on it. Talk to me, tell me a story or something.”
“You expect me to form sentences right now?”
I gritted my teeth, and then let all the tension go when she removed the needle for a break again.
When I wasn’t writhing in pain, I was memorizing everything about the way Mary looked in this moment. Her hair was piled in a messy bun on top of her head, eyes still a little red and underlined in dark circles from our night together. I liked seeing proof that it happened on her face, that it wasn’t a dream. I liked even more that she was marking me permanently, that she was real and I was about to have proof of her existence forever.
Her hands were covered by black gloves, and I’d watched with fascination as she got everything set up for us — from the stencil I told her I didn’t want to see as she transferred it from the paper to my skin, to sanitizing the needles and setting up her station before she powered up her gun and got to work.
She was in her element, and it was a completely new side of her.
I’d seen her sarcastic shield she wore so effortlessly, heard her sling teasing insults with ease. But in this shop, she held herself differently — chin high, shoulders relaxed — calm and confident in a way only someone truly comfortable with themselves and what they do can be.
Inside, she might have been a nervous fucking wreck for all I knew.
But from my perspective, she was a pro.
There’d been a little tension when we first walked into the shop — especially when Nero had seen me step into his space. But I didn’t give a shit about him or whatever had transpired between us the night before. Now that I had my chance to fight for Mary, I was willing to put everything on the line — including my pride.
On our way over, she’d explained to me how much that upset her — the way I acted toward Nero at the bar. In her eyes, it wasn’t me standing up to a creep for her. It was her career in jeopardy, her reputation on the line.
That, I understood.
So, I’d walked right over to him and apologized, shaking his hand and explaining that I was out of line. It didn’t matter that I still wanted to ram my fist right into his fucking nose, or that I still felt like the position he put Mary in was fucked. This place, and therefore these people, were important to her. So I’d respect him and keep my mouth shut.
For now, at least.
Any time I looked over to where Nero had his own client, I caught him watching us. I was sure Mary would see it only as a tattoo artist watching his apprentice and making sure she didn’t fuck up.
I knew better.
The needle vibrating my chest again made me grit my teeth. “You talk,” I managed. “Distract me.”
“What do you want me to talk about?” she asked calmly, smiling a bit as she wiped the mixture of ink and blood away from my skin. When she smiled like that, so effortlessly, it tugged on a string tied to the deepest part of my gut.
How did I not know it was her?
The thought had played on repeat in my mind all night and all day, too. I racked my brain mercilessly, rummaging through it in my desperate attempt to remember that day, to remember her. But I couldn’t — not more than I had last night, anyway.
It was so cruel, how her life had plummeted that day because of me, and I hadn’t even noticed. And my life had shifted, too, but it was because I lost her. I lost her by my own fucking hand.
Thinking of how my team had treated her after, how I had been so broken I hadn’t even noticed…
And even if I did back then, I didn’t care. I couldn’t care about anything or anyone other than the girl online who’d left me like a ghost in the night.
It was all so gut-wrenching, it made it hard to think straight.
Inhaling a breath back to the present, I tried to look down at what Mary was carving into me, but she covered it with her hand.
“No peeking!”
I chuckled, letting my head fall back against the chair again. “Your username,” I said. “Octostigma. What the hell does it mean?”
Her smile bloomed. “In ancient Greek, stigma is the word for tattoo.”
“No shit?”
She nodded. “Kind of fitting, considering the overall view of tattoos over the centuries.” She dipped the tip of her needle into a cap filled with black ink, which she’d explained to me was a way of reloading the ink, before she started again.
“And the octo part?”
“I just think octopus are cool as shit.”
I smiled. “Explains why you draw so many of them.”
“Well, they expel ink, so obviously that attracted me to them,” she explained. “Dreams of being a tattoo artist and all. But they’re also super fucking intelligent. And two thirds of their neurons are in their fucking arms — and they are arms by the way, not tentacles.”
I held my hand up in mock surrender. “I’ll never make the mistake again.”
Her eyes twinkled a bit as she smiled and continued working, and I had to admit, listening to her talk was helping me not to focus so much on the pain.
“They have three hearts, which I thought was pretty rad. But I think the connection I really made was with the fact that with three organs pumping blood into them, and eight arms that essentially all have a mind of their own — they must feel pulled in so many different directions, you know? Like they’re made up of too much to be confined into one little being.”
She paused, wiping my skin, her eyes floating up to mine.
“I could relate to that, feeling like eight people at once, especially at that time in my life.”
“And so, you were Octostigma.”
She smiled in confirmation, sitting back in her chair and cracking her neck. “Want to take a little break?”
“Nah, I’m good. Keep on with the torture.”
Mary rolled her eyes, but then dipped the needle again before resuming her position over me.
I let my gaze drag over every centimeter of her face, noting how she had a line between her brows from concentrating. Everything else was smooth, though, and serene.
Again, I searched and searched, waiting for some sort of recognition to hit me, for my stupid brain to piece the girl tattooing me now with the one who bared her soul to me when I was a dumb teenager. I waited for it to hit me, for me to suddenly see that young girl’s face, how her hair was styled, what notebook she held, the drawing, any of it.
But I couldn’t place her.
I couldn’t remember anything specific about that day, about that moment that had seemed so insignificant to me, but had meant everything to Mary.
Well, that was a lie.
I remembered that day, but not for the same reason. My life shifted later that evening, when I logged on and Mary immediately blocked me, when I called her and she didn’t answer, when all of my texts went unanswered.
I never noticed how my friends reacted to the girl who showed me her notebook because I was too busy obsessing over the girl who wiped me out her life for seemingly no reason.
The reality of it all made me want a time machine so badly I’d kill for one.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Mary said, bringing me back to the present.
“Like I’d devour you if you said the word?”
The gun paused over my skin, and she went white before her eyes shot to mine. “What?”
“That’s what you said to me,” I reminded her. “When you were drunk off your ass during the preseason game.”
“No,” she said, pulling away and covering her mouth with one hand. Her eyes doubled in size. “No, please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Nope,” I said with a victorious smile. “To be fair, your assessment was spot on.” I let my eyes trail a blaze over her skin, from where her own sternum tattoo met the swells of her breasts down to where her hips made a delicious heart shape from her waist.
When I slid my gaze back up, her face was flushed, but she dipped the needle in ink and took position again. The pain had ebbed a bit, almost like my body had adjusted to the invasion.
“Well, that embarrassing tidbit aside, I meant the way you were looking at me just now.” She peeked up at me only a second before her eyes were back on where she was working. “Like I remind you of everything you regret.”
I swallowed down the urge to tell her that was partly true.
“So, back to the devouring look, then?” I asked, arching a brow.
She smiled and shook her head, focusing on the tattoo and not saying another word.
It took five hours total for Mary to leave her mark, and when she finished, she wiped away the excess ink and blood with a proud smile on her lips. She looked a little tired, but in the way only an artist could be after completing another masterpiece, like she left a little bit of her soul in me.
I loved the thought of that, that no matter what happened next, she’d always exist in me in some way.
“Okay,” she said, sitting back and admiring the piece. “Ready to see it?”
Carefully, I swung myself off the table, following her to the full-length mirror attached to the wall near her station. She blocked my view of myself, turning around to face me and biting her lip as her eyes scanned where she’d just inked me.
“I hope you don’t hate it,” she said, and her actual concern made its way through the joke she tried to hide it with.
“Step aside, Stig,” I said, grabbing her by the arms and shuffling her out of the way. I didn’t miss the way her cheeks reddened at the nickname, how her smile bloomed with it, too. But when I saw myself in the mirror, my focus shifted entirely to the ink on my chest.
Every muscle in my face went slack, awe striking me like a lightning bolt.
“Holy shit, Mary.”
The skin was still a bit red and angry from being stabbed a million times over the last five hours, but underneath the slight swelling was the most bad ass octopus tattoo I’d ever seen.
The dark ink of the outline was clean and precise, but the shading of the head, of each tentacle, of the little suckers and the textured skin — that was what stole the show. I would never say it out loud, but it was far better than what I’d expected.
It was the kind of tattoo I’d presume to get from an artist who had been practicing for decades, not one who didn’t even officially have her own chair yet.
I lifted my fingers to trace the ink, but she slapped my hand away.
“Do not put your grimy hands on my fresh tattoo,” she said. “It’ll get infected. I need to put a second skin on it, but I wanted you to see it first.”
I shook my head as I took in every detail in the mirror, stepping even closer. It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t gigantic either. The head sat right in the middle of my sternum, with the arms stretching out over my pecs and down to touch the top of my abdomen.
“Adding to your list of regrets?” Mary asked from where she stood behind me.
My eyes found hers in the mirror, and I swallowed. Emotion gripped my throat in a tight vise.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
The corner of her mouth lifted, but then she looked down at her hands, shrugging. “I haven’t done a chest piece before. The sternum was a little harder than I thought, and the shape—”
“It’s perfect,” I said again, and this time I turned to face her, and without a second thought about who was around us or the fact that I shouldn’t have felt comfortable enough to do it, I slid my hands up to frame her face, tilting her eyes to meet mine. “I know you’ve been worried about your style, but I can tell you confidently that you have nothing to worry about. Because this tattoo is sick. It’s bad ass. Fucking incredible. Maravilloso,” I said as her eyes teared up a bit. “And I love it.”
A victorious smile found her then. “Really?”
“Really. But I hope you realize what you’ve done, because now I want you to mark every last inch of my skin.”
She laughed at that, pulling out of my grip and walking back to her station to start cleaning up. “Tattoos are addicting.”
But as she cleaned my piece and covered it with a second skin, giving me all the aftercare instructions, I watched her with the truth vibrating through my chest.
It was her who was the addiction.
