Daring Ink(12)
“Punch.” At least then they’d be even because she felt like shit after no sleep, a bucket full of tears and a gallon of Clorox.
Staci looked at the three men wandering around the studio looking at the flash. They all had on expensive shoes and cheap, ill-fitting pants. They were the kind that window-shopped but never bought.
“You three.” She pointed a long canary yellow fingernail at them. “Vamoose. Come back when you have balls enough to get decorated properly.”
As soon as they crossed the threshold she flipped over the Open sign and locked the door. “No one else comes in for another hour. Tell me everything and leave nothing out.”
So she did. She poured it all out, including the screaming orgasms and the weird but sweet way he’d told her goodnight through the wall last night. By the time she got done, Staci was on her second soda and her third piece of gum.
“I see two options.” Staci held up two fingers in a V. “You can kill him or I can. I know people, and this is Miami, so there are a ton of ways to dispose of the body without anyone knowing a thing.”
“I don’t want to kill him.” She may have thought about it, but she didn’t actually want to off him and Staci really did know people.
“I have a cousin who’d break his leg, a compound fracture at the very least.”
Penny shook her head, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “I’m not going to jail because my heart’s broken.”
As soon as she said the words she realized they were the truth. Somehow, between slipping shut-up-already notes under Sawyer’s door and right up until that elevator ride from hell last night, she’d let him in. Was it love? Not yet, but it was something that would have grown into it. She knew it as well as she knew that anyone who got a lover’s name tattooed on their forehead had exponentially upped their chances of breakup in the near future.
“Look.” Staci sat down next to Penny on one of the tattoo tables and put her arm around her shoulders. “You’re my best friend and I love you, but twenty-five is plenty old enough to learn that a fuck is a fuck and a great fuck is totally amazing, but neither is love.”
“Tell that to my heart.” The one so broken that shards of it were poking into her lungs and making it hard to breathe.
Staci cocked her head to the side and gave her a considering look. She brushed a stringy strand of hair out of Penny’s face, which, Penny knew after she’d made the mistake of looking in a mirror earlier, gave Staci an unencumbered view of the dark circles under her eyes and the bright red coloring on the tip of her nose.
“Oh hell.” Staci leaned her head against Penny’s. “You got it fast and hard—and I’m not talking about the banging.”
Penny let out a chuckle that turned into a sniffle that morphed into a quiet wail. “What do I do now?”
Her best friend—the woman who could fix a busted pipe, balance a ledger and call in muscle to rough someone up—shrugged her shoulders. “That is something only you can figure out for you. But if you decide to go with the leg-breaking thing, let me know and I’ll get you the family discount.”
*****
As Sawyer’s granddad always used to say, desperate times called for desperate measures. Looking around his bedroom a week after the disastrous elevator ride and he figured this stunt would either get Penny’s attention long enough that she’d finally talk to him, or he’d get kicked out of the building.
His bedroom looked like an electronics store. Speakers. Subwoofers. Sound bars. He had it all stacked up on top of each other facing the wall dividing his bedroom from hers.
“You have officially lost your mind, man.” D’Andre surveyed the room with a mix of awe and fear. “She is either going to report your ass to the cops or the mental health professionals. My vote’s for the psych ward.”
Sawyer flipped his friend off. “Please, you’ve known me for ten years. I’m crazy but I’m not that kinda crazy.”
“You’ve never tried to blow a hole through your wall with sound before.”
He adjusted one of the speakers that looked like it was about to tip over. “I’m not going to do that, I just can’t think of anything else. She won’t talk to me because of your big ass mouth.”
“Is that not why I hauled all of my very expensive, top of the line and formerly perfectly calibrated equipment down from the penthouse floor for you?” D’Andre asked. “I admit it when I’m wrong.”
“So do I, but she won’t listen. I’ve sent flowers that she trashed, balloons she left in the hall until they deflated like a drunk dick, and I’ve gone to her studio.” The past week had been hell. He’d gone from never wanting the same girl twice to never wanting anyone but Penny. She’d taken over so much space in his brain that he almost got kicked out of the grocery store last night for standing around and smelling the peaches too long. Obviously, he had lost his mind and was at a breaking point. “None of it has worked. If she’d just listen, I’d tell her I’d do whatever it took to get her to forgive me.”
D’Andre lifted an eyebrow. “And you think busting her eardrums is the way to make that happen?”
“I think it’s a way to get her attention.” Maybe. Hopefully. He was a man of action without options here, so he was making his own.
“All this for some girl you’ve known for what, a week?” D’Andre shook his head, sending his dreadlocks swinging.
“She’s more than just some girl.” She was Penny. His Penny.
“Are you telling me you’re in love?”
Was he? He felt a little deranged and he was more than willing to make a total ass of himself in front of God and everyone to get her back. It definitely wasn’t the kind of thing they wrote about in greeting cards. “Something like it.”
D’Andre laughed. “Good luck to you man. I’m outta here.”
His best friend let himself out while Sawyer looked around one last time. This was crazy, but it just might work. He hit play.
*****
For the third time that week, Penny lay naked in her bed and promised herself she wouldn’t cry herself to sleep. Inhaling a deep breath, she let her eyelids drift shut and tried to picture skulls and bad rose tattoos rather than the honey-brown happy trail dusted across Sawyer’s six pack abs or the way her heart kicked into high gear whenever he walked into the room.
Skulls and bad roses, she chanted to herself, skulls and bad roses, skulls and bad ro—
Music blared through her wall and she jackknifed into a sitting position. The noise was everywhere. Heart pounding against her ribcage, she spun around on her bed and scrambled off of it, then rushed to the doorway to turn on the lights. She slapped her hands over her ears and looked around for the source, but the only thing unusual was the way her paintings bounced against the wall dividing her bedroom from Sawyer’s.
Sawyer…
Still keeping her hands over her ears, she tried to pick out the lyrics blaring through the drywall. The song had a solid thump-thump beat followed by a man with a Scottish accent promising to walk 500 miles to fall down at a woman’s door. That if he was getting drunk it would be with her. That if he was lonely, it would be because he was without her. That if he dreamed it would be of the time he was with her.
Emotion clogged her throat and tears sprung to her eyes as the singer went back to the chorus about walking so many miles to be with the woman he loved.
Sawyer…
He’d fucked up. He’d been trying to make up for it, but she was scared. Falling in love, if that’s what this was, wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t neat. It was ugly and hard and scary but absolutely breathtakingly thrilling at the same time. She grabbed a T-shirt from the hook by the door and put it on.
Could she dare to risk giving Sawyer a second chance?
Could she dare not to?
A pounding echoed up from her floor and it wasn’t musical. It was the person in the condo below her banging something against their ceiling but she didn’t care. She was already out the door.
*****
The song came to an end and Sawyer turned off the speakers. The silence was more deafening than the blast of music. A dull, throbbing ache pounded against his sternum as he sank down onto his bed and surrendered to the inevitable.
He’d tried.
It hadn’t been enough.
Penny didn’t want him.
Someone knocked on his front door, loud and fast. That wasn’t the cops. He’d done the law-enforcement-open-up knock too many times not to recognize it. Adrenaline spiked in his veins and he sprang off the bed. Penny. It had to be Penny. He sprinted through the condo to the front door, then yanked it open.
“You asshole.” Penny stood on the other side in that same oversized Daring Ink T-shirt she’d worn the first night he’d seen her, but tonight she had tears running down her face. “You woke me up.”
Okay, that wasn’t ‘I’m giving you a second chance’, but he could work with it. He had to. There was no way he was giving up now. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do to get your attention.”
“Well you have it for the moment.” She strode into his condo just far enough to allow him to shut the door.