“Yeah, I guess they couldn’t,” he said. He paused and took a deep breath. “Pain’s not always temporary, though.”
She examined his eyes. “Maybe you’re right…but I would argue with you. Even if it stays with you forever, it fades. It does. You can find a way to move on and maybe be stronger.”
He raised one eyebrow. “You know this from experience?”
So it made her vulnerable…but she couldn’t hide herself from him. “Yeah, I do.” He nodded and the waitress brought his new mug of beer. She didn’t want him commenting, so she forged on. “But you told me to tell you more about me—tell you what you should know, I think you said. So here goes. Like I said, I graduated high school a couple of years ago and I’m going to the community college. I’m not sure what I’m going to get my degree in yet, but I need to decide by this fall. Business right now, until I can decide for sure. I’ve been taking two or three classes a semester—you know, getting pre-reqs out of the way—but it’s time for me to focus now. I’ve got the general shit done. And I work at On The Go—you know, the convenience store? I live on my own with a couple of roommates now, so I have bills, and they come first. So I work and go to school part time.”
“You work full time?”
“Pretty close. Between thirty and forty hours a week, depending upon how many hours my manager decides to give me for the week.”
He nodded. “What else?”
“Hmm. Let’s see. I think of myself as an amateur photographer. I love to take pictures with my phone. If you want to friend me on Facebook, you can see some of the pictures I take. I try to find beauty in everything I see.”
“Nice.”
She paused for a moment, ultimately deciding that he wasn’t being sarcastic before moving on. “I also like hard rock music and catch a concert now and then, but I can’t afford to buy a lot. I mostly load up Spotify and that’s how I hear a lot of new stuff.” She noticed that he tilted his head again and then took a swig of his new mug of beer, but he didn’t say a word. “I’m also into reading a lot of weird nonfiction books about odd subjects.”
“Like?”
“Hmm. Oh, like the last one I read—it was a book about physics. Physics. I am so not a math or science person, but the book I read made it seem almost understandable to me. It was pretty cool.” She smiled and took a sip of her tea.
“Anything else?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. I guess that’s all you need to know for now.”
He grinned. “Fair enough.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, come on, Kory. Don’t play around. I already know you know who I am.”
Okay, so that was strange. “Uh, yeah. You’re the tattoo guy from The Iron Maiden.” If she’d been the kind of person who blushed, her cheeks would have flamed at her next statement. Instead, she stifled a smile. “And, uh, I guess I have an unhealthy fascination with you…which is why I asked if you wanted to go out sometime.”
He had a skeptical look on his face, his brows furrowed, a slight frown on his face. “Come on.”
Was he being a dick again? As much as part of her liked him, she was getting ready to write his ass off. She didn’t need his particular brand of shit. “What the hell? Seriously?”
His face was serious as his eyes searched hers—for what, she didn’t know. “Hmm. You really don’t know.”
“Know what?”
He grinned again—that was so damned disarming. Every time he did it, she almost forgot she’d been irritated with him. She was getting ready to say something else when the waitress brought the pizza by along with two plates and asked if they needed anything else before zipping off again. Without a word, Stone grabbed a plate and slapped a slice on it before handing it to her. She thanked him as he put another slice on a plate for himself and said, “Okay, well, you know about the shop. A friend of mine opened it about seven years ago, and then after being open a couple of years, he somehow managed to get buried in debt. He called me up because he knew I was interested and had enough money to invest in the place. So now we’re partners and I’m doing something I really love.”
She sprinkled Parmesan on her pizza and then took a fork to it. “How many tattoos do you design yourself?”
“Let’s just say this—I don’t like to do flash when I can help it. Putting flash on your body is like buying a print instead of an original painting. I get why some people want something like that, but most people want something no one else has. They figure the artwork is permanent, so it should be something unique and special. Yeah, it costs more, but that’s because I put my heart and guts into my original stuff. And I have no problems designing something special for someone.”