Eyeing him out of the corner of my eye, I grabbed the other side of the machine. "Doesn't it only weigh about ten pounds?"
"Don't worry about it," he huffed. "Move that kit over a little more and it'll fit."
I pushed over the set of inks on the counter he'd been referring to and watched as he slid the thermal fax into place. It'd gotten to be a pain running back and forth to the kitchen when one of the guys needed a stencil done, so I might have been a little too excited about ordering a new machine with the intention of putting it in the front when the old one pooped out.
"You wanna break in the new machine?" Slim asked, his back to me.
"I still don't know what I'd want," I explained, referring to the tattoo.
He looked over his shoulder, fluttering those ginger-blonde eyelashes. "The dragon is waiting for you when you're ready."
He meant the dragon that blew rainbow.
“Would it hurt?” I asked him like a wimp, taking a seat on the nearest chair.
Slim bit his lip and made a face that said yeah, it's gonna friggin' hurt. “Well, yeah. A little.” Ef me. "But you're tough. You can handle it."
The story of my life. Shit.
I found my voice. “I'm still thinking about it, Michaelangelo.”
He let out a resigned sigh. "All right there, grandma."
Blake’s head popped up over the divider of my reception desk and his station. There was nothing scheduled for the next hour and at the last minute, I'd asked Blake to man the desk while we set up the new equipment. His head wrinkled as he narrowed his eyes at what we were doing.
“Does Dex know you want to get a tattoo?” he asked carefully.
"He heard us talk about it the other day," I answered him vaguely. The day they all found out about my arm.
Blake barked out a laugh. It might have been the first laugh I'd heard from him in a week. He still seemed stressed out of his mind about Seth, but now that he'd told us, it had hopefully taken a weight off his shoulders.
"I don't know why the hell you're bothering, Slim. You know he's not gonna let any of us pop her cherry."
I almost, almost wheezed at his offhand comment as a memory of the night before—when Dex had stripped my clothes off, laid down flat on his back and pulled me over to straddle his face—swamped me. That was probably the greatest fifteen minutes of my life. And the fifteen or thirty minutes that followed after that, when he’d turned me around and made me appreciate a certain number with a six and a nine in it...well, let’s just say that I was racking up fun new experiences really quickly.
Hallelujah!
"Whatever," Slim drawled. "Maybe he'll let me do this on him instead. You know I've been bugging him about letting me finish up his other side."
"The other side of his chest?" I asked.
Both of them raised their eyebrows in mock amusement but it was the damn redhead that cracked a smile. "Oh, you know all about his ink now, huh?"
Any resemblance of a smile on my face disappeared. "Shut up."
"What happened to Miss Nothing-is-Going-to-Happen?"
"I hope you forget to put sunscreen on the next time you spend any time outside," I deadpanned.
Slim shook his head with a laugh. “Uh huh. I bet you know all about those piercings now too, don't ya, Ris?”
I made a face. "Keep it up."
"Next thing you know, you're gonna have 'Property of Dex' tattooed on your back," he mused.
There was no way in hell I’d ever get a man’s name tattooed on me. "Dream on, sucker."
Blake held up his hands in surrender. "I wouldn't hold it past him."
Yeah, I wouldn't either once I thought about it. That sneaky dick would do it to me in secret the first chance he got.
And yet...
Strangely, I was only about ninety percent against it.
Not that it would ever happen, especially if I couldn't even decide on a small tattoo to get first.
The swing of the door opening didn’t alarm me. Blake was free and he’d help whoever came in. Being a Tuesday night, we were definitely going to be slow. Hence the reason why Dex had taken off after finishing up his three hour session to go talk to his mom about her possible divorce.
Except the first thing out of Blake’s mouth was a loud and alarmed, “What the fuck?” followed by the sharp sound of something very hard hitting something equally as dense but much more frail. And then the unmistakable sound of a body dropping to the floor had us both straightening up and looking over in Blake's direction
But it wasn’t my bald friend standing there. There were three men in black ski masks standing directly over where Blake had just stood. Average height men with average body builds in ski masks with angry curls to their barely visible lips.