Chapter 5
SMITH
The week passed in a blur and before I knew it, I was standing—for the third time—in front of Ink and Ember.
I could see Riggs through the glass, wearing what looked to be the same jeans as Monday, but instead of a white shirt, he wore a black hoodie that looked to be a little too small for him.
He had the sleeves pushed up and his brown hair tied back at the base of his skull, and when he turned unexpectedly and saw me on the sidewalk, one of his thick brows lifted in question.
He tilted his head toward the door and without much thought, I turned the corner and walked into the shop.
Ink and Ember smelled just like it had on Monday, like disinfectant and soap, but when Riggs came closer, I caught a whiff of rosemary and sage, a delightful, herbal blend that went right up my nose and lodged itself there making it hard to smell anything else.
“You’re dressed better,” he said in greeting, and I looked down at my jeans and t-shirt.
Since I’d taken the day off work there was no need for business casual, and I’d only belatedly realized on Monday how ridiculous it had been to walk into a tattoo shop wearing a long-sleeved shirt and ask to get my arm tattooed.
“I didn’t think about it until after the fact,” I admitted. “Coming in was kind of spontaneous.”
I couldn’t believe I’d asked to get anything tattooed, if I was being honest. None of my brothers had any ink, at least as far as I knew, and it was pretty out of character for me to do something brash like this.
My brothers always teased me about how much like Marshall I was, but I never saw it as a bad thing to be compared to my almost forty year-old brother.
He was the best role model growing up and continued to set the bar for almost everything in my life.
I went into architecture because of Marshall, and I had an affinity for expensive wine because of Marshall.
He was a good man, and I was proud to be compared to him, but sometimes it felt like that was all I had.
I didn’t want to be Marshall Covington’s youngest brother forever.
Hell, I didn’t always want to be a Covington.
There had been a brief time when I’d entertained changing my name to Calavert, my mother’s maiden name, but after some thought I’d decided her sins were far worse than those of Willem Covington.
Willem was not a good father; he wasn’t even a bad father.
He was absent, which was the best thing he could have done for any of us.
Present in name and money only, he bought out all of our mothers and gave us opportunities that never would have been in reach were it not for his heavy hand.
It was hard to be grateful for the life I had when it was so easy to think about the life I lost because of him.
The older I got, the more often I realized I needed to break out of the mold that I’d built for myself, the mold that had been built for me by his hand.
I had also thought of leaving my job, but at the end of the day, I was truly passionate about architecture separate of Marshall’s fondness for it, so the work and the Covington name could stay.
Going to Rapture with Asha was probably some flavor of rebellion, this tattoo… another.
“Nothing wrong with spontaneous,” Riggs said, lifting a section of the counter so I could step through into the back of the shop. “And you’ve had all week to change your mind.”
He was right.
I’d had all week to do a lot of things, namely think about how to get Asha to invite me back to Rapture so I could stare at men getting spanked and fucked again.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to get spanked, but I definitely wanted to try the getting fucked part.
Admittedly, I had watched a fair amount of spanking porn since the weekend, and I didn’t hate the idea as much as I wanted to.
Anyway, I was a bit of a mess.
“Here’s what I drew up for you,” Riggs said, turning an iPad around and showing me an actual rendered sketch of the cut and paste job I’d walked in with.
It was better than I could have hoped for, the trees disappearing into the brick and concrete like they were meant to be joined forever in the first place.
“I love it,” I said, looking down at my arm.
“Cool. I’ve got to shave your arm and then I’ll get the stencil on and if it all looks good, we’ll get started.”
Riggs explained every step of the process, from the shaving to the gel he smoothed over my chillingly bare arm.
He pressed the stencil into my skin and carefully lifted the backer paper away to reveal the bones of a tattoo around my forearm.
It was a big tattoo, considering I had none in the first place, but seeing it on my skin in the reflection of his full-length mirror felt achingly right in a way I didn’t have words for.
“I love it,” I said again, and when I looked from the mirror to Riggs, there was some indecipherable emotion mapped across his face. I blinked and it was gone, and he gestured toward the chair and an arm rest, and before I knew it, he was ready to start.
“This is gonna be a long day, so if you need breaks, let me know. Okay?”
I nodded, and the quiet of the tattoo shop was broken by the piercing whir of his tattoo machine kicking to life.
Riggs used his gloved hands to stretch the skin around my wrist, and then the needle sank beneath my flesh and we were off.
The pain was sharper and clearer than I expected, and at first contact, I visibly winced.
Riggs inked out a short line and leaned back, dark eyes studying me carefully.
“Good?” he asked.
I swallowed and nodded.
He returned his focus to my arm, to the cluster of Ponderosa trunks that wrapped my wrist. I watched him work, attention caught in a snare.
The meticulousness of his lines was hypnotic, even if I had no idea how he could see what he was doing.
There was blood and ink all over my arm already, but Riggs just inked and wiped, inked and wiped.
It took a few minutes for me to settle against the back of the chair, and by then the pain had turned into something expected.
I was getting a tattoo. My brothers were going to lose their minds.
Lincoln would probably buy me a drink over the whole thing.
I smiled to myself and closed my eyes, letting the vibration of the needles rock me into a quiet lull.
I had no idea how much time passed, but eventually, Riggs made it up to the tops of the trees, and I asked him, “How long have you been tattooing for?”
He paused, wiped, re-inked the needle.
“Since I was nineteen.”
“And how old are you now?”
He glanced up at me, eyes insufferably dark and handsome.
“Older than twenty-five,” he said.
“Obviously.”
He snorted a laugh and used his gloved pinky to wipe a smear of ink off my arm.
“I’m thirty-six,” he answered.
“I have two brothers that age,” I said.
“Twins?”
He passed the needle over a nerve, a bright flare of biting pain racing up the length of my arm. I grunted, flinching at the shock.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” Riggs murmured, and I realized I hadn’t been.
I let my breath out in a rush, sucking in one immediately after and refilling my lungs. Riggs waited until I’d settled back into a normal breathing pattern before returning to his work.
“They’re not twins,” I answered him finally. “My family tree is messy.”
He made a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat and nodded. He didn’t ask for more information, but I found myself wanting to give it to him anyway. “My father basically bought me and my brothers from our mothers. It’s really atrocious to say out loud.”
The climb of the needle paused briefly, then resumed.
“I have three brothers… well, four now. They’re all half-brothers. Finn and Hunter are the same age, only a few weeks apart. Marshall is almost forty, and I’m the baby,” I said.
“And the last brother?” he asked, not looking up from my arm.
He’d started into the buildings, and my brain was a little fuzzy around the edges. I had no sense of how long I’d been sitting there.
“Andrew,” I said without thinking. “We just found out about him. He’s twenty-nine or twenty-eight or something.”
“Do you not like him?” Riggs asked.
I scrunched my nose, cracking my neck and staring down at the top of his head. He was a tall man, muscular but slender, and he had to be aching for how bent over me he was.
“I don’t know him,” I answered.
I thought about the group text Hunter had started with all five of us, his plan to force us into friendship something that hadn’t quite come to be just yet.
Admittedly, Andrew being the one to take a swing at Scott Shaw had endeared him to all of us more than time could have, so I made a mental note to text him over the weekend and see how he was doing.
“What about you?” I asked, not wanting to talk about my newest brother. “Do you have any siblings?”
Riggs stretched his legs out and slid his stool back from me, changing the tattoo machine for a towel and clear bottle of liquid. He sprayed it down onto a folded towel and gave a long wipe to my arm. My breath hitched in my throat at the sight of my forearm.
I had a tattoo.
It was nowhere near done, half black ink and half purple stencil, but I had a tattoo. Something that was mine, just for me. Something my brothers had no say or thought in. Something I wanted and decided on for myself.
“What do you think?” Riggs asked instead of answering me.
“I love it.”
He tilted his head back and smiled up at me, a closed-lips thing that radiated pride and happiness, and I fought back a ripple of pleasure that attempted to blossom behind my sternum.
“I’m an only child,” he said, ripping off his gloves and flinging them into the trash. “Let’s take five so I can stretch out my back. Is that okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Of course.”
I leaned back against the chair and stretched my own legs out, used to being bent in awkward angles over desks and drafting tables for hours at a time.
Riggs took a quick lap around the shop, and I tried to focus on the permanent lines tracing up the length of my arm and not the corded muscles that wrapped the length of his neck.
A few minutes later, he was back on the stool, bent over my arm with warm breath puffing out against my already swollen and tender skin. He’d turned on music, I realized, an aggressive band at a low volume, and his foot started to tap against the floor while he traced lines over and around my arm.
I lost track of time, lost track of everything except myself.
Getting tattooed, there wasn’t much else to do besides think, which led to some mixed results.
Lunch time came and went, and I realized not only had I not eaten, but I also hadn’t had any water.
Riggs grabbed me a bottle from a small fridge, and I drank it down quickly, resting my head against the back of the chair with a tired sigh.
“Do you need a break?” he asked me, not for the first time. He gave a wipe down my arm and slid away from me to study his work on my skin.
“I don’t think so,” I told him.
Riggs set down his tattoo machine and turned my arm around, checking both sides of it with a frown.
“We’ve got probably two more hours left,” he said.
“I’m good,” I assured him. “Ready when you are.”