Chapter Nine – Angela
Chapter Nine
Angela
I woke up the next morning to an empty bed and the sound of muffled groaning.
Gray had showed us last night where the bathroom was, cleverly hidden behind the bed, palatial, as if a woman had planned it out.
After a walk around the room wearing a sheet like a robe, I deduced that that was where the groaning was coming from.
Setting my ear against the wood paneling the sounds got louder, clearly Willa, and I heard soft grunts, clearly Gray.
She was enjoying herself. Again. I had no idea how she was managing it, I was almost chafed, and my hips were beyond sore from everything I’d gotten them into last night.
The temptation to walk in on them though and join them again—after everything we’d done—I shook my head to break the spell and walked around the room.
There was a closet on the wall nearest the bathroom.
I opened it slowly and found a rack of shirts and leather.
Everything smelled like Gray and I wanted to fall in.
I thumbed through the clothes instead, surprised to find two dresses hanging at the closet’s far end, one in floral blue, the other with a pattern that looked like rain drops.
I closed the door quietly and went to inspect Gray’s desk.
It had a line of pulpy paperbacks stacked at the back—the male equivalent of the trashy romance novels Willa and I gleefully read. I pulled one out to read about the cop who was undoubtedly going to solve a murder against all odds and found it inscribed.
For my baby. Love, Brittani.
Clearly, there had been a recent ex-girlfriend, after all—the one we’d been busy fucking from his thoughts all night.
And from the sound of things in the bathroom, Willa was doing an extra special job erasing her now.
I went to Gray’s jeans, fished out his wallet, and found out his real name was Erik—then Willa’s voice started to rise.
I tucked the wallet back into his jeans and stood up, walking toward the bathroom door.
I could hear her, almost feel her, urging him on.
Her voice was louder, the sounds now more wild, echoing against the tile—I imagined them in the shower, him rutting behind her, her barely holding on against the wall.
The way she was screaming, he was either killing her or fucking her, I didn’t know which—I only knew if it was the latter she’d kill me if I interrupted them.
Willa’s final scream rang out and then I heard Gray give a long, low groan as he finished himself inside her.
Listening to them—the urgency of my own unmet need made me sway.
Then the door swung open unexpectedly and I was caught eavesdropping as he walked out.
He closed the door and looked surprised.
“She’s alive, right?” I said, kidding-not-kidding.
His eyebrows rose and then he laughed. “Yeah. Of course. We just didn’t want to wake you,” he said, giving me a guilty grin.
I shrugged like I didn’t mind. And I wasn’t jealous, really—just hungry still. I wondered if I’d always be hungry, from here on out. He walked by me and grabbed his jeans to pull on.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back,” he said, buckling his belt, then going into his closet for a shirt.
Him leaving was a reminder that the outside world existed.
One night out with Willa I could lie away, but one night and a morning, I wouldn’t manage.
I started looking for my own clothes, too. “Wait—what’re you doing?” he asked.
“You’re not the only one who has places to be—" My parents must have been mad with worry, I needed to go and talk them down.
He crossed the room back to me and caught my hands. “Don’t—don’t go. I’ve just got some club business to attend to. After that though, I’ll bring food back for us. You can help yourself to anything behind the bar in the meantime. Just wait for me, okay?”
Looking up at him, it was impossible not to remember everything that’d happened the prior night. “Okay,” I breathed.
“Good. I’ll be right back,” he said, and grabbed his vest.
The second he left I locked the door behind him, which was where Willa caught me when she came out. “Oh my gosh, Angie,” she said, falling into the bed naked. I scurried back to her, almost tripping on the sheet.
“Willa—what the hell are we doing here?” I asked, mounting the bed to sit beside her.
She looked up at me with her post-orgasmic glow and caught my waist with a lazy arm. “Living the dream,” she said, snuggled up against me, and fell back asleep.
Willa was braver sleeping than I was awake. I kept trying to figure out ways to make my old world and this world mesh—they were like puzzle pieces that would never fit. But since I was already in trouble I might as well stay and keep ignoring the likely frantic messages my mother was leaving me.
I freed myself from Willa’s arm, took an unfortunately solo shower, and then found all the clothes I’d worn yesterday, pulling them back on. I was thirsty—and some biker had promised me free beer.
I crept out into the hallway and heard an intermittent hum, like a refrigerator going bad.
There couldn’t be that many people at the bar right now, I mean it was early afternoon and—I turned the corner and saw a shirtless man leaning over a table on his elbows, and another man sitting behind him, the bartender from last night.
He glanced up as I walked in and the humming stopped.
“So you survived.”
“Seems so.” I padded towards the back of the bar, where I was sure I’d find something in a bottle or can, making sure I was still close enough to the room to run back inside and throw the latch.
He snorted, and went back to the man in front of him. The humming began again, and the shirtless man winced.
I ducked below the bar and opened up a mini-fridge to grab a Pbr. Then I popped back up like a nervous gopher. I shouldn’t have worried though, all of the bartender’s concentration was on the man’s back, and the shirtless man was squinting in pain too tightly to see me.
I opened the can and heard its crisp sigh over the hum. I took a defiant glug, daring the bartender to stop underaged-me, and when he didn’t I started sidling in his direction, craning my neck to see what was going on.
He was giving the shirtless man a tattoo. There was an array of inks behind him, primary colors and three different shades of gray and black.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance,” he said, without looking up.
I took a step closer. I wanted to see. The man was getting the outline of a massive snarling wolf in the center of his upper back.
“My chance as him, or as you?”
The bartender pulled back and looked at me dolefully. “You think you can draw?”
“I know I can.”
“Then draw something for me.”
I looked around the bar for inspiration. “What?”
“I don’t know—something good.” He reached behind himself and shoved a piece of paper my way. I took it, and ran back into the room for Gray’s desk.
Gray’s desk had three drawers—the first one was full of pens, pencils, and scraps of paper, the second two were locked.
I sketched out my own version of the barman’s snarling wolf, shading it in with the sides of pencils, while listening to Willa’s snores.
When I returned to him, he was almost done, taping a bandage over the man’s back.
He took the art from me for inspection as the man left the bar. “Decent.”
“Good,” I corrected him.
“You scared of needles?”
“No.”
He nodded slowly and appraised me again. “You can draw on paper, but can you draw on a man?”
“Uh....” I’d drawn on myself before. Show me an artist who hadn’t. But….
Sensing my discomfort, he laughed. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Want to try?”
Before I could answer, he was rolling back one sleeve and showing me a hairy arm, with a scar scored down the middle, and grabbing for a razor. I watched in slight horror as he shaved a patch clean—and then in fascination as he changed out his tattoo gun’s needles.
I wanted to say, What, no, you’re kidding, right? But I also wanted to call his bluff—there was no way someone like him was going to let someone like me ink them, first time out. So instead of protesting, I decided to see how far he’d let things go.
“What’s your name?”
“Angela. Yours?”
“Wade. And you can have a square inch,” he said, looking over at me, his smug expression a clear dare.
“What do you want?”
“Dealer’s choice.”
I thought of the tritest tattoo I could. “Fine, then you’re getting a heart with a Mom.”
He chuckled. “Feel free,” he said, and handed me the tattoo gun.
I looked at the inks he had lined up—he hadn’t cleared away the old inks yet, but reusing those seemed unsanitary. I’d set up palettes before—I could do this. I put the gun down and arranged red and black in little plastic wells, then faced him.
He wasn’t that much older than Gray, but something in his bearing said he’d seen a rougher life.
His dark hair was slicked back in a severe fashion, making a crisp widow’s peak on his forehead.
He scooted down the table and lay his arm out.
I took his spot and tapped my foot on the foot pedal, listening to the gun, feeling it buzz like I was holding a hummingbird.
“Get the ink on it—there—go,” he prompted, shoving his arm near.
This had to be some joke, but I couldn’t stop now—the thought of putting art on someone else—in someone else, in a manner of speaking—the allure was too grand.
“Come in at an angle. Don’t stab,” he said, and I stopped wondering when he would stop me and leaned forward.
With one fine needle I made a delicate outline, a symmetrical freehand heart, harder to do than it sounds.
The bartender sat like a rock, a stark contrast to the man who’d been wincing before, and he was as intent on my art as I was.
There was no way not to be close to him like this, him in my personal space, or he in mine, close enough to touch me, just as I was touching him, holding his skin taut with my free thumb.