Chapter 4
CONNOR
“You did great,” I tell the man in front of me, knocking my fist against his. Gathering a few supplies from my station, I put together a small aftercare bag for him. “I know you think my care instructions are suggestions, but seriously, no sex or self care for three weeks.”
“So if I come back in two and it’s angry, you won’t help me out?” He jokes.
My eye catches on one of the other guys here, whose face is pinched together in something resembling disgust while he watches and listens to a conversation he isn’t part of.
With an annoyed shake of my head, I turn my attention back to my client, handing him the bag before walking him up to the front of the shop to pay for the service. It’s a quick and easy transaction, but I still feel eyes on me all throughout, and still as I walk back to my station to clean up.
“I’m about to start charging you an hourly rate if you keep insisting on watching me like that,” I tell him.
As if suddenly realizing that he isn’t as invisible as he seems to think that he is, his eyes flick away from me, blinking too fast and too many times to seem normal.
I’ve never been close with Rob; we work together, we’ve occasionally bounced ideas off of one another, and I like his art, but we’ve never been more than acquaintances. Work friends, at the most; and even that would be a generous description of our relationship.
Even still, once word made it around that shop earlier this year that I’m not the hetero ladykiller they all assumed me to be, things got weird between us.
Now he just sits there and stares at me.
“Sorry, it’s just—” He hesitates, twisting his face at me before he drops the volume in his voice. “You fuck dudes.”
“I do, and I even date them sometimes,” I tease, wearing fake shock on my face while I spray disinfectant onto my worktable.
My eyes move to my best friend, sitting at his station with a pen to a sketch pad, but his eyes are on the two of us.
He does that a lot, the watching. Part of me thinks that it’s because he knows that once he gets going, there’s no stopping him, and he tries to maintain what little self control he may possess.
He calls it protectiveness, I call it repressed trauma.
“Don’t you think it’s a little weird to do piercings like that on people you’re attracted to?” He asks. “Conflict of interest or something?”
And just like that, Riptide is on his feet and making his way toward us.
His steps are heavy and deliberate, something that I’ve seen enough times since I met him to know that those steps usually end with a fist flying and someone bleeding.
Nine times out of ten, it’s about his wife.
I feel almost honored that this one is about me.
“Alright, you’re done,” He says, jerking his thumb toward the building’s exit. “I already told you, you’re making people uncomfortable.”
“He makes me uncomfortable!” Rob’s arm flies in my direction. “I don’t want him staring at me while I’m trying to work.”
“Bisexual doesn’t mean yousexual, you fucking walnut,” Tripp tells him, “and if you think you’re his type, you’re being way too generous. Have you looked at your fucking hairline lately?”
I stifle a laugh, turning my head away from them with my hand covering my mouth.
He isn’t wrong about that. I tend to like them more rough around the edges, but still polished, and Rob…isn’t.
Reaching to the rack behind him, Tripp pulls bottles of ink from their slots, tossing them onto the floor at Rob’s feet. A few of them pop open, leaving pools of purple, turquoise, and orange in their wake.
While he works, the shortened hem of his cut-off t-shirt raises above his waistline to let ink-covered skin spill out, images out of my nightmares covering it, with lines of text that fall beneath his belt buckle.
“The cool thing about owning the place,” he continues too calmly, “is that I don’t have to offer you jack shit. I can just tell you to get the fuck out of my shop.”
“Riptide,” I finally say through an appreciative chuckle, “it’s okay.”
His foot flies out in front of him, sending a spilled bottle of ink across the floor and leaving a vibrant mess at the toe of his shoe.
“My clients make up—”
“I don’t give a fuck what your clients do,” Tripp says, cutting him off. “Get out.”
I heave a sigh, leaning against my jewelry display case with my arms crossed over my chest as I watch ink and machines get tossed into an empty file box.
None of it is neatly or carefully placed, and I’m almost certain that Tripp is actively trying to break the guy’s stuff as he drops it inside; and I don’t really feel all that bad about it.
“He’s so worried about you looking at him, you should fuck his dad instead,” Tripp teases, heading back toward his station for a pack of cigarettes as the two of us are left alone. “Look, I get that you don’t like to cause problems, but it’s okay to break a bigot’s nose every once in a while.”
“I think you’ve probably got that part covered for me,” I laugh.
“Someone has to,” he grumbles, arching a brow in my direction.
I wave him off as he steps outside for a cigarette. It’s his third smoke break of the day, and judging by how long he’s out there, I’m willing to bet that it isn’t just one cigarette that he goes through.
When he steps back into the building, I lean against the back of my rolling chair, crossing my arms over my chest with an arch in my brow.
“You know you’d save somewhere around four grand a year if you quit, right?” I taunt.
“I’m gonna start having an extra one every time you or my brother make a comment about it,” he counters. With a precise aim, he shoots the emptied pack into a garbage can as if he’s throwing a basketball into a hoop. “Jules cleaning you up tonight?”
“Yeah,” I nod, “I’ll walk over with Koda.”
“Cat’s gonna kick the shit out of him.”
“Exposure therapy,” I say with a shrug.
I don’t mind the walk from my house to Tripp’s. It’s longer than I would usually be willing to walk most places, but on days that I can’t make it to the gym – or on days I’ve been slacking on going – it helps me get my steps in, and the exercise is great for Koda.
It’s breezy and clear out tonight, so he spends much of our walk chasing a handful of butterflies, at least two of which, I’m pretty certain he eats mid-flight.
Tripp and Julia live on a street of identical-looking townhouses. This isn’t an area where I’d expect to see anyone under forty, or who didn’t hold crafting circles of some kind on the weekends. It kind of reminds me of one of those retirement communities.
Despite all of the sameness of the neighborhood, Koda whines and jumps up and down as we near the walkway to the house. As I knock on the door and Jules opens it, though, he cowers behind me with a yelp as Drumstick hisses at him, pulling his back up into a sharp arch.
All one hundred and fifteen pounds of my dog are terrified of an eight-pound chicken breast.
“My poor baby,” Julia coos at him as she rubs his ears. “Come with me, let’s get you a treat.”
Koda’s ears perk up at that, and he quickly trots behind her into the kitchen, because the only word that he’s managed to pick up on so far is the word ‘treat.’ Telling him to sit may as well be telling him to solve a quadratic equation.
A chair is set up near the center of the living room, just off of the coffee table. The table itself is lined with clippers, shears, capes, and other tools that I can’t recognize. My regular barber never had them.
After a quick hello and short conversation, I grab a beer and settle into the chair, and Jules gets to work wetting my hair with a fine mist so she can give it a trim.
It doesn’t take any more than fifteen minutes for her to get me cleaned up and start drying my hair, pulling her fingers through it to give it some shape.
“Okay, you’re finally handsome again,” she teases, dusting off the back of my neck with a soft brush. “Make room for my boy.”
Combing my fingers through my hair, and earning a smack to the back of my head in the process, I stand and make my way to the couch. Tripp takes the chair at the center of the room, and Jules throws the cape around his chest.
With the same bottle that she used for me, she mists his hair until it’s wet, using a small comb to brush back his typically-shaggy hair.
“You should wear it like that, slicked back,” I tell him, using my chin to gesture toward him. “It looks nice.”
“I look like a mobster,” he argues.
I reach toward the table to get a peanut butter cup from their treat dish and toss it into my mouth.
“You don’t look that much like your dad.”
“I said mobster,” he says, holding back a laugh.
“I think it makes you look very handsome,” Julia tells him with a soft smile. “With your natural color, you’d be like a young James Dean.”
He laughs with a shake of his head as she drops her open laptop onto his lap.
“Please and thank you,” she says, her voice sing-songy and saccharine sweet.
While she pulls Tripp’s hair through a fine-tooth comb and carefully trims off the ends, I watch pictures of half-naked werewolf-looking dudes, aliens, and cartoonish people scroll by on the laptop.
“What’s all that?” I ask with a nod in the direction of the screen.
“It’s Stuff Your e-Reader day!” Julia tells me far too excitedly.
At the confused arch of my brow, Tripp explains, “It’s the day that I get an email every ten seconds because my wife won’t stop downloading digital books she’ll never read.”
“I— will get to them eventually,” she insists, using the handle of her shears to smack against the back of his head.
With a doubtful shake of his head, he scrolls through, clicking on book after book.
Excusing myself, I stop in the kitchen to pull another one of my beers from the refrigerator.