Chapter 11 #2
I mean, look at me. I’m getting a freaking tattoo! I always wanted to get a tattoo, but Jake said he wouldn’t be as attracted to me if I ever did.
August’s hand pauses again.
“You’re doing great,” he says quietly. Not in a patronizing way, just like it’s a fact he’s observed and decided to say out loud.
I look at him instead of the ceiling.
He’s focused on my arm and on the work. But every time I involuntarily tense, he registers it, with the smallest shift in his own posture and his eyebrow furrow.
“You hate this part,” I say.
He glances up, pausing. “What part?”
“The hurting people part.”
A pause. He looks back down. “It’s just part of the process,” he says carefully. “But yeah. I hate that I’m causing you pain.”
His jaw clenches a little as he resumes.
“Even though I asked you to?”
“Still sucks even though I know the end product will be good.”
“A little pain now for a beautiful forever seems worth it to me.”
He sucks in a quick breath and swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing, and I’m glad he’s focused on the tattoo instead of that gaze of his coming my way.
I look at the side of his face and the tattoo that wraps around his neck of a fire-breathing dragon. And think of the dragons he and his son conquer on the weekends.
I bet getting tattooed on your neck hurts way worse than on your forearm, but that’s not what has tears pricking at my eyes.
Or the pain that I’m starting to get used to as August explains he’s switching to shader needles instead of the single he’s been using for the outline.
The shaders feel like more of a scraping across my skin, and that’s somehow less painful than the singular.
I don’t want to over-romanticize this guy.
I don’t know him. But I get the feeling he really loves his son.
Maybe he’s a womanizer. He probably is, with how gorgeous he is.
He was certainly willing enough to hop into my bed the other night.
But why not? He’s single. He makes me feel stronger than I ever have in my life.
And meanwhile, there’s just this… devastating halo of sadness around him.
I can see the art emerging now, every time he wipes away the accumulating ink.
“This isn’t damage,” I say, resting back against the tattoo chair. “This is healing.”
He doesn’t answer right away.
“That’s how I always felt about it,” he finally says.
He goes back to the work, and I go back to the ceiling, and we don’t say anything else for a while, and the needle keeps moving. The Medusa keeps becoming herself on my skin.
It takes three hours.
When he puts the mirror in my hand I look at myself for a long time.
She’s there. On my inner forearm, starting just below the crook of my elbow, rendered in August’s artistic black and gray—Medusa not as a monster, but powerful before they tell a story making her terrible for it.
Her expression looking back at me from my own arm is the expression I’ve been trying to locate in myself for approximately a decade.
Just… present, in full possession of herself.
My eyes are all hot and my throat is tight again.
I blink at the ceiling until I get myself under control while August takes pictures of the fresh tattoo.
“How much do I owe you?” I ask. “I don’t have the cash now but when my accounts get back up and running, I can—”
“Nothing.” He places a protective see-through bandage over the new tattoo. “Just leave this on for seven days. It should heal all on its own. No scabbing or anything.”
“August—”
“You don’t owe me anything.” His voice is quiet and completely certain. “Consider it a trade. Marketing for ink.”
I look at the Medusa on my arm.
“That’s not a fair trade,” I say. “This is worth more.” He’s just placed a piece of true art on my skin.
“We’ll see how the marketing goes.”
I look up at him.
He’s methodically cleaning up his station, his broad back to me. There’s something careful in the set of his shoulders.
Like we’ve both just realized we’re in this in-between space between professional and the wild closeness of another intimate experience we’ve just shared, albeit of an entirely different sort than the other night. Still, all alone in this otherwise darkened tattoo shop, it would be so easy to—
August is Jake’s brOTHER, shouts everything reasonable in me.
He’s also the man who touched me in a way that made me feel like I belonged in my own body again. The man who listened when I spoke instead of waiting for me to become more convenient.
My husband’s brother.
I should feel sick about it.
Instead, what makes me sick is realizing I spent nine years married to one brother and felt more seen in a single night with the other.
I jump out of the chair and grab my purse to my stomach. Not like a shield against his handsomeness and charisma and amazing talent. Definitely not like that.
“So, tomorrow?” I squeak. “I definitely want to get the eleven o’clock session on camera. You can give me access to your socials and we can hit the ground running.”
He turns around, and that gaze of his slams into me.
My arm throbs. Along with other parts of me.
I look down at the plastic wrap and at the badass Medusa underneath it.
I am in so much trouble, I think.
And then scurry out to my car.