3. Rocco
ROCCO
I try not to stare as Sophia pulls up her long skirt to reveal a smooth calf and a delicate, shapely ankle. It almost seems a shame to mark that skin with ink, but then I realise it means she will always have something I created with her.
I’m going to have to touch her, I know that.
There’s no way I’m going to be able to tattoo her skin without placing my hands on her.
Even though I wear gloves, I’ll still be able to feel her body heat through my fingertips, and I feel myself responding to the thought alone.
Fucking hell, I can’t get turned on simply by thinking about touching her ankle.
That’s insane. We aren’t living in Victorian times.
But just being near her takes me back to being a teenager again, how obsessed I’d been with her.
No, not obsessed. I’d been in love with her.
A crazy, perfect love that had stemmed from two people knowing each other as deeply as they knew themselves, and who had grown up together to discover all the things that teenagers eventually learned about themselves.
We’d been each other’s first kiss at age eleven, both awkward and shy, telling each other that we were friends so this was the best way of getting it out of the way.
That had been it for a long time, but then we’d hit fourteen and a new kind of tension had sprung up between us.
All it had taken was some stolen alcohol and a night sitting in a park, and that first kiss had become the first of too many to count.
And how we’d kissed. We’d been able to kiss for hours without stopping for air, leaving us hot and panting, and me with an erection that sprung to attention at even the thought of Sophia.
And here I am now, ten years later, and it seems she still has exactly the same effect on me.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
I’ve just been standing here, staring at her ankle. Jesus. I need to get a grip on myself.
I clear my throat. “Yeah, just making sure I get the positioning right.”
She’s watching me, too—I can feel her gaze on my face, her pale-blue eyes exactly the same colour as I’ve always seen in my dreams.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” she says, as though plucking the thoughts from my head. “Seeing each other like this again.”
I nod. “I’m not sure my brain has processed it. I feel like I’ve jumped back in time.”
“Like a wormhole opened up in the studio and we both dropped through it.”
I grin. “Exactly.”
“I missed you, you know,” she says softly. “I’m sorry I ghosted you, and that I didn’t come back.”
I turn my face to look at her. “Why didn’t you?”
“It was complicated. We were young.”
“I worried about you, for a really long time. And then I got angry.”
She glances away. “I can understand that. I’m sorry, Ri—Rocco.”
I note how she’d gone to call me my old name—the name I shared with my father and that I no longer use—but she’d stopped herself in time.
I shrug, trying to appear nonchalant. “It was a long time ago now.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “It was.”
It’s impossible for me to explain to her how much I’d hurt all those years ago. How abandoned I’d felt, how I’d tortured myself with the idea of her having found someone else, and that was why she’d ghosted me.
That night, when she’d run over to my house in tears to tell me she was leaving, I’d wanted more than anything to tell her she should stay with me, to ask her to come and live with me rather than leave with her parents, but how could I?
My dad was a drinker and my only parent, and I didn’t want anyone else to see that.
My dad wasn’t a bad man, but when he’d had too many, he shouted and had tried to take a few swipes at me.
I had been as big as him by that point, and had held him off, but I had no intention of exposing Sophia to that.
Not my Sophia. Not the girl who was sunshine and light and everything good in the world.
I didn’t even want her to know that such behaviour existed.
Her parents had always seemed so perfect to me—a mother who stayed at home to take care of Sophia, and a father with a respectable job.
My family of two people had been quite the opposite.
If I’d been able to see into the future, however, and had known saying goodbye to her that evening would have been the last time I’d see her in ten years, I would have done things differently.
Every day that went by where I hadn’t heard from her, I’d wished I’d just grabbed her and told her we were leaving, together.
Still lost in memories, I do my best to focus on the reason she’d come here—for a tattoo. I put the transfer onto her skin and then get the ink ready.
She lies back on the bed, and it’s all I can do to stop myself covering her body with mine, kissing her beautiful mouth and lacing my fingers in her gorgeous red hair, just like I’d done all those years ago.
But she isn’t a seventeen-year-old girl who’s madly in love with me anymore.
She’s a woman, who, for all I know, is married with children by now.
“Just shout out if you want to stop,” I tell her. “It shouldn’t take long. The outline is always the worst—especially on the ankle.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Is she feeling the same way as me? Is she conscious of my fingers pressed against her skin, the wave of memories sweeping over her like a dam that’s been opened and now can’t be shut?
The buzz of the needle fills the room as I switch it on and get on with my work.
I still haven’t gotten my head around the idea that this really is my Sophia. Her skin I’m touching.
My heart races, my mind spinning. No other woman has affected me the way she did, and I’ve had plenty of women over the past ten years. None of them made me feel as though the entire universe has shrunk down to one tiny spot, and now she’s all that exists for me.
“What have you been up to all these years?” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant. I don’t want to come right out and ask her if she’d got married.
She gives a strange kind of laugh, and I look up with a frown. “Not as much as I would have liked. My parents are still around. They live in Windsor now. I’m staying with them at the moment.”
“With your parents?”
Why is a woman like her still living with her parents at the age of twenty-seven?
“Yeah, it’s embarrassing, I know. I’ve had some stuff going on, and I needed to get easy access to London, so it made sense. What about you?” she asks, turning the conversation from herself.
I desperately want to ask her what kind of stuff, but I know I would be prying. She would have just told me if she wanted me to know.
“I went to Art College. Got a degree.”
Her eyes light up. “That’s amazing! You always did love your art, though you used to say it was only because it was better than maths and English.”
I chuckle at the memory. “I’d never have admitted actually liking a school subject back then. That would have ruined my street cred.”
“What street cred?” she teases me, and we grin at each other, caught in the moment.
I’m surprised I can’t see the electricity darting between us like one of those blue light balls we used to have in science class.
I force myself to concentrate on filling in her tattoo now the outline is done, though my pulse is racing.
How has this happened? I’d woken up this morning thinking I was going to spend the day hanging out, maybe play some Xbox, and have a few beers down the pub, and instead my past has collided with my present.
A horrific thought comes into my head. What if Kane hadn’t fallen ill, and I had never been asked into work this morning?
Sophia would have come into the place where I work almost every day, and then left again, and I’d never have known about it.
Our paths would have crossed so closely, but we might never have met.
“How does that look?” I ask her when I’m done.
She peers down at the symbol and smiles. “It’s great. Thanks so much.”
I wonder what she needed the symbol for strength for—what has she needed to be strong about?
I cover the tattoo and then hand her a leaflet on aftercare.
“Thanks, Rocco,” she says, swinging her legs from the bed, the long skirt falling to cover her skin. She’s dressed demurely in a long-sleeved t-shirt as well as the long skirt. That’s a change for her—when we’d been younger she’d lived in cut-off vests and short-shorts.
“Hey, I’d hate for us to lose touch again.” I feel nervous asking her. Dumb of me. This is Sophia, the girl I’d grown up with. “Can we exchange numbers?”
“Oh, I?—”
She glances away, and my stomach sinks. Is that a no? Why would she say no?
“Just as old friends,” I add hurriedly. “I mean, if there’s a boyfriend on the scene or something, I’m not trying to step on any toes.”
“No, it’s nothing like that.” A smile is fixed on her face. “Sure, why not?”
I don’t understand her hesitation. If anyone should be hesitant in exchanging numbers, it should be me.
She’s the one who’d left me all those years ago.
Maybe it hadn’t been her choice, but I hadn’t known where she’d gone, while I’d stayed in the same place, at least at first. She could easily have come back to me, or even called my house, but she’d vanished off the face of the earth.