Chapter 9 Sloan
Sloan
Then - College
Bohdan doesn’t flinch when the needle of the tattoo gun whirs to life, dancing over the skin of his inner bicep.
I do. I hate the idea of anything hurting him.
I’ve seen him in pain too much for my liking over the last two years.
I’ve seen him with too many cuts to count: a thin slice along his jaw that didn’t end up needing stitches, but left a faint scar you can only really see when he’s clean-shaven and there’s no stubble dusting it.
A gash through his eyebrow that had to be taped, but if you look closely, you can see a tiny bump of raised skin that sits above the left brow; and more than one concussion.
None so severe he was out for more than a week, but I don’t actively enjoy seeing him hit the boards at all, let alone when his head makes contact with anything.
I think he might be a little too high above it all right now for anything to bother him.
A graduating senior who holds more on-ice records than he cares to remember, the best centre in MSU history with not one, but now two Frozen Four titles.
First overall in the draft, and so many bright, lovely things waiting for him in his future.
A big, beautiful life on the West Coast, where he says he’ll wait for me, too.
It’s not just Bohdan I’ve seen win and lose and get hurt and get back up over the last two years; I’ve seen Jay and Talon do the same and get hurt right beside him.
But even though they’re just as high in the stratosphere as he is, and Jay’s no stranger to ink—tiny tattoos dot his arms in patchwork sleeves—they both wince when the needles pierce their skin.
Bohdan’s eyes cut to the tattoo gun as it presses down, but they don’t stay there long.
They’re back on me, perched beside Tia on the end of Jay’s neatly made king bed, watching the three of them stretched out across Jay’s room—the biggest in the house, a point of pride for him over the last two years.
Bohdan has one leg kicked up, lying back on a padded table, his left arm extended out into space, with a tattoo artist hunched over his bicep, making tiny, precise strokes with the needle.
Talon and Jay sit on either end of another table, opposite legs stretched out with artists hovering over the pop of muscle above each of their knees.
“This doesn’t feel sterile. Shouldn’t we have gone to the tattoo parlour?” Tia frowns, apprehensive.
Jay glances up from the tattoo artist, hunched over his thigh where she moves the gun up and down in a way that tells me she’s drawing the twenty-two for Talon.
His mouth pulls tight and his nostrils flare, but he shakes his head at Tia.
“My dads gave me money as a present for winning the Frozen Four twice. Said I could do whatever I wanted with it.”
A brow flicks up on her forehead. “So you called a mobile tattoo truck and thought that permanently scarring your body with all your respective numbers from the ‘only line to ever exist’”—she pauses so we can all give appropriate deference to her exaggerated air quotes—“was a good use of their hard-earned money?”
Jay grins before he exhales sharply when the gun carves above his kneecap. “I’ll pay them back. I’m about to have a lot of my own hard-earned money.”
“The only line to ever exist.” Talon’s smile splits across his face. He holds a palm up, and Jay looks like he might reach out for it, but the artist working on Talon moves to the second number, seventeen for Bohdan, and her eyes don’t leave his quad when she cuts in, “Do not move.”
Talon flashes his other palm in apology, but he’s still smiling. “Tell Mr. Choi and Mr. Solorzano thank you very much.”
The corners of Bohdan’s mouth twitch, like he’s vaguely amused, the left corner just a bit higher, and he winks at me before looking back towards the needle. “You okay over there, Zlatí?ko?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” I roll my eyes, but my hands curl around the edge of the mattress and I lean forward to get a closer look. “Does it hurt?”
Bohdan gives a jerk of his chin at the same time Jay says, “Yes,” and Talon inhales with a hiss.
“You can come watch, baby.” He gives another jerk of his head, but this one in invitation.
Talon jumps backward in age by about ten years and starts making high-pitched kissing noises when Jay snorts and lifts his brows at Tia. “You can come watch, too, baby.”
I can practically hear Tia’s eye roll when I stand, head tilting as I cross the room, watching the needle whir across the stretch of Bohdan’s muscle. The artist just finished with his number, and she’s moving to the next one—twenty for Jay—when Bohdan’s hand finds mine.
He laces our fingers together, pressing his lips to the back of my hand, and he does the whole thing in these sharp, precise movements—the way he does everything. Careful, thoughtful, measured. So much so that the tattoo artist doesn’t look up, she doesn’t reprimand him or warn him not to move.
His skin touches mine and it always feels like the first time.
It’s been two years—but it’s never really stopped. Not with us.
I smile softly, tightening my grip on his hand.
I’ve been afraid of so many things in my life.
My own mind usually contends for first place. But now, I think the thing that scares me most in the entire world is the idea that one day, my hands won’t know his.
Bohdan cocks his head. “Do you want one?”
“Pardon me?” I blink.
“A tattoo.” His hand tenses in mine, and he points a finger towards the shining, black ink stretching across his bicep. “Do you want one?”
“Oh.” I nod, like he’s asking me if I want something simple and mundane. “I’ve never really thought about it.”
“You should get one, Sloany,” Talon calls, and I imagine him nodding exuberantly, eyes coming alive and a deep brown curl flopping over his forehead. “Mr. Choi and Mr. Solorzano already paid.”
“Yeah, go nuts.” I glance over my shoulder at Jay, who nods along and stretches his leg out to admire the artist’s handiwork. “I paid for the time. Not for the three pieces.”
Tia purses her lips, pointing at Jay. “Another colossal waste of your fathers’ hard-earned money.”
“Do you want one?” Bohdan’s voice, low and rough and still the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard two years later, cuts across everything else.
I flick my eyes back to him with a small shake of my head and pout of my lips. “I honestly wouldn’t know what to get.”
He nods, thoughtful, before offering me a gentle smile. “That’s fine, Zlatí?ko. Just thought I’d ask.”
“What would you get? If you were going to get a second one?” I tip my head back and forth, examining the new piece of him, this thing about his body I’m not intimately familiar with, blurred slightly now under a clear plastic bandage.
Bohdan’s eyes rove across my face, a crease scores between his brows, and he never looks away from me when he says, “Get Sloan a pen and a piece of paper.”
“Why?” I frown, but his hand squeezes mine.
Tia does get me a black marker and piece of paper, clearly ripped out of the first notebook she could find on Jay’s desk, and she shoves them at me, brown eyes wide and sparkling with interest, flicking back and forth between Bohdan and me.
“Draw an S,” he says, words firm and quiet.
“Why?” I ask, even though I do it anyway, and I’m a bit nervous now because there are all these horrible, worst-case scenarios running through my head.
He’s leaving me. It’s something to remember me by.
He’s dying, actually. A terminal illness and you didn’t see the signs and now it’s much too late.
It’s not for you, idiot. It’s an S for Seattle.
I almost breathe a sigh of relief when that particularly rude thought strolls across the expanse of my brain, but Bohdan sits up, legs swinging over the edge of the table, and he stretches his left arm out again.
He takes the piece of paper between two fingers, hands it to the artist, and without looking away from me, he taps his left forearm, right where the muscle sits, just beyond the precipice of his elbow.
“I’d get you. On me forever. Where you belong. ”
Everything goes so, so quiet. It’s wonderful and it reminds me so much of this one night when I was in Lake Huron with my grandparents and it snowed.
These giant, fluffy flakes floating down from the sky, all cloudy and grey, and everything was so still when I watched them fall to the earth under the glow of a streetlight.
Talon mutters somewhere behind me, “I think I could have pulled off a better line. Bit cheesy.”
“Tracks. This makes more sense for him than the numbers.” Jay would be nodding, I think.
“You can’t pull anything off, Talon. Shut up.” Tia rolls her eyes again I’m sure, folding her arms across her chest.
But I don’t see any of that when I drop down beside Bohdan on the table, and ask softly—maybe as quiet as my world is right now—but our best friends hear me anyway, because I do think they’re always listening, “Can someone get Bohdan a piece of paper, too?”