Chapter 17 #2
Papa and Dad still laugh about a phase I went through when I was five or six, where I would steal cookies only to immediately find one of them, mouth stuffed with the afore-mentioned klepto cookies, and confess my crimes with tears running down my face and chocolate chips falling out of my mouth.
All this is to say, after I watch The Ghost Prince leave, still thinking about wanting to kiss him, I find myself peeking into Ari’s room.
She’s asleep, as any normal person would be at twelve-forty a.m. on Thursday night.
But still…a huge part of me really wants to wake her up and tell her everything.
I don’t. But I think that might have more to do with the fact that telling her about The Ghost Prince would mean I'd have to tell her about Velvet Villainess, not so much me not wanting to wake her up.
In the bathroom between our rooms, I start the shower and brush my teeth while I wait for the water to heat up. Then I pause, frowning as I look at my nails.
…They're black.
Underneath my nails is black, that is.
I spit out my toothpaste, then use a cleaner to scrape underneath the nail. I hold the gunk up to the light, peering closer.
Is that…paint?
The gunk falls from the cleaner onto the sink. Where it lands on water droplets, black starts to run down the porcelain slope of the sink in streaks.
My brow furrows.
It is paint. But it’s not like I was creating a masterpiece earlier. So when the hell did I get black paint under my—
Whoa.
I turn the shower off and bolt into my room, sitting down at my desk and quickly opening my laptop to do a search on “temporary tattoos”.
I now very vividly remember what I was scraping with my nails earlier.
…It was The Ghost Prince’s body.
I dug my nails into his hips when he was thrusting between my thighs, and scraped them over his skin.
And now there’s black paint under there.
I stare at the search result.
Temporary tattoos are typically made of water-permeable paper, cosmetic-grade FDA-approved colorants and pigments, a thin water-soluble release film (such as polyvinyl alcohol or gelatin), and a skin-safe, hypoallergenic acrylic-based adhesive.
A slithering sensation coils in my chest as I quickly bring up The Ghost Prince’s page on my laptop and click on a random video. When he’s mid-dance, I pause the video at a point where he’s got both muscled arms raised and his chiseled abs flexed, and take a screenshot.
I do the same thing with four more videos of his: one from just a few weeks ago, another from three months back, and two from last spring. Then I open all the screenshots of his bare torso and compare them.
At first, I think I might be crazy. But then I see it, like those puzzles in kids' magazines that ask you to find the subtle differences.
I just spotted one.
On the surface, in every screenshot, The Ghost Prince looks the same.
Same mask. Same low-slung pants. Same bare, tattooed torso and muscled arms. My eyes trace over the tattoo of the raven swooping down one side of his torso over his ribs and onto the groove of his left hip.
Then my gaze shifts to the coiled snake rippling down his right side.
I know these tattoos. I’ve seen them up close. Tonight, I raked my nails over them as I came for him.
But the devil, as they say, is in the details.
In four of the screen grabs, The Ghost Prince looks identical. But in the fifth one, from three months ago, he doesn't.
…The snake is flipped.
In all his other videos, the all-black, highly detailed tattoo of the snake coils down his ribs with the snake’s head and forked tongue curving down toward his waistband, like it’s pointing right at his dick. But in this one video, the head is facing the other way.
My pulse skips.
It’s not a real tattoo.
I spend the next hour taking screenshots of The Ghost Prince’s videos, comparing his ink.
His arms are really hard to track, because they’re covered in layers of it, like maybe he had new tattoos done over previous ones.
But after a while I’m pretty certain the “Ride fast, live hard” tattoo on his left pec and the skull on the right one are both fake.
I mean, I get why he does it. I wear a blonde wig to obscure my own identity in my videos.
But the reason I’m looking is because I want to know which ones are fake and which ones are real.
Because if I’m right, and The Ghost Prince is a Knightsblood student, it means I can look for those real tattoos on my male classmates and figure out who he is.
The guy I just came for, eagerly.
The guy I wanted…still want…to kiss.
By three in the morning, I’ve got a few more potential fakes spotted on both his arms. It’s still not enough to be able to identify him, but it’s a start.
But as I finally slip into bed and close my eyes, my body still tingling from his touch, I find myself asking: do I want to know who he is?
There's something intoxicating about not knowing. There’s a thrill that comes with the idea that he exists only in the dark, nameless, without a daylight version of himself that might disappoint me or complicate things.
If I find out who he is, he becomes real.
And “real” comes with consequences.
But then again, I already know what his skin tastes like. I already know the sounds he makes when he loses control. I’ve already felt his fingers inside me and shattered against his tongue.
The fantasy ship, I think it’s safe to say, has fucking sailed.
So maybe the question now isn't whether I want to know who he is.
It's whether I'm ready for the fantasy to become reality.