Chapter 11
ELEVEN
LENNON
Look, this photoshoot after hours in the tattoo shop working with August on his branding is strictly professional.
Something that’s in both of our interests.
Professionally.
Did I mention how professional I’m being?
Super profesh as I tell August to take off his outer hoodie so he’s standing in nothing but his white ribbed tank.
Which just happens to expose all those muscles I viscerally remember hefting my body around so easily two nights ago when we were just perfect strangers intent on a very hot one-night stand.
Back when I didn’t know he was my brother-in-law.
Soon-to-be ex-brother-in-law.
I’ve really got to figure out this divorce shit.
In the meantime, though?
I’m standing in a darkened tattoo shop with a very tall, very handsome—and did I mention very muscular?—August, standing like a tattooed god against some of his framed artwork and a tattoo chair.
I’ve artfully lit him, and now I’m dancing around him, using my phone’s excellent zoom to get a close-up of his face.
I catch just enough of his neck tattoo to make him look dangerously sexy and get several pics. Then I move and snap continuously to catch the different planes of his jaw where it catches the light.
I decide I’ll make all the pics black and white. Definitely black and white. It’ll match his art style and do approximately devastating things to the contrast of ink against skin.
One of his eyebrows pops up and I get a quick snap of his sardonic look before he opens his mouth.
“I feel ridiculous. Don’t you have enough by now?”
“Are you kidding? We want to batch a month’s worth of content. And believe me, the Instagram girlies will be eating this up.”
“Instagram girlies? I thought we were trying to boost my clientele list. Not crowd my DMs.”
I shake my head back and forth. “A little of both kinds of engagement will really get the needle moving. Give in to the gifts the good Lord gave you, bro.”
“Bro? So I’m your bro now?”
For a second our gazes connect, and I feel that sizzle all the way through my belly down to my toes.
I lower the phone and bite my bottom lip. “You are technically my ex-brother-in-law.”
“Right.” He drops his eyes.
The room does something. Like tilt a little and go a little swimmy.
Except, no, that’s just what’s happening inside my belly when I look down at my phone screen at the last photo I took. His sardonic eyebrow, the gaze that cuts straight through me with the corner of his mouth tilted up.
He photographs like someone who’s never once been self-conscious in his life.
It’s entirely devastating.
And what keeps getting in the way of the professional I’m trying to be.
“I need action shots,” I say. “You posing is great but the real content is you working. Hands holding the needle with the art happening in real time.” I look up. “You have any clients tomorrow morning I could shoot?”
“First booking’s at eleven.”
“Could I come in before? Set up and get some ambient shots of the space—”
“Shop opens at ten.”
“What about before ten?”
He looks at me.
“I’m there at nine,” he says. “Doing setup and prepping. It’s not very exciting.”
“It doesn’t need to be exciting, it just needs to be real. Authenticity is what performs.”
I’m warming up now, the part of my brain that is genuinely good at this switching online.
It’s a relief to be in a professional competence mindset because that feels like much more solid ground than whatever…
may or may not be going on flirtation-wise between me and this gorgeous man I had earth-shattering sex with two days ago.
No, who you had a one-night stand with two days ago. Who also happens to be your legally-current-husband’s brother.
Which is why we’re focused on professional mode. “The behind-the-scenes stuff, the prep, maybe you doing some sketches—” I stop.
The sketchbook.
His face does something. He saw that I saw the angel with my face. My incredibly accurate face on the intricately beautiful angel.
“Forget the sketchbook,” I say quickly.
“Forgotten,” he says, equally quickly.
We are both very focused on the middle distance for a moment.
“What about tonight?” I say. “I’ve got you here, and we’ve set up decent lighting. If I had some action shots to go with the portraits we’d have a solid first batch.” I look around the shop. “Could you—do a practice run? Fake tattooing something, just so I can get the hands?”
“I don’t fake tattoo things.”
“Could you sketch, then? Just at the station, like you’re prepping a design?”
He pulls out the stool at his station and reaches for a pad on the counter—not his beat-up sketchbook, but a fresh one, and picks up a pencil.
The shift is immediate. He goes from the slightly stiff quality he has in front of the camera to totally loose but also concentrated, his hand moving across the page with the ease of someone who has been doing this a long time.
I take approximately forty photos in the next three minutes.
This.
This is the content.
His hand and the pencil and the way his brow does that thing where it almost furrows but doesn’t quite.
The ink on the muscles of his forearms shifts in the light as his wrist moves.
I crouch for one angle and step back for another, completely in it, the hyperfocus that comes when something is working and I know it’s working—
“What are you drawing?” I ask, without lowering the phone.
“You’re about to find out.”
I lower the phone.
He turns the pad toward me.
It’s a woman. Just her face and the top of her shoulders, pencil sketch, not finished—but even unfinished it’s obviously a Medusa.
But it’s not the monster version, with writhing serpents meant to horrify.
This one is just a woman who’s beautiful and full of righteous fury, which isn’t something I would have ever thought I’d be able to tell from just a drawing, but it’s so clear in what he’s just put to paper.
The snakes in her hair aren’t monstrous.
They’re powerful, like an extension of something that was always in her.
I look at it for a long time, and my throat gets a little choked up.
“You just… came up with that? Right now?”
“Sometimes the inspiration hits.”
Strength and beauty and rage, I think. All three at once, unapologetically.
“Will you tattoo it on me?”
He lowers the page. “For content? Because a tattoo is for life. Not just to meet a content quota.”
I meet his eyes. “I want this tattoo.”
His hand with the pencil goes still on the pad.
“You don’t have to—” he starts.
“I know I don’t have to.”
“It’s a significant piece. It’s not—this isn’t flash, Lennon. This would be a few hours at least, and if you’ve never—”
“You said they hurt like hell,” I say. “I know what I’m getting into.”
“Do you?” He’s looking at me now with those piercing eyes of his, and I have to adjust my gaze to the bridge of his nose, because I can’t handle the full intensity… of him. “It’s permanent.”
“I know what permanent means.”
He looks back down at the sketch, and nods. “You’re the muse. It deserves to be on your skin.”
I’m the muse? I mean, I guessed, but him just saying it out loud like that—
“Yeah?” I swallow hard, trying not to be impacted more than I should be. If you think about it, all clients are a muse of sorts. They ask for a piece, and he draws it.
Except, I didn’t ask for this, and he drew it because he saw something in me that I’m only starting to glimpse in myself. But he saw what I’m trying to live into even though I’m still terrified every moment that I’m doing the wrong thing and—
“It’s right for you.” He says it simply, like it’s just a fact.
I clear my throat. “Where would you put it?”
“Where do you want it?”
I think about it. “Somewhere I can see it,” I say.
I want to be reminded every day of how he sees me. Because this is how I want to see myself all the time.
Strong and able to scream on the outside and powerful.
He nods, slowly. “Inner forearm,” he says. “Or upper arm. Depending on size.”
“Inner forearm,” I say, and then reiterate. “I want to be able to look at it.”
He pulls on a fresh pair of gloves and sets up with the efficiency of someone who has done this ten thousand times. I prop my phone on a little stand I’ve made from a stack of tattoo magazines.
I angle the phone to catch his hands and my arm in frame. I have strictly professional reasons for recording this. Not so I can watch it back later over and over and over for myself, his face bent so intently and focused over my arm.
“Ready?” he says.
“Yes,” I say, before I can think about it.
The first touch of the needle isn’t what I expected.
It feels almost like a little zapping burn that makes me jump and yelp. Neither is very dignified.
August’s hand pauses.
“You okay?”
“Yes.” I look at the ceiling, and breathe out through my nose. “Keep going.”
“You can tell me to stop.”
“I know I can. I don’t want to.” I make myself look down at what he’s doing—at his hands, at the line beginning to appear on my skin—and something steadies in me. “I’m okay. Keep going.”
He does.
It hurts. I want to be accurate about this: it really, really hurts.
Like a weird burning line that somehow connects to my stomach muscles in little spasms. But underneath the pain is something else.
A kind of aliveness. It feels similar to the cold plunge in the pool, as it turns out. It’s not a pleasurable feeling exactly, but I do feel very, very… present.
I am here.
I am in my body.
My body is mine.
August works without talking, and I’m grateful for it because I’m using most of my available processing power for not making undignified sounds.
And being proud of myself because: I’m doing this.
Not just the tattoo specifically.
But in general.
I left.
I left and Jake locked me out of everything and Brianna called me cray cray and Kathy called me Jezebel and I’m sure everyone at church agrees. I have a thousand dollars in a sock and I’m living in someone else’s RV but I am still here.
The world as I knew it did fall apart.
But… maybe that’s not the disaster I was always afraid it would be.
I haven’t had a migraine in days and I feel wonderful, and wild, and free—