J.M. Darhower
Copyright 2015 by Jessica Mae Darhower
All rights reserved.
Other Works by J.M. Darhower
Sempre Series:
Sempre
Sempre: Redemption
MADE: A Sempre Novel
Friends & Forever: Sempre Novellas
Monster Series:
Monster in His Eyes
Torture to Her Soul
Extinguish Series:
Extinguish
Reignite
Forbidden Series:
By Any Other Name
Snowflakes & Fire Escapes
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Other Works
Overture
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Intermission
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Finale
Acknowledgements
"Drop it! Now!"
A flashlight shined behind him, illuminating the darkness of the building. He instinctively opened his hand, the metal canister slipping from his fingers, clattering to the broken asphalt and rolling to a stop right at his feet.
He looked down at it for a moment before slowly turning his head, glancing over his shoulder, making sure not to make any sudden movements. The light blinded him as it bounced around his face. Blinking rapidly, he vaguely made out the blurry forms of two police officers, blocking his only exit, guns drawn and aimed right at his head.
Shit.
"Turn around," an officer yelled, "and keep your hands where we can see them!"
It took a moment for him to follow that order, caught off guard by the situation. Slowly, he turned the whole way around, raising his hands in the air in front of him. Streaks of black paint splattered his palms, coating his fingertips and staining the edges of his hoodie sleeves. Caught red-handed.
Or black-handed, as it was.
Son of a bitch.
In a blink they were on him, slamming him against the wall as they forced his hands behind his back. Gritting his teeth, he closed his eyes, feeling the rough coldness against his cheek. Handcuffs were tightly secured around his wrists, cutting off circulation, before he was yanked back away, covered in the still-wet paint.
"It's been a long time coming," an officer said, standing in front of him as his partner clutched the handcuffs from behind. He shined the flashlight intentionally right in his eyes, making him flinch as it stung, blinding him. "I knew we'd catch you eventually."
"Oh God… Reece... oh, yes, like that… right there!"
Her voice echoes through the small bedroom, bouncing off the walls plastered with movie star posters and pink princess bullshit. I'm a 'lights on' kind of guy, like watching as a woman comes apart beneath me, because of me, but I had to turn them off this time.
I'm in a vortex of Disney, and there's no way I can keep a hard-on looking at that bippity-boppity-boo shit.
She's eighteen, I remind myself, the words pounding through my head as I pound into her. Morally questionable, maybe, but legally fuckable.
"Uh, God, yes, please… more, Reece… yes… yes… yes!"
Her toned legs wrap around my neck, propped over my shoulders, as I push into her hard, again and again. Each thrust, each slam of my hips into hers as I fill her as deep as a cock can humanly go, makes her let out a high-pitched squeal. I savor the sweet sound, wearing it like a badge of honor.
I make her sing like the pretty little birdie she is.
Lark. I only remember her name because she had it tattooed on the small of her back on her eighteenth birthday… exactly fourteen days ago. I gave her two weeks to let her tattoo heal, two weeks of inane texting and ridiculous flirting, before throwing her down on a bed and fucking the daylights out of her. I'm a man, yeah, and I was tempted the second I met her, but I'm also a professional.
Business first, then pleasure.
"Oh God… I'm gonna… I'm gonna… uh!"
I feel it as she comes, her body convulsing with pleasure, pulsating around me as I thrust hard and deep, keeping my rhythm. As soon as she's satisfied, as soon as I feel her body start to relax back into the bed, I let loose my own release.
"Fuck," I grunt, intense pleasure exploding through me as I come. I thrust a few more times before stilling myself, dropping her legs to the bed as I collapse on top of her, exhausted.
I stay there for a moment, catching my breath, as her hands explore my sweaty back, nails gently scratching at the skin. The rhythmic sensation relaxes me, lulling me toward sleep, until I feel her warm breath against my ear. She places a soft kiss on my cheek, her lip-gloss sticky. The intimate gesture makes my skin prickle, like it's trying to fucking slink away.
Danger! Danger!
Red alert, asshole!
Before she can kiss me again, I roll over off of her, discarding the condom in a small trashcan beside the bed as our naked bodies tangle up in the satin sheets. She lays facing away from me, body mostly covered by the flowery blanket, but her back is left exposed. My eyes trail down her spine, to the vibrant patch of ink.
Stunning.
Unable to stop myself, I reach out, my fingertips tracing the lines of the tattoo. Two birds framing her name in fancy cursive. Girly as shit, sure, but still goddamn beautiful.
At least it has meaning to her.
I wait until Lark falls asleep, her soft snores filling the room, before I slip out of the twin bed and scrounge up my discarded clothes, nearly tripping over a gigantic stuffed toy on my way to the door. Un-frickin'-believable. I practically dance down the hallway, still putting on my shoes and trying to fix my pants, as I head straight for the front door of the quiet townhouse.
Cold air blasts me when I step out into the night… or morning, rather. Whatever. My watch reads a quarter after five when I glance at it in the glow of the streetlight. In a little over an hour, the sun will start to rise, the sky lightening, another day dawning over Manhattan.
By the time I finally get to sleep, my alarm will go off for work.
Lovely.
Reaching into the pocket of my black hoodie, I snatch out my pack of Newports, pulling out the only cigarette left. Shit. I stick it between my lips as I step off the front steps, mentally cursing myself.
My last cigarette.
I'd just bought the pack, determined it would last me all week, and it hasn't even made it twenty-four hours. But this is it for me. I'm done. I have to be. No more scrounging up change for something that takes years off my life, when I have too much to live for.
I have her to live for… and I made a promise.
A promise I desperately need to keep.
Crumbling up the empty pack, I toss it in the trashcan along the curb as I stroll down the street, pulling my hood up over my head to block out the chill in the air. Glancing around, it takes a minute for me to recognize the neighborhood I'm in, just a few blocks away from my apartment in the Lower Eastside, close enough to walk home.
I light the cigarette, inhaling deeply, relishing the burn in my chest as the nicotine soothes my nerves one last time. Come sunrise I'll be an insufferable prick, there's no doubt about it in my mind, but here, right now, in this moment, I'm as content as can be.
Which, for me, still tends to be pretty fucking miserable. There are moments—hours, days, weeks—when I wonder what the point of it all is, wonder why I even bother getting my ass out of bed in the mornings. But then I see her
face, and she smiles that smile, the one that stole my heart the first time I ever saw it, and I remember. I remember why I bust my ass, why I fight so hard to be a better man, why I struggle to make my way in the world. I remember why I get out of bed, why I still try, even though it feels like I can do nothing but fail.
I do it all for her.
Even if she's probably better off without me.
Buzzing echoes through the back room of the shop, the constant drone melding with the music pouring from the old, beat-up Sony boombox.
Tupac today.
What the customer wants, the customer gets.
The bass vibrates the long wooden shelf above my head, the song washing through me as I unconsciously mouth the lyrics, listening but not really hearing anymore. No, I hear nothing, feel nothing, see nothing, except for the rendition of Van Gogh's Starry Night splayed out on the table before me. The guy walked in this morning, his back a blank canvas, but in a matter of minutes he's going to walk out a fucking masterpiece.
Or partially one, anyway.
There's really no helping a fucked-up face. And Jimmy? Jimmy has so many piercings he looks like someone slammed the ugly bastard face-first into a tackle box.
The buzzing dulls as I pull the needle back and wipe away the residual ink and small beads of blood that surface. The art will take more than one session to finish, but I've managed to get a good bit of it laid out in our first sitting. I absently smack on a piece of gum—the same piece I popped in my mouth when I started hours ago.
I feel like I'm chewing on a wad of rubber, the mint flavor long gone, leaving a nasty taste in my mouth.
"Alright, Jimmy, how about jumping up and having a look," I say, cutting the power to the tattoo machine. The humming fades away, the room suddenly feeling too damn quiet, despite the thumping music.
"Badass," Jimmy says, grinning like a mad man as he surveys the ink in the full-length mirror off to the side, affixed to the bright blue painted wall.
Standing up, I tear off my black latex gloves and toss them in the trashcan when someone steps into the doorway. Ellie, the curvy receptionist at Wonderland Ink, leans against the doorframe, gnawing on the end of a cheap BIC pen as she stares down at the ragged appointment book. Her bright red hair is pulled up in childish pigtails, like Pipi Longstocking in the flesh.
"Your six o'clock just called," she says without even looking up. "They're not gonna make it. Family emergency or something."
My eyes drift to the clock above the door. Ten till. Hell of a notice. It's a memorial piece I've been sketching for a week that would've taken the rest of the night to knock out.
"I rescheduled them for next month, so you have nothing else now until morning," Ellie says, glancing at me, a twinkle in her unnaturally blue eyes, so bright they sparkle like the diamond studs pierced in her cheeks. "Unless..."
I cock an eyebrow at her. Uh-oh. "Unless?"
"Well, we have a walk-in waiting."
I blow out a deep breath as I take off my blue Yankees hat and toss it on the desk along the side of my workspace. I run my hands through my light hair, gripping the locks in contemplation, making some of the wayward strands stick straight up.
I hate walk-ins. They're usually quick, and simple, and often not thought out, the impulse buys from people wandering by with shit else to do but mark up their skin.
Tattoos are art—I pride myself on being an artist. Maybe I'll never be the next Picasso, but I lost interest in bullshit like coloring between the lines of somebody else's pre-made pictures when I was just a snotty-nosed kid with a bucket of broken crayons.
And even then I preferred drawing on the walls instead.
"One of the other guys can't do it?" I ask, spitting my gum straight in the trash. There are three of us at Wonderland Ink at the moment—Kevin runs the place, while Martin and myself pick up his leftovers, so to speak.
"They're both in sessions right now," Ellie says. "Martin will be done in about an hour and can probably squeeze it then, but Kevin has appointments lined up the rest of the night."
I run my tongue across my chapped lips before biting on the silver hoop piercing near the corner of my mouth, considering my options. Not like I have any. As much as I want to say no... and I really fucking want to... I know I shouldn't. I can't. Money is money, and being as how I never seem to have enough of that, I'm certainly in no position to turn down any.
Sometimes you have to just lie down and take one for the team, no matter how degrading it feels.
Just fuck me and get it over with.
"Fine," I mutter, motioning toward Jimmy, who is still surveying his fresh ink in the mirror. "Let me finish up here first."
"Great," Ellie says. "Her name's Bridgette."
I bandage up Jimmy's back and quickly go over aftercare. Pointless, really, since I've inked him before. Once he heads off to the receptionist's desk to pay and schedule his next appointment, I hit stop on the boombox and pull Tupac out of the cassette deck, tossing it in the box beneath the desk for next time.
Off in the distance, I can hear buzzing as the others in the shop steadily work away. Wonderland is laid out sort of like a clinic, with a main lobby and separate rooms surrounding it. All of us spend more time here than anywhere else, so we relish having our own workspace, something we can call our own and do with as we please. Kevin prefers his colorful and chaotic, while Martin's room is a geek's wet dream, murals painted on the walls with memorabilia cluttering every inch of free space. Mine? Well, mine's pretty vacant.
I never got around to doing anything with it.
All that surrounds me for a moment is irritating silence as I clean up my station before an animated voice carries through the shop, loud enough to reach my ears.
"Oh, what about this one?" a girl exclaims. "No, wait, this one! I like this one much better!"
I can faintly hear the clang of the hanging album as whoever it is shifts through the pre-drawn tattoo samples that decorate part of the lobby near the door, mockups that had been conceived in a warehouse somewhere and mass-produced, sent out to hundreds of studios in dozens of cities, so thousands of jackasses walking the street ended up with the same exact designs branded on their skin.
For fuck's sake, please don't be my walk-in.
"This is the one," she says. "This is definitely what I want."
Seriously, I silently plead to whatever God/Buddha/Fairy fucking Godmother that is willing to listen. Don't make me do something off that goddamn wall today.
I haven't had a cigarette in a little over twelve hours, the longest I've gone without one in twelve damn years. I feel like a live wire, my muscles taut as parts of me spark and twitch, in danger of electrocuting whoever dares cross me. I ache, my mind erratic, making focusing a struggle. It has been the longest day of my life, running on little sleep and no nicotine, and I have a sneaking suspicion it's about to get a hell of a lot longer in a moment.
After thoroughly cleaning up, making sure everything is sanitized, I step out of the room and cautiously glance around the lobby of the studio, spotting a few waiting guys but only two females, the girls eagerly looking through the generic tattoos. Guess they're mine. I clear my throat to get their attention and am about to speak when one of them turns around and catches my eye.
I freeze.
Mouth hanging open, words on the tip of my tongue forgotten the second I set eyes on her: long brown hair, insanely dark eyes, and the tightest pink dress hugging the curviest frame. She doesn't have much up top, but fuck if her hips don't just beg for a pair of hands to grasp them as she's pounded into from behind.
The girl is a goddess, Aphrodite in the flesh.
Thank you, whoever the hell is above, for answering a prayer I didn't even know I had.
There's something about her, something familiar on a peculiar level. I don't know her, but I oddly feel like I could. Like she has a face I've somehow seen before, one that stands out in a crowd.
Her skin is smooth, the color of cream, and I insta
ntly want nothing more than to run my tongue along every inch of her and find out if she tastes as sweet as she looks. The thought of doing just that momentarily distracts me, every other craving fading away.
I'm still tense, but I know exactly how I can take the edge off.
Changed my mind. You can definitely be my walk-in. "Bridgette?"
The moment I speak the name, the girl beside the goddess stops looking through the drawings and turns around. "That's me!"
Damn.
I force my gaze to meet the other girls' as an equally strained smile touches my lips. I habitually bite the inside of my cheek. The goddess's friend is shorter, five-foot-nothing with dirty blonde hair and bright red lips. Usually I would find her attractive—she looks a bit like the pretty little Lark I made sing last night—but in comparison to her friend, she's barely a blip on my radar.
Shifting to thoughts of business, trying to focus, my eyes scan Bridgette, calculating. She looks like a cheery girl, the kind who pledges Kai Beta Bullshit and throws mixers on the weekend with the frat boys at Alpha Kappa Douchebag. I know the kind well. She'll want flowers, maybe, or else some hearts... something new school, frilly and feminine, with bright colors. Easy peasy, but boring as shit. "What can I do for you, sweetheart?"
"I want to get this," she declares, pointing at a picture on the wall beside her.
Slowly, I step forward and survey the drawing: a red heart with a banner across it, surrounded by pink and purple flowers.
Hearts and flowers.
"I want the name Johnny written on it," Bridgette says, smiling proudly. "In pretty cursive, of course."
"And Johnny is your…?"
Please be your kid… or your father… or Johnny Depp, for that matter. I don't care if it's Johnny goddamn Appleseed. Anything but your—
"Boyfriend," she squeals.
Boyfriend. I stand there for a moment, looking between Bridgette and the drawing on the wall, suddenly feeling the urge to burn down the fucking shop to get rid of everything—and everyone—inside of it. A conflicted sense of integrity pesters me. I try to have standards, and well… this breaks every personal rule I have.