He sucked in his breath as his saw me, his eyes traveling from my toes to my hips, as if he hadn’t seen it all before.
“Jesus,” he whispered, gaze lingering everywhere. “I keep forgetting that you’re art already.”
I felt strangely shy at his admiration and fidgeted with the corners of the towel. “So what are you going to tattoo on me?”
“Whatever your scars tell me to,” he said.
I lay my head back on the bed as he started prepping my leg. I didn’t want to watch. I wanted to submit. I looked out the window, the sun glinting off the Rio building in the distance. After a few minutes, the needle buzzed, alive and waiting to transform me.
I put my sins in his hands.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Then
The girl stood outside the tattoo parlor, shaking her head adamantly. She had promised her boyfriend that she’d get a tattoo with him, but she was getting very cold feet at the last minute.
“Come on, angel,” Javier crooned to her, taking her hand. “Everyone gets nervous their first time. It’s a little like sex, although you should be so glad you don’t have to wear the loss of your virginity on your sleeve.”
I kinda will, she thought to herself, unable to keep from smiling. Not only had she lost her virginity to Javier, but they had talked for months about getting tattoos together. Javier already had several, a large cross that ran up his spine, and his mother’s name scribbled on the inside of his bicep. The girl had none.
They had decided to go with a musical theme based on songs they would pick out for each other. Javier was partial to the song “On Every Street” by Dire Straits. Being a big fan of the band, the girl loved the song but could never understand why her boyfriend had associated it with her. After all, the song talked about a woman’s “injured looks” whose “fingerprints remained concrete,” and the man with a “ladykiller regulation tattoo” who was “still on the case” and forever searching for her in “a ravenous town.” Javier’s answer was always the same, that no matter what happened to them, he’d always come looking for her, on every street.
At the time, the girl thought it was romantic. And perhaps, in some twisted way, she still did. But she couldn’t decide how to incorporate that into a tattoo. There was a line in the song about the moon hanging upside down, and she thought that might be a good one. Then Javier suggested she get the written notes to the part of the song that always made her cry. She said she cried when she heard it because it made her feel what the hero in the song felt. And that was alone. Just three simple notes, and she felt all the grief of losing your lover, forever confined to a never-ending search. She told him it sounded like your heart echoing down a black corridor.
Her song for Javier was Nine Inch Nails’ “Wish.” A darker, faster, more frantic song but one of her favorites. But when it came to the cryptic lyrics, to wishing there was something real in a “world full of you,” she wasn’t sure who the song was about. Her or Javier?
He decided to get it on his wrist, just the word “Wish.” He said he had always wished for a woman like her and every time he looked at his hand he’d be reminded that wishes did come true.
Still, despite the commitment and support, the girl was having second thoughts. It was more than just the pain; tattoos were forever. Her tattoo spoke of a future that may or may not happen. Did she want it to come to pass, to look down at her arm one day, knowing Javier was looking for her? Did she want to feel that empty, seeking sound?
Javier was making sure she’d always remember the first time she had sex and the first time she got a tattoo. He was imprinted on her body in so many ways. And in the back of her head, buried deep behind logic, hidden behind first loves, sex, lies and power, the girl knew that she was being branded, for him to own, forever.
It took a bit more pleading and coaxing outside the parlor on that day when the clouds pressed down on Ocean Springs like a humid hand. But finally, and as usual, the girl gave in. She had a hard time saying no to Javier. It was one of the reasons why, a year later, her mark became her lover and the master of her heart. She never meant to fall for Javier. She couldn’t even understand how she did, how she succumbed to a man who did very bad things, who was part of an organization that had once done very bad things to her.
But when you’re twenty, the heart wants what it wants and if you’re dedicated enough, it gets what it gets. Youth and naivety did so much for this girl who was now calling herself Eden White.