“You ready for this?”
“Always,” I answered.
She peeled the transfer off and blotted my skin dry, inspecting it all the while. It was like she had flipped a switch and was all business and then flipped it again, all pleasure.
“Okay. Take a look.”
I stood and checked out the placement. It started just above my elbow and moved up and around my bicep and the cap of my shoulder — it was bigger than I’d imagined but exactly what it should be.
“I like it,” I said.
“Good. Me too.” She nodded to her chair. “Go ahead and have a seat.”
Her station seemed to already be set up, and she took a seat on a saddle stool with wheels, straddling it before rolling over to me, pulling on black rubber gloves.
Several reactions hit me. The sight of her rolling over to me with her legs open, snapping those rubber gloves, hit me below the belt. The realization that she was about to take a needle to me sent adrenaline shooting through my veins in a cold burst. And the look in her eyes got me right in the rib cage.
“All right,” she said as she poured black ink into a little cup. “So here’s the deal. This is way too big to do all at once if you want color. But I kinda think it’ll look better all black, just the outline. We’ve got to do that first anyway, so if you want to have it filled in later, you totally can.”
“How long until I can have more done?”
“A couple of months is usually wise.” She loaded her gun, wrapping a rubber band around the base of it. When she hit the pedal to test it, she smiled. “But anybody can do it. The line work is the hard part. You don’t have to come back to me to get it filled in.”
My heart deflated just a bit, just enough. Penny was putting space between us, telling me we wouldn’t be together in a few months, giving me permission to have it finished somewhere else.
She rolled her tray where she wanted it, scooting close to me with her eyes on my arm.
“Here we go.” She pressed that buzzing needle into my skin.
The thing about tattoos is that when it starts, you think it’s not so bad. Four hours in, and you feel like you’ve been carved like a turkey. So I enjoyed the burn before it consumed me.
Hearts worked the same way, I figured.
“You okay?” she asked after a moment, her eyes darting to mine for a solid second before looking back to my arm.
“I’m good.”
I watched her work, admiring the sureness of her hand, competence radiating from her. She was confident, so certain, completely capable. Penny could take over the world if she wanted to. She could take me over.
She kind of already had.
I looked over the shop and realized I’d met all the important people in her life — her family. I was in her chair as a customer, but it was more than that. There was an intimacy to the act and intimacy to her bringing me to the place that meant so much to her. Not that she’d made a big deal about it, but I knew by how she talked about everyone I’d met that they were her people. And that filled me with hope and pleasure at the connection to her.
Of course, that connection scared me too. Because I knew deep down that I didn’t have as much control as I’d thought I did over the situation. Every single day, she’d marked me in more ways than one, and I couldn’t turn back any more from my heart than I could from the needle in her hand.
“So, Bodie,” Ramona started from the wall of Penny’s booth.
When I glanced over, she was leaning on the wall from the other side, next to Veronica. They were both smiling unabashedly, their eyes never quite reaching mine — they were too busy scanning my chest.
“What is it you do again?” Ramona asked.
“I’m a software engineer. My buddies and I are working on a video game.”
They nodded their appreciation.
“What kind of game?” Veronica leaned in, shoulder to shoulder with Ramona.
“It’s an open world role-playing game. Steampunk, story-driven.”
Their faces were blank.
“Ah, like … think Victorian era, airships, like blimps. Treasure hunting, like Indiana Jones meets Han Solo but British.”
They lit up at that, including Penny, and I found myself feeling pleased.
“What’s it called?” Ramona asked.
“Nighthawk. It’s the name of the ship.”
Penny bounced a little in her seat. “Oh my God, that makes me want to draw stuff. This is seriously genius, Bodie. Who’s doing your artwork?”
“Jude. He’s a graphic artist and handles all of our 3D renderings. Phil and I are the code jockeys. Jude is the art.”
Penny waggled her brows at Veronica, who rolled her eyes.
“So how does that work?” Ramona asked. “Like, what do you do with it when it’s done?”
I took a breath and let it out as Penny carved a line in my skin and wiped it with a paper towel. “The first real step is to get a gameplay demo ready so we can pitch it to a big developer. The idea is that they pay us for the concept and bring us on as part of the development team. But we’ve been working on the demo for seven years,” I said with a laugh.
“Man, that’s intense,” Penny said as she dipped her needle in the ink and got back to work.
“It’s moving a lot faster now that we’ve been working on it full-time, but yeah. It’s been a long time coming. I mean, we came up with the idea in junior high and have been working toward this ever since. Phil’s focused on our outreach, networking through college and career buddies to see if we can get a meeting. There’s this one development company that’s at the top of the list. If we can get in with them, it’s a guarantee that the game would be everything we could possibly dream of. They’ve got the chops and the cash to throw at it.”
“What’s the company called?” Veronica asked.
“Avalanche,” I said, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice. “The games they produce are off the charts. But that’s the pie-in-the-sky kind of dream. We’ll probably get it picked up by a smaller company — I just hope they’ll let us do the work to make it what we want.”
Another gigantic hairy dude walked out of the hallway and into the shop, eyeing me in the chair, then he smirked at Ramona. He slapped her on the ass, and she yelped, laughing when she saw him.
“Hey, Shep,” Penny chirped. “This is Bodie. Bodie, this is Shep, Ramona’s fiancé and Joel’s brother.”
I jerked a chin at him in greeting. “How’s it going?”
“Not too bad,” Shep said, every word loaded, “other than the fact that my future wife is salivating over Penny’s guy.”
Everyone laughed but me. I was a hundred and ten percent sure that he could wreck my face without breaking a sweat.
“Come on, girls,” Shep said. “Leave Penny alone so she can do her job without an audience.”
They grumbled about it, but he effectively shooed them off, leaving Penny and me as alone as we could be in a tattoo parlor full of people.