“Stay still,” he snapped, tightening his grip on my hip and sending butterflies into a whirlwind inside my stomach. God damn him, this truly was torture.
“Why won’t you answer me about Peyton?” I tried again. It had been a question that had bugged me since I’d overheard him and Caleb talking that day at school, when Caleb accused his brother of treating me like shit because I reminded him of Peyton. Then Lucy had mentioned her recently too, and the curiosity was eating away at me.
“It’s not a story I feel like telling,” he murmured, and his fingers dug into my hip painfully. “She’s an ex.”
“No shit.” I snorted. “Why do I remind you of her?”
He heaved a pained sigh and blotted at the tattoo with his cloth before sitting back and looking at me.
“You don’t. Not if I’m being honest. You did at first...” He shrugged. “Now, not so much.”
“Okay.” I pondered my next move. “How did you meet?”
“Uh, Omega training actually.” His mouth twisted down, and I could clearly see this wasn’t a topic he wanted to be discussing. Still, it felt really vital to where the two of us had gone wrong in getting to know each other.
“She’s an agent too?” I was genuinely surprised; I had expected she might be an old high school girlfriend or something.
“No, she never completed basic training.” He paused, putting down his tattoo gun and meeting my curious gaze. “She dropped out when she realized she was pregnant.”
My eyebrows shot up before I had a chance to temper my reaction. That was not what I’d been expecting. “So you...” I trailed off as he shook his head.
“She had a little girl. Bella. Most beautiful little girl you could ever imagine.” His voice glowed with love, and my heart cracked in two for him. However this story ended, it wasn’t with a happily ever after. At least not yet. “We were only eighteen, but I was in love, so I supported them for a full year. Set them up in an apartment near here, spent every spare moment I could with them, with Bella. Being her dad.”
There were no words I could offer that were going to sound like anything less than hollow platitudes, so instead, I slid my hand over his where it rested on the table and squeezed his fingers.
“After a year, Bella’s real father owned up. Turned out Peyton had been cheating on me from the very beginning and I never knew about it until then. He was married, though, and hadn’t been willing to leave his wife for his pregnant girlfriend, so he’d ignored the problem until his wife found out on her own. Once his marriage was in shambles, suddenly he wanted to know his daughter.” He looked down at my hand on his and turned his own over to link our fingers together.
“But what about you?” I asked gently, my heart aching for how utterly devastated he must have been. Hell, he still was, if the look on his face was any indication.
“I wasn’t Bella’s blood relative, her birth certificate didn’t list me as her father, and I’d signed no adoption papers. I had no rights. Peyton and this douchetard got back together, and they moved. No idea where to.” He shrugged, like he was shaking off the bad feelings and picked up his tattoo gun once more. “Ancient history. I’m almost done here, by the way.”
He went back to work on my tattoo, but left his free hand linked with mine, occasionally stroking his thumb down the inside of my wrist.
It was late—I had no idea what time—when Caleb crawled into bed with me. Despite how pissed I was with him, I still craved our late night cuddles, so I willingly rolled into his arms when he tugged me closer.
“Can I see your new ink?” he whispered in my ear as I burrowed my face into the curve of his neck.
“Shhh,” I murmured. “Sleep time. Going to yell at you more in the morning.”
“Please? I’m dying to see what he drew,” Caleb begged, and I mumbled incoherent curses at him. I’d been fast asleep when he’d crept in, and I really hated being fully woken up from deep sleep.
“Here,” I yawned, rolling to my side a little and lifting my shirt. Caleb was silent for a long time, tracing a light fingertip over my new ink.
“It’s too dark to see; I’m going to flick a light on,” he warned me all of two seconds before the bedside lamp flooded the room with light. I groaned and dragged a pillow over my head to block out the light but could hear Caleb snicker.
His fingertips traced over the edges of my ink once more, and I shivered, biting back a grin. The tattoo was, in a word, exquisite. When I’d lost the bet, I had it in the back of my mind that he was going to actually give me something truly awful to live with, just to be an ass. But what he had done instead totally defied expectation.
A whimsical, almost watercolor image of a red fox danced up the front of my hip, her back paws starting dangerously close to the bend of my thigh. The fox was chasing what looked like butterflies, with a multitude of little butterflies extending up the side of my belly and six bigger, more distinct butterflies, that I knew without asking represented my six dianoch. It was the most beautiful tattoo I think I’d ever seen, and I had actually teared up a little when Austin had finally shown me.
“Holy shit,” Caleb snorted. “That bastard. I knew he would pull something like this.”
“What?” I asked, popping out from under my pillow and squinting at him. “Don’t you like it? I think it’s gorgeous.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, Kitty Kat. This is one of the best things he has ever drawn, but he’s still a dick.” Caleb smiled at me. “You didn’t see it yet, huh?”
“See what?” I demanded, peering down at my stunning new ink.
“Here.” Caleb ran his finger over a section of the little butterflies. “Look closely at the negative space between butterflies.”
I stared hard at the patch he was talking about, but it felt like I was doing one of those eye-spy games. Those 3D images that you needed to squint and tilt your head to see what the picture was.
Caleb sighed, and traced the negative space he was talking about. “Right here, the space between butterflies spells A-U-S-T-I-N. Babe, he tattooed his name on you.”
That... asshole. I’m going to kill him! My initial reaction was what I expected of myself, but somehow I couldn’t seem to summon the anger to back it up. The tattoo was still a work of art, regardless of Austin-fucking-King’s sneaky hidden message.
Now if only I could work out what that message was actually trying to tell me.
21
“Bingo!” Wesley crowed, jumping up from the table where he’d been sitting at his laptop for the past few hours.
“Bingo?” I repeated, stirring the pasta sauce I was making. Cooking was not one of my talents, but I did make a passable spaghetti bolognese, so that’s what we were having for dinner. Having the boys constantly cook for me was irritating my inner independent woman, so I’d pushed them all out of the kitchen for once.