Five First Dates (Sassy in the City 2)

“Let’s assume, then, she is just a bitch who likes to make people miserable. You have to find a way to tolerate her. Otherwise, you’ll lose your job and she’ll win. Because filming or not, you can’t be acting crazy in front of clients. People like that somehow always find a way to come out on top. I wouldn’t count on it going in my favor if I were you.”

She sucked on her vape, a plume of smoke rising in front of her face. “You’re very pragmatic. I’m not sure if I love that about you or hate that.”

I frowned. “I’m not sure I would call myself pragmatic.” That sounded fucking boring.

“It’s true. You’re like a ‘this is the way it is, so deal’ kind of guy.”

I leaned against the brick wall and stuck my foot against it. “I was raised by a teen single mom. That was the story of my childhood—deal.”

“How old was your mom when she had you?”

“Fifteen.” I was well aware the cameraman was filming, but I was proud of my mother. She’d worked her ass off.

Her eyes widened. “Oh, damn. That’s young.”

“Yep. She worked hard to provide for me, but we were broke, and she was gone a lot. So yeah, maybe I am pragmatic. But why does that sound like such an insult?” Women weren’t going to be all hot for the guy who was pragmatic.

“It’s not an insult. But right now, I just wanted to vent and rant and you wanted to problem solve. You’re not a dude who sees the value in a grand gesture.” She pointed her finger at me. “WWRRD, remember?”

I rolled my eyes. I was annoyed. I’m sure Ryan Reynolds was a great guy, but he played roles in movies. You know. Not real. They were lines in a script.

“What does that mean?” the cameraman asked. “Can you elaborate?”

“It means nothing,” I said, opening the back door. “And no. I can’t elaborate. I’m going back to work. I have a client.”

I was doing a mountain scene landscape back piece and I was excited to get started on it. I held my hand out to the guy waiting for me and introduced myself. I welcomed the distraction from the conversation that had seemed to irrationally pissed me off.

Being a tattoo artist gave me a clear medium for my art and it had been a natural progression for me from comic book art I’d dabbled in during middle school and high school. It also had one big advantage over comics—I got to meet interesting people. Some people didn’t want to talk, they were concentrating on dealing with the pain. But others wanted to talk through it and I was always up for that.

Even in a town that wasn’t huge, I’d met people from all walks of life, with cool stories to tell. The meaning behind a person’s ink always fascinated me. Some humbled me. Others had touched me in ways I couldn’t have predicted, like a mother who wanted her child’s footprint tatted on her own foot after the baby had passed away.

In that case in particular, I had been hugely honored that she had trusted an artist as young as me to do something so important, but she’d loved my portfolio. I had left after that appointment and driven straight to my parents’ house to hug the snot out of all my siblings.

Nope, I didn’t think of myself as a pragmatic guy. I actually thought I was kind of fucking sentimental.

But apparently unless you had a so-called grand gesture none of that shit mattered.

I wasn’t sold on hanging back and being Savannah’s nanny and honorary little brother and waiting for something to change.

If you want your situation to change, you do something about it.

I lifted the tattoo machine and asked the guy sitting on a chair with his back to me, “You ready for this?”

“Let’s fucking do it,” he said.

“Words to live by, man.”

I’d gone for a more casual look with Dakota’s date choice for me. I was wearing wide-leg jeans, boots with a heel, and a tight off-the-shoulder sweater in a rust color that I hoped complemented my hair. I was wearing a jeweled headband to elevate the outfit slightly since this was a late-night date. To me, meeting a stranger for the first time at a club at eleven o’clock at night seemed a little odd, but Jackson Martin was a DJ. A celebrity DJ, whose day usually started at noon and ended at 4 a.m., so I had agreed to be flexible on when to meet up.

Yet at the same time, all I could think as I checked my lipstick in the mirror by the front door of my apartment was that I’d give anything to be sitting on the couch with Maddox and Sully right now. Maddox was lying down and Sully sitting on his chest.

“Hey, get your finger out of my nose,” Maddox said, pulling Sully’s hand back and giving his arms a little up and down motion. “That’s nasty,” he said in a teasing voice. “Yuck, yuck, yuckity yuck.”

Which each yuck, he punctuated it by bouncing Sully up and down so that by the end, my son was laughing, that hearty belly baby laugh that warms your heart to the core.

It was stinking adorable. Just absolutely everything.

I was leaving that sound because I was determined that I was going to find my Prince Charming so that I could have a healthy, happy relationship with a man, and eventually, some day have more children. But suddenly my whole reason for doing all of these dates seemed suspect. Was I being totally selfish? Was it wrong to want to have a relationship right now?