INKED 8: A Tattoo Shop Reverse Harem

Now I’ve finished my ridiculous Buzz Lightyear thoughts, I lie back on the bed while Carl searches books for inspiration and begins to pull together lots of ideas into a unique tattoo for me.

Dex sticks his head around the booth and immediately straightens. “What? You’re getting a tattoo?”

“Yep.”

“And you asked Carl.”

I raise my hand and shake my head, knowing that with seven other men who could all have fulfilled this request, this could get crazily competitive. “I asked Carl, and that’s it. He’s free to do it now, and I want it now.”

Dex nods, and I’m glad that he’s heard me and is not going to ask any more questions. This is a hard enough step for me to take without it being questioned. “I’ll show you when it’s done, okay?”

“Do it well,” Dex orders Carl before retreating to find his next customer.

“You’re learning fast,” Carl says with a twitch of a smile. “A woman with eight men needs to know how to defuse them without anger.”

“Lucky I’m not an angry person then.”

When he shows me the design that he’s created, tears spring to my eyes. It’s an intricate and feminine combination of the infinity symbol with a single open flower on one side and eight tiny swallows lined up around the other curve in various stages of spreading their wings. It’s our love represented in a single tattoo.

It’s perfect.

“What do you think?”

“I think, if I didn’t already love you with everything that I am, I’d love you more.”

Carl’s eyes lower for a second, and he inhales deeply as though he can draw the sentiment into his lungs. His fingers find the edge of my shirt, sliding slowly up the center of my abdomen. I don’t stop him from exposing me because, although it feels completely sexual, I know he’s thinking about where to place the tattoo. I break out in gooseflesh, and I have to stifle a moan as his fingers explore my skin.

“Are you sure you want to mark yourself?” he asks. “Your skin is so beautiful.”

“I’m sure,” I whisper, taking hold of his tender hand. It’s a hand that can touch me with gentleness but also a hand that needs to deliver pain. My Carl is a beautiful quandary.

“Then here?” he asks, stroking a place beneath the wire of my bra at the side over my rib. “Or here?” Moving his hand, he strokes over the top of my left breast.

“Over my heart?” I ask.

Carl nods, touching that place again. It’s a place where I feel him and the rest of my boys every day. A place that was cold before they came into my life but is now filled with soft warmth, day, and night.

“There,” I say. It’s perfect.

“Okay.”

It takes him a while to convert his drawing into a format that can be transferred to my skin, and for all that time, I watch him silently working, knowing this won’t be easy for him.

Pain without pleasure doesn’t come naturally to Carl, but it’ll be worth it.

That evening, with my beautiful tattoo completed and wrapped to keep it sanitary, I sit on the back porch and watch the sun go down. The boys are late home. Work has been crazy, but I don’t mind waiting for them. It builds anticipation, and the rewards are something else.

When I eventually hear the front door opening, it only takes two seconds for someone to call my name.

“Kyla, where are you, baby?”

“Out back,” I yell.

The stomping of eight sets of feet through the house is like a herd of elephants. They don’t have a chance of creeping up on me, that’s for sure.

“There she is,” Nash says, beaming. He’s the first to bend to kiss me, his eyes drifting to the place he knows I’ve been inked. “I can’t believe you did it,” he says.

“Ha, you thought I was too chicken?”

“Nah. I just thought it wasn’t your thing.”

“Carl better have done his best work,” Noah says, kissing my lips a little harder than his brother.

The rest take turns in greeting me, the smell of something delicious filling the air. “We bought burgers,” Dex says. “Lex didn’t feel like cooking tonight.”

“Well, he’s allowed a day off once in a while,” I laugh.

“It wouldn’t hurt you guys to learn to do more than boil an egg,” Lex grumbles.

“Isn’t the whole benefit of having a household with so many people that each of us takes on a role?” Niall asks.

“What’s yours?” Lex begins unwrapping burgers as Carl returns with plates.

“Who do you think makes sure the clothes are clean?” Niall says. “Are you enjoying the fresh underwear you're wearing right now? That was me.”

“Well, I guess my ass should thank you,” Lex laughs.

“Yes, it should.”

“I feel like I’m slacking,” I say, realizing just how much my men are doing to keep our household functioning.

“Your job is the most physically taxing in the house,” Kole says. “We only have to fuck once each. You have to times that by eight every time.”