Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

For Hudson, I’d done up his ceilin’ and his wooden floors in stark black, white, and red geometric shapes ’cause he was already a popular kid, a golden boy, but he had an asceticism to his personality that called to ordered and exactitude.

Miles and Oliver, only eleven months apart in age and totally inseparable, got a room cut down the middle. The same designs done on either side of the thick black line running along the center of the floor but in complimentary colours, blue and green against orange and red.

When I finished the house, I took to the streets, searchin’ for anythin’ ugly I could turn into art with a bottle of spray paint and my imagination.

Pretty soon, I had a reputation with the cops, even though they didn’t know the identity of the boy in the purple hoodie with the hand painted, black bandana coverin’ most of his face.

Unlike most graffiti artists, I didn’t tag my name on my shit ’cause I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t need to anyway; my art was my own, and it looked it too.

When I discovered the club at seventeen, I found Axe-Man, only a handful of years older than me but already experienced, with a young daughter and ten years of tattooin’ under his belt. He hooked me up with his buddy in Vancouver where I apprenticed for six years before I decided to bite the bullet and open my own place.

One could say I didn’t take direction well, so it was better for everyone that I became my own boss.

My family, they’d believe in me.

Both my biological members and my club brothers.

But no one save Lila had expected my art to reach the heights it soared at now.

Millions of followers on social media.

A schedule booked a year in advantage, at least, with some spots saved permanently for celebrities who made their way north just to feel the sting of my tattoo gun.

It was more than I’d ever dreamed.

Yet lately, I’d been restless, houndin’ the streets of Entrance for new adventure, pushin’ Zeus then Buck then King to give me more responsibility, to send me on more and more runs, even though I’d never been so interested in them before.

My ravenous heart was fuckin’ hungry, and no matter what I fed the beast, it wouldn’t cease it’s grumble.

After that night in the bar, Lila pressed to my front, her mouth bloomin’ under mine like one’a her favourite flowers, I knew what it hungered after.

Her.

I blinked at the poster of Lila we’d hung over the reception desk near the koi fish painted up the black wall. In the shot, she was naked, the stark lightin’ and a well-placed arm over her breasts hidin’ her groin and tits from view while the rest of her golden-brown skin was visible. She had her head tipped back, eyes closed like she was dreamin’ of somethin’, and that dream was illustrated on the garden sproutin’ across her skin. Peonies in bunches up her muscular thigh, high into the crease of her flared hip, a lotus peakin’ out from between her breasts, vines filled with blossoms scrawled underneath those lush curves. She was breathtakin’ in it, utterly mesmerizin’, so none of us at the shop were surprised when new customers and old both stopped to gape at her image when they entered Street Ink.

She was my Flower Child now in ways both metaphorical and literal.

I’d tattooed each of those flowers onto that smooth skin over the years.

Still remembered the first time I’d had her in my chair, the shop empty ’cause I’d wanted, no, needed, privacy to take that virginity. We’d played our favourite rock music on low so our breath and the buzz of the gun were louder, somehow intimate.

She’d wanted the lotus first, tucked up under and between her breasts.

She was sixteen, and it was the first time I’d noticed how much she’d fuckin’ changed. No longer the scrawny little girl with dirt under her nails and pollen on her nose.

Lila was a young woman, ripenin’ like fruit on a vine. Honest to Christ, I was almost afraid to put my hands on her lest she fall off into my hand like an overripe peach too succulent to toss away without taking a bite.

But my Lila? She made it easy. She had no fuckin’ idea what her body could do to a man ’cause she was a virgin. That I knew ’cause she’d told me one night when I couldn’t sleep and I’d crawled into bed with her like I used to. She’d had some sexy dream that had woken us both us, and she was sweaty, squirmin’, obviously aroused.

I’d teased her about the man in her dream, thinkin’ it was some kid at her school.

She’d cracked her knuckles, her nervous tic, and confessed there was no kid at school.