“What is it?” Rebekah asked, standing on tiptoes but unable to see over Eric’s shoulder. He had a good foot on her.
“I don’t think Butch wants us to fuck in his chair again.” Eric held out a key card from a nearby hotel.
“Next time you need a fuck break,” Butch said, “I’ll drive you myself. Consider that your wedding present.”
“Thanks,” Eric said, “but we just made a bet, so I won’t need this today.”
He tried to hand the key card back to Butch, but Rebekah jerked it out of his hand and slid it into the front pocket of her jeans. “Don’t be so hasty. I still have a third of a sleeve to get tattooed today. You will have a hard-on again by the time he’s finished with me, I guarantee it.”
“I don’t doubt that I will,” Eric said, “but our bet wasn’t that I wouldn’t get hard. And it wasn’t that I wouldn’t enjoy as much self-love as I want.”
“What did you bet?” Butch asked, spraying and wiping and spraying and wiping every surface imaginable.
“That I wouldn’t have sex with her for an entire day. Heck, I’ve already made it five or six minutes.” Eric crossed his arms over his chest, looking entirely too smug for such a minor accomplishment.
“That’s the stupidest bet I’ve ever heard,” Butch said as he cleaned up his station to start with new ink and a fresh needle.
Jeez, how much hepatitis does he think we have? Rebekah wondered.
“She wants to drive to Bangor, Maine, for our honeymoon,” Eric said. “In December! If I win this bet we’re going to Tahiti instead.”
“Hmm,” Butch said. “Maybe you should go hang out at the bar upstairs while I finish her sleeve.”
Eric shook his head. “I don’t care if I nut down my leg—I wouldn’t miss watching this woman getting ink for anything.”
“Even at risk of freezing your ass off in Maine?” Butch asked. “Just trying to help you out, brother.” To Rebekah he said, “Are you ready?”
She smiled and slid back into the chair. “Oh yes,” she said, staring into her husband’s brilliant blue eyes. “Hurt me good.”
Chapter Three
Eric had gotten quite worked up again while Rebekah was getting the first session of her sleeve completed. It didn’t help—either him or Butch—that she insisted on making pleasurable sounds in the back of her throat every time the needle passed over a particularly sensitive spot. He wasn’t sure if she was addicted to tattooing yet, but he hoped so. There was something intensely erotic about watching his wife get off on the pain. And either she was very good at faking—an idea he did not want to believe—or Rebekah had had an actual orgasm when Butch had been working near her arm pit. It was going to be a long, sexless twenty-four hours, he decided. But there was no way in hell he was going to Bangor, Maine. He’d win Rebekah over to his side somehow.
Now that Eric was in Butch’s chair, his excitement had waned. He didn’t find tattoos particularly painful. For him, the experience was more like scratching a deep itch beneath his skin. Satisfying in a way, but not sexually arousing. He wondered why his wife found them so enjoyable.
“So is it the pain of the tattoo that makes you cream your panties,” Eric asked her as he held perfectly still so Butch could work his artistic magic, “or knowing that your mother would never approve?”
Rebekah smiled crookedly and stroked a strand of purple hair that was mixed into her platinum blond. The bright unnatural color made her blue eyes stand out in her adorable face and made certain parts of his anatomy stand up in his pants.
“You don’t think my mother will approve?” She held out her arm, now slathered in petroleum jelly and covered with long lengths of plastic wrap. “There’s a cross in the design.” She showed him the vague outline of it on her inner forearm. “How could she disapprove of such a powerful symbol?”
“There’s also a butterfly that looks harmless enough, but I know its significance.”
She opened her eyes wide and then batted her eyelashes in her most innocent look. God, he suddenly wanted to do naughty, devious things to her.
“You mean this one?” she said, pointing at her wrist. “Are you insinuating I had that put there because it represents my favorite sex toy?”
Butch leaned back on his stool and rubbed at his forehead with the back of his wrist. “And here I thought the sexual tension would lessen after I got her out of the chair,” he said under his breath.
Eric chuckled. “Sometimes she wears that toy in public and gives me the remote. There’s nothing quite like sitting across from a woman in a restaurant and buzzing her clit until she loses her composure.”
“He’s quite ruthless,” Rebekah said. “He made me come on the dance floor at a club the other night.”
“Do you two need a chaperone?” Butch asked, dipping his needle in ink before he continued with the lettering of Eric’s vows.
“I wasn’t dancing with Eric,” she told Butch, kicking off her shoes and folding herself into the nearest chair to wait for Eric. “He dared me to dance with some drunk-as-fuck woman and then he did that to me.”
Eric chuckled at the memory. “That chick thought you were having a seizure.”
Rebekah snorted. “Just a clitoral orgasm.”
“I’m starting to think your wife is even more perverted than you are,” Butch said.
“He corrupted me,” Rebekah said. “I was a perfectly respectable woman until he watched Trey Mills eat me out. It was all downhill from there.”
Butch cursed as his needle slipped.
“Don’t remind me,” Eric said. He tried not to remember that he’d kissed the male rhythm guitarist of his band clean on the lips just so he could sample Rebekah’s taste for the first time. And once he’d gotten his first taste of her, he knew he’d never get enough.
Rebekah toyed with the edge of the plastic wrap near the back of her hand. “Before I got to know Sinners, I thought Trey was the sexiest, naughtiest member of the band, but boy, was I wrong.”
Butch chuckled. “She only wants you for your body, man.”
“Do I look like I’m complaining?” Eric asked. But he knew she cared about more than his physical self. She understood him on a level that no other person did. She got him—weird, deviant, twisted man that he was—and not only accepted his quirks but seemed to admire them.
“I wouldn’t,” Butch said and set his gun aside. “I’m done here for today. Go have a look.”
Eric climbed from the chair and examined his arm in the mirror. It was still hard to tell how the old work and the new would work together once the outline was filled in with color, but he trusted Butch to get the design right. The words he’d inked there were clear and concise.
Rebekah
you are my everything
from now until the end of time
I will love you more with each passing moment
Because you are my perfect fucking woman
His everything stepped up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. She peeked around his side to admire his new body art.
“Are you sure you aren’t going to get sick of me by the end of time? I’m thinking that’s at least a trillion years.” Her baby-blue eyes flicked upward and met his gaze in the mirror.
“Even if time starts anew and I have to love you for another trillion years, it won’t be long enough.”
She licked her lip, a pleased little smile settling at the corners of her mouth. “You’re such a sap sometimes, Eric Sticks.”
“Only when it comes to you, Rebekah Bla— um, Sticks.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever get used to calling her that. He doubted she realized how much it meant to him that she’d taken his name. Not the name he’d been born with, the name he’d chosen for himself when he’d rejected his past life. Now that he was older and slightly wiser, he sometimes wished he’d chosen something a little less junior high, but he was stuck with Sticks now. They were stuck with it. And if he and Rebekah adopted kids together, those poor little shits would be stuck with it as well.