“Yeah,” I agreed even though I wasn’t sure exactly how to get past it. “Okay.”
“Good,” he nodded curtly then grinned rakishly. “Now you ready for why I really brought you here?”
As if on cue, a huge, leather clad biker opened a door toward the back of the shop and stalked through it. I recognized him because he had a daughter around H.R. and my age named Cleo.
Axe-Man trudged forward and sat down heavily on a stool at the station beside Nova’s. “Sit,” he ordered.
I watched as Nova moved over to his chair, peeled off his shirt, and dropped onto it. He winked at me as he raised his arms above his head and tilted his chin to the ceiling.
“Gettin’ somethin’ done for Dane,” he explained as Axe-Man pulled over a wheeled table topped with tattooing tools to his side and started prepping. “Thought you should be here.”
I nodded, struck dumb by the sight of Nova spread out over the chair like that, shirtless and easy with his half-nakedness.
He had a long torso with broad shoulders and a waist defined by hard rows of sculpted muscle I would have loved to trace with a pen. He had ink on both arms now, sleeves done up in a myriad of seemingly random art that I knew he’d drawn himself. Flowers, skulls, a pair of brass knuckles over a heavy fist, an anatomical heart shot through with an arrow fired by a demonic cupid sitting up on his shoulder. The art was beautiful and made his already extraordinary body almost sinfully handsome.
I touched my fingertips to my gaping mouth, and they came away slightly damp with drool.
Staring at him, heat rushed from the top of my scalp down to my heels as if a bucket of scalding water had been dumped over my head. My skin tingled with heat, my heart beating faster against the onslaught.
Desire. The first stirrings of it so recklessly ignited by my foster brother laid out on a table to be inked with the memory of my lost brother.
It was a foreign sensation, and I rubbed my thighs together in my jeans to try to alleviate the odd tightening I felt in my groin.
So this was it, I thought, this was what it felt like to want someone.
“Li?” Nova said, jerking me roughly out of my salacious daydream. “Pull up a stool, and watch a master at work. Axe-Man’s almost as good as me.”
The big, blond Viking of a man only grunted as he leaned forward to place a stencil at the base of Nova’s throat.
“Isn’t that going to hurt?” I asked, touching my own neck.
“Hell yeah,” he said easily with a laugh. “But beauty is painful.”
“Why don’t you get it somewhere less painful?” I asked as I rolled a stool to his free side and sat down close enough to be able to count the dark hairs sprouting from his naval down into the edge of his blue jeans.
My mouth went dry as I stared at the straight, oddly erotic trail and thought about tugging it between my teeth.
Sweat beaded on my brow.
“’Cause I wanna be able to see it, to remember Dane, whenever I look in the mirror no matter what I’m wearin’, and the throat is always visible,” he explained.
A lump lodged in my throat, and no matter how hard I swallowed, I couldn’t get it down. “You really loved him. Did you ever tell him?”
Nova’s lips flatlined for a second. “Not much in the habit’a sayin’ shit like that out loud. But there’s lotsa ways to let someone know you love them. This is one’a mine.”
He held still while Axe-Man traced the outline of the design.
“What is it?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he waited for Axe-Man to pull away and hand him a hand-held mirror so he could see the image on his throat.
It was a lotus, bulbous and resplendent, unfolding slightly right at the base of his throat.
“A lotus,” I breathed, leaning forward unconsciously to reach out for the design, my fingers hovering over it. “A symbol of overcoming obstacles, of rebirth.”
“Of something beautiful created from something ugly,” Nova agreed. “Dane was born in a stinkin’ fuckin’ mire just like you in that place with Ignacio, but he was the purest, best man I’ll ever know.”
“Yeah,” I wheezed through the expanding mass in my throat. “Yeah, he was.”
Nova nodded and leaned back to close his eyes, reaching for my hand with the one closest to me. I watched as his big hand, the back of it inked with a skull, enfolded my own.
“It’s gonna take a while, but when he’s done, we’re gonna tag the same thing in the alleyway on the side of the shop together, yeah? That way everyone comin’ to the shop’ll see our tribute to Dane. What do you think’a that?”