Work of Art (5 page)

He groaned and let his head fall back against the couch as I finished the last of my beer and got up to get another one. At this rate, I’d be drunk in an hour, and I wasn’t sure I cared. I hadn’t been drunk in a very long time, and a part of me sort of wanted to just stay that way all weekend. Responsibilities
be damned.

“She was so fucking hot,” he groaned. “She had these butterfly tattoos trailing up her arms
. They were all different colors and designs. It was sexy as hell, and I know she had more tats that I couldn’t see, and I really wanted to. And she had these perfect tits, and her hair fell over them, and all I could imagine was her on top of me and her hair falling all around my head as I let her ride me for hours. I mean, you just know a girl who looks like that is fucking amazing in bed.”

Standing in the kitchen, I reached down to adjust myself as my imagination got the best of me. Jesus, I needed to get laid.
There’d always been something about tattoos that had turned me on, and I’d hooked up with a few girls over the years who had ink, so the image Brandon had put in my head was taunting me, reminding me of what I couldn’t have.

And
out of the blue I was suddenly reminded of my high school girlfriend. She had a sexy tattoo on her lower back, and I was pretty sure my fascination with girls with ink stemmed from her. But I also remembered how much my mother hated her tattoo. She saw it one day and went apeshit about how a lady shouldn’t decimate her body, and I should be ashamed that I’d stooped so low as to date a girl as classless as her. I was eighteen at the time, and as much as I wanted to please my parents, I was head-over-heels in love with my girlfriend, so I didn’t exactly care what they thought.

Now things were different.

“You going see this girl while you’re out here?” I asked Brandon, as I walked back into the living room.

He grinned.
“Hell yeah. Get this, she’s a tattoo artist. How fucking hot is that?”

Yeah, I could only imagine what this chick looked like if that’s what she did for a living.

“Totally hot, man,” I agreed, just to appease him.

Brandon and I just had different taste when it came to women.
Even though tattoos turned me on, I’d never gone slumming, but he did all the time, especially since he and Heather had separated. Of course, Brandon hadn’t grown up with money. I’d never really been around girls who hadn’t been bred to be ladies. Even my high school girlfriend came from money, but her stepfather had embezzled a ton of other people’s money, as well, and he’d landed himself in prison when we’d been in high school, so my parents hadn’t approved of her. Of course that wasn’t her fault, but they didn’t want me associating with her. I’d dated her for two years.

“I know, right.
So I’m thinking I’m going to get some ink done tomorrow. You up for coming with me?”

“To watch you get a tattoo?”

He shook his head. “No, to get one too.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t think so.”

“Come on, dude. It’ll be just what you need. One last act of defiance before you get shackled for life.”

I chuckled. “You make marriage sound so appealing.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Dude, look who you’re talking to.”

“Good point.”

Chapter Four

Harper

“I have tickets for the theater tomorrow afternoon, and Devin has to work. Do you want to go?” my friend Kelly asked from inside the oven where she was pulling out the chicken she’d made for dinner.

I’d assumed we’d go out, since that’s what
we usually did when we met for dinner once a week, but she’d apparently had a surge of domesticity, so we were staying in.

“I can’t. I have to work,” I said, as I reached for the wine bottle on the counter and refilled both of our glasses.

Kelly and I had been friends for years, and when I’d initially met her I didn’t think we’d get along. She looked like all the girls I’d hated growing up – shiny blond hair, petite, cardigan tied around her neck, but she’d surprised me. She’d started dating Julian’s younger brother Devin in college, and he’d brought her to Julian’s apartment when I was there one night.

We’d hit it off after she’d made a sarcastic crack about Julian’s fifty year-old neighbor who dressed like she was twenty-two and constantly brought home guys thirty years younger than her. She’d been a cougar before cougars were cool. And she loved to hit on Devin and had no shame of doing so in front of Kelly.
But Kelly had set her straight, and from what I understand, the neighbor never looked twice at Devin again.

“Damn, girl, you never take time off.
If you’re not at the shop, you’re in your studio or out at a photo shoot. I don’t know anyone who works more than you.”

In addition to making a name for myself in the world of
body art, I’d also make a name for myself in the San Francisco art community with my paintings and my photographs. My work was in several galleries around town, and I’d recently signed a contract with a gallery that wanted me to showcase a different photography series for a month every quarter. So I stayed busy.

“
Kel, painting and photography are what keep me sane. They’re like hobbies I happen to get paid to do. Besides, I just took two days off work to go to Boston.”

She rolled her eyes, as she stuck a
meat thermometer into the chicken. “That was for a funeral. Take a day off every now and again and relax.”

“I can’t tomorrow. I have appointments all afternoon, and
it’s Saturday. You know we’ll be busy with walk-ins.”

Brandon had called me an hour before to let me know he and his friend would be in the next day for tattoos
and asked if I could work them into my schedule. He’d asked to look through my designs since I wouldn’t have time to do something custom for him since he was leaving on Monday, but he had some ideas he wanted to explore for when he came back out in a month for the wedding. Hopefully he’d like what I did the first time before committing to coming back a second time.

“Fine, I’ll call Jessica and see if she wants to go
to
Anything Goes
with me.”

It was my turn to roll my eyes. I didn’t like Jessica that much. She worked with Kelly, and we’d hung out a few times, but we just didn’t get along. She was loud and brazen and rude half the time. Hey, maybe I should introduce her to Brandon, they might get along famously. She was sort of like the female version of him.

Okay, not really. He seemed like a nice guy, and she was just toxic. I wasn’t sure why Kelly liked her.

“Oh, shit,” Devin said then, emerging from their bedroom wearing just a towel.
“Sorry, Harper. I didn’t know you were here.”

I winked at him.
“Looking good, Dev. How’s your eyebrow?”

He grinned.
“What do you think?” he asked, leaning toward me so I could admire the piercing I’d done for him the week before.

He’d had it done years earlier before we’d met, but it had gotten infected, so he’d taken it out and let it close up. I’d been begging him to let me do it again for him, after
he showed me the one picture he’d taken shortly after it was done. It suited his face, and his personality, and he’d finally let me get him under my needle. It wasn’t the first time. I’d done five of his tattoos, but he’d been hesitant about getting another piercing, and it had taken a lot of convincing on my part.

“I think it looks as great as I told you it would.”

“You were right,” he said, walking over behind Kelly. “Hey baby.”

She turned around and kissed him. They were always so gushy and in love,
and had gotten even more affectionate with each other since Devin popped the question a few months earlier. It would make most single girls jealous, but for the girl who saw them regularly, they made me actually want a relationship when I’d shied away from them for so long.

“How was work?”

“Good. Did you listen to the show?”

She shook her head. “I had a meeting
with a client this afternoon, so I couldn’t.”

Devin was a deejay at an alternative rock station. He had the afternoon drive
show, and we always tuned in and listened at the shop. He played a good rotation of 90’s and current alt rock. Kelly worked at an ad agency, so she didn’t always have the luxury of listening to his show.

When they met, I never thought
Kelly and Devin would last. Julian had actually been talking to me about dating his edgy brother who’d gone to Berkley, and I was considering it since Devin was just the kind of guy I probably should have been interested in. He was tall, good looking, had full lips and shoulder-length dreads. He also liked ink, so he was a fan of both my job and the artwork I’d decorated my body with.

Over the years I’d learned not to care
what people thought, but for a period of time when I was much younger, I got upset when I found out a guy I liked didn’t think I was girlfriend material because of my body art. So I figured maybe someone who had come into my parlor for their own ink wouldn’t be so judgmental.

Then Devin
brought Kelly home one day and never looked back, and I pushed away the idea of dating him since if I was being honest, he wasn’t preppy enough for me anyway. I craved men who were perpetually wrong for me, and I knew it was all because of the one guy who’d broken my heart when I was eighteen. Damn him.

“That’
s okay,” Devin said, reaching over to pluck a carrot out of the Dutch oven Kelly was roasting the chicken in. “Damn, did you make my mother’s chicken recipe?”

Kelly winked at me. “I like to take care of my man.”

“And your man appreciates it,” Devin said, as she smacked his hand away from where he was trying to pluck a piece of meat from the chicken.

“Stop that. Go get dressed, and when you come back out, Harper and I will have dinner on the table.”

“We will?” I asked, knowing full well that she knew that the extent of my cooking skills included ordering in and heating up the leftover takeout food the next day. And I had mastered most breakfast foods, but they were sort of hard to screw up. I definitely wasn’t as accomplished in the kitchen as Kelly was.

“You can set the table,” Kelly
told me as she leaned over her cookbook. “I just need to make the gravy, and then we’ll be good.”

“Fine, I guess I can help in some way since you did cook for me,” I said, finishing my wine and going over
to the drawer where I knew she kept the silverware.

* * *

That night when I finally crawled into my bed exhausted from traveling all day and then staying up late talking to Kelly about the hell that had been my trip to Boston, I closed my eyes and fell asleep instantly. Then at around three in the morning, I woke up crying.

I’d dreamed about Ryan Carson, the very first boy I’d ever loved, and the fi
rst boy to break my heart. I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d been home where everything had seemed to remind me of him or if it was because I’d been recounting my hatred of the ladies my mother was friends with who were just like his mother, but for some reason he was on my mind.

And I hadn’t thought about him in a long time.

Very few people in my life knew the real story of why I’d fled Boston in the first place after what Ryan had done to me and my mother had kicked me out. It wasn’t something I was particularly proud of, and at the time it had hurt more than I’d ever imagined.

My father
was one of the people who knew my story, because he’d lived it with me, and because of that I picked up my cell phone, knowing I’d catch him awake. He barely slept as it was and always got up early to open up the garage he owned. During the three years I’d lived with him, there were many times when I found him up in the middle of the night working on his motorcycle or one of the vintage cars he rebuilt from the ground up. I’d go downstairs, sit on the steps leading down to the garage and watch him work. He never said anything, but he’d smile at me, so I knew he knew I was there.

“Harper,
” he answered gruffly. He’d probably had to roll out from under a car to answer his phone. “It’s been a while since you’ve called me in the middle of the night.”

“Hi Daddy.”

For the longest time, I hadn’t known that Bill Harper even existed, let alone that I was related to him and had been named after him. My mother had told me growing up that my stepfather, George Connelly, was my father, but it had been a lie. She’d gotten pregnant at sixteen and at nineteen she’d met George who was ten years older than her and a little bit of a Bill Gates type. He wasn’t social, he didn’t have many friends, but he had a boatload of money that he wanted to share with someone. He fell in love with my mother and her two year-old daughter.

When I was five
, we moved to the town where I grew up, and they told everyone, including me, that George was my father. It wasn’t until I was sixteen and George was arrested for embezzling money that my mother finally told me the truth. I’m not sure why she did it when everything was already crashing down around us, but for some reason she felt I needed to know the truth. I learned that she’d also been lying about her age for years, telling everyone she was four years older than she actually was, because God forbid anyone know she had me when she was a teenager. But in our town, appearances were everything, and she wanted to maintain hers.