Tall, Tatted and Tempting

  ***

  I’ve been working on this tat for weeks. It’s a huge bald eagle that goes from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Not to mention that it’s on a really big guy. I drew the outline, and then I started shading it last week. I need to finish it today. It’s a five-hundred-dollar tat, and we could use the money. Particularly now.

  I settle down to work on it, and Kit watches over my shoulder for a few minutes. But then she goes to the front of the store to sit down with Friday and Paul. Paul is updating Friday on Matt’s condition. Friday adores Matt—if there’s one of us she hangs with the most, it’s him. She wipes a tear from her eye.

  I can read her lips from there. “What are the odds that he gets accepted into that trial? It’s so strange,” she says. I can’t see what Paul says in response.

  Kit ambles up to the front of the store and says something to Paul. He looks shocked for a minute, and then he pulls her forearm down to look at it. She’s not hurt, is she? I move to set my gun to the side, but she looks over her shoulder and smiles at me. She’s fine. Paul motions for her to follow him, and he takes her behind a curtain. I see his lips when he says, “Keep him out of there,” to Friday. Keep who out of where? Then he pulls a curtain around the two of them to separate them from us, and I have to put the gun down. I start in that direction. Friday gets between me and them. “She’s just getting a tat,” she says, turning me around.

  “What kind of tat?”

  “A tiny little butterfly or something equally as cute. Maybe a Disney princess. She hadn’t decided yet.” She rolls her eyes. Friday has skulls and crossbones and turtles and all sorts of weird shit all over her body.

  “I want to help her pick something,” I say, trying to push past Friday.

  “Stop,” she says. “She wants to surprise you.”

  I run a frustrated hand through my hair.

  “Tats mean different things to different people,” Friday says. “This means a lot to her, and she should be the one to decide what she gets.”

  I already know this, but I want to be involved, dammit.

  “You don’t trust Paul to take care of her?” Friday asks, her eyebrows crashing together.

  Of course I trust him. “But this is my girl,” I say. I know I sound like a baby. But there it is.

  She pats me on the arm. “Suck it up, buttercup,” she says. Then she narrows her eyes at me. “Wait a minute! When did you start talking?”

  My face flushes with heat. “Don’t get used to it,” I grumble. “I may never talk to you again.”

  “I could only be so lucky,” Friday says, rolling her eyes. But she jumps up onto her tiptoes and hugs me tightly. “I’m so happy for you,” she says.

  I can’t figure out what she’s talking about. Kit? Me? Our relationship? My talking? I brush her off when the guy I was working on starts waving his arms from the back of the shop. I have a lot more to do so I better get busy.