A volcano erupts in my mind. What was I thinking telling him it’s over? It will never be over. Oh God! What have I done? What if he releases the video today? I have to stop him. Shaking with anxiety, I turn to face him. But it’s not Eddie. It’s Neil and he’s looking at me with concern and…fear?
Now there is something to be said about a slip of a girl managing to scare a seven foot hunk with just her melodrama and tears. I don’t know why but right then watching that wary expression on Neil’s face snaps something inside me and I go hysterical with laughter. It’s the kind of laugh you let out when you realize your life is so messed up that nothing you do will ever make it right. When you know you’ve probably slotted yourself as an A-grade psycho and sentenced yourself to a long lonely life. I laugh till my tears run out. Till my body starts trembling with the after-effects of the adrenalin rush. The humor of the damned.
I feel Neil’s arms sliding across my shoulders and pulling me towards him. I grasp the life-line being offered and melt into his chest. We stay like that for a long time. My forehead on his shoulders, my face planted in his chest, me breathing deeply till the spice of his skin brushes away all my darkness.
“You should bottle that and sell it,” I mutter without thinking.
“What?”
Ohmigod. Did I just say that out loud?! Christ! Just shoot me already and get it over it! This morning could not get any worse.
I slowly lift my head from his shoulder and pull away. “Nothing,” I say, as I use my sleeves to quickly wipe my face clean of all possible snot and streaks.
“Nothing?” I wince when I hear the smile in his voice. I look up at him and sure enough there is a wide grin stuck on his face.
Holy hell! He heard me! I feel the hot burn rising up from my neck to my face. Great! A snot-laden face turning an unsightly shade of red. Just perfect.
Then I realize, I’m staring at him and he’s …gazing back at me. And somehow the air between us has completely changed. The heated expression on his face sends a shiver down my spine and just for a moment, I want to believe. I want to feel what it would be like. If it were just him and me. No complications. No mess. No fear. Because right now, when he’s looking at me like I’m the only person he sees, it doesn’t scare me at all. Not one bit.
The roughness of his fingers grazes my skin as he cups my cheek and I allow myself to lean into his caress. When he lowers his lips on top of mine, it feels just like when he’d held my hand. Natural. Phenomenal. Unparalleled.
Our lips start moving in tandem, opening, tasting and releasing. And then the beat shifts. It becomes intense, consuming, so physically damning that my lips feel scorched. My body starts thrumming with a need so violent that I tremble to contain it.
When we break and come up for breath, we’re both breathless. And that’s when the panic strikes. How can I let myself get burnt again? And so easily?Jesus! I’m a textbook case of victim complex. Feels ashamed and blames herself? Check. Falls for promises that are meant to be broken? Check. Thinks sun will shine from assholes someday? Check.
Neil rests his forehead against mine and even though my heart believes in the magic we’ve just created, my body pulls away. I notice a range of emotions flicker across his face. From surprise to a frown to that maddening concern.
“Kari, I’m sorry.” I cringe at the apology and he hastens to correct himself, “I’m not sorry it happened, just…I didn’t mean to take advantage.” He tucks a wisp of hair behind my ear. Oh God! Why does he have to be so nice? Why can’t he act like the regular assholes I am so used to dealing with? I pinch my forehead trying to bite back the dull throb building inside.
“I couldn’t help myself,” he says softly.
Oh-kay. Time to rise and shine. “Yeah. I think…it’s time…to open the shop? Isn’t it?” I get up and brush my pants free of any grime.
Neil doesn’t say anything and I refuse to look at him. Instead, I involve myself in essential grooming activities. I brush imaginary dirt off my fingernails, tighten my ponytail, remove a make-believe fleck from my eyelash. Then the other. Until I hear him let out a deep sigh. A clink and a clank later, Neil pulls up the shutter. He holds the door open for me and I walk in feeling irritated with his overtly gallant behavior. Too much niceness can also be a pain in the behind. Especially, when you know you don’t deserve it.
I settle into my work ignoring the looks he keeps giving me as he switches on the lights and turns over the door sign. But it’s not until he shuts the stairwell door behind him that I truly relax and start focusing on my design. Ten minutes later, Nalini walks in.
“Yo Mary Sue! Howiz zee?”
“Hur mar du?” I say without looking up.
I hear complete silence in response, so I look up and find Nalini holding her plush pink jacket in her outstretched arm frozen half-way towards the coat hanger. She is looking at me like my brain is mashed.
A second later, she seems to snap out of her daze and shakes her head. “Girl, you are in serious need of a night out. I’m not taking no for an answer, you are coming with us to the club tonight.”
“I’ve got an early-morning class tomorrow! I can’t stay up late!”
Nalini gives me a look then plugs her ears with her fingers and goes, “Lalalalalala. Lalalala.”
“Wow. Real mature, Nalini.”
With her hands still plugged in her ears, Nalini walks off towards the coffee machine. When she returns, she’s bearing a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. “What did that even mean?” she asks, leaning against the counter.
“What did what mean?”
“That hur mar…weirdness you just threw at me?”
“Oh, that’s Swedish for ‘how are you?’”
Nalini twists her face in dismay. “Why?”
“Because you called me Pippi Longstocking yesterday. Get it?”
Her dismay turns to horror. “What?!”
I give an exasperated sigh. “Oh! Come on. She’s Swedish?”
Nalini’s face dead-pans as she sits down and switches on the laptop. A second later, she turns and gives me a stern look. “Seven sharp. In front of the shop. We’ll pick you up. Oh and it’s a masquerade party! So wear a mask of some sort.”
Then after a few minutes of normalcy, during which I finish half of my design and Nalini does her morning chores of updating records and cleaning the piercing tools, Neil shows up again.
Dressed in blue jeans and a fitted black tee, he looks like the progeny of Ryan Gosling and Robert Pattinson. If they went that way. If this were a universe where such a thing was even possible. And if I don’t stop ogling at him right this second, I’ll probably stab myself with the inking machine buzzing in my hand. Thankfully, the object of my distraction soon disappears into the kitchenette.
“AHEM!”
Startled, I turn to look at Nalini. She wiggles her eyebrows at me and nods her head towards the coffee machine.
“Stop it,” I hiss at her.
She hisses back, “Why not? You keep molesting him with your eyes, might as well go talk to him.”
“I DO…” I shout and then immediately lower my voice, “I do not.”
“Uh-huh. You do know other girls would give an arm, a boob and a pinky just to breathe the same air as him? He’s…” Nalini has the sense to break it off as soon as Neil emerges. My nerves however need much more time for regaining composure. Cheeks woefully aflame, I bend my head and go back to my etching. From the corner of my eyes, I see Neil’s big black boots walk past me and head towards the counter.
“What’s up?” he asks Nalini in his gravelly voice. A voice that does giddy things to my entire body. I really have to stop thinking like this. But I can’t believe he kissed me! Stop it. What had he said? He couldn’t help himself. What did that even mean? Like he didn’t want to, but he did? Or he wanted to but shouldn’t have? Seriously, you psycho, STOP IT!
“Still flapping,” I hear Nalini telling him.
“Good that. Agnas is not feeling well today. She said Kari could
take on her clients or any other walk-ins.”
I stop inking and swing around to face them. “What?! No way.”
Both Nalini and Neil give me patient, condescending looks. The kind people give to their untrained domestic pets. Oh, what are we going to do with this fluffy little biter?
I bite back. “Seriously. I can’t take on so many clients so soon and Sundays are the busiest!” I replay the sentence I’ve just uttered in my mind and realize that it sounds completely…whore-ish. I’m still mentally cringing at that wayward thought, when a hand drops on my shoulder and snaps me back to reality.
His eyes gazing straight into mine, Neil is standing right in front of me with an intense expression covering his face. Then he opens his mouth and tells me the most epic thing any guy has ever told any girl. “Kari, you are brilliant at what you do. I’ve seen you work. When you plug on that machine and start inking, I doubt if there is anything else that matters to you as much as etching a design so spectacular that it will mark a person for life…just the way you’ve marked me.”
He says this, smiles, turns around and then leaves the shop. Seconds later and I’m still standing there with my mouth open, feeling completely and absolutely dazzled.
Nalini’s voice cuts through my love-struck haze. “So last night I was watching TV and they had this movie on. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. This girl loves this guy on e-mail and hates the same guy in person? But she doesn’t know they’re both the same and when she realizes, she thinks she hates his guts. Only he gives this epic romantic monologue in the end and so she decides she can’t help but fall in love with him,” Nalini says it all in a single breath and then finishes off with a deep sigh.
I look at her feeling completely cured of all my previous bedazzlement. When she doesn’t elaborate on the long-winded story she’s just recounted, I give up and prompt her.
“So? You think what Neil just said was better than that or…what?!”
Nalini gives me a confused look. “What?! No. The girl had this off-beat sidekick in the movie. You know the quirky friend? Who’s just there to make the girl look prettier? Well, right now I feel completely like that,” she says and sniffs.
My brain feels frazzled and numb, both at the same time and I’m still thinking of what an impossible state of mind that is, when she summarizes with a shrug. “Just saying.”
A few more seconds of stunned silence and then I roll back on my heels. “O-k-a-y then.” Then for the next hour, I put my head down and focus on my work. When a scheduled client walks in an hour before lunch, I’m proud to say that I’m the very picture of cool and calm as I handle her. She selects the design, I load the machine and then I proceed to etch out a flight of stars on her back. When she leaves feeling happy and satisfied, for the first time in my life I feel…invincible. Because nothing that ever happens now can take this away from me. The tattoo I inked on Neil yesterday was not a fluke. I really do have this. Talent.
Chapter Six
I fidget with my hair until I finally give up on the unmanageable mess and decide to leave it open. Blow-dried to hell, my hair bears an uncanny resemblance to a huge bearskin hat. Now all I need is a red tunic and I could march off straight to Buckingham Palace.
Maybe my skinny jeans and silk top will offset the balance? Maybe my special Green Lantern mask will give me that extra edge? Especially, since I’ve matched it with a power ring blinging bright on my finger. Who can beat that I ask you? No one. That’s who.
In addition to the bearskin hat hair, the brown monstrosity of this overcoat that my Mom insisted I wear does somewhat lessen my whole kick-a-pow impact but then there is absolutely nothing I could have done to avert that.
I remember how Mom had reacted when I had told her about my night out with Nalini. Mom’s been to the shop before and she’s met Agnas, Nalini, even Josiah. So obviously she didn’t get all excited at the prospect of my going out with a girl who is into piercing and her headbanging boyfriend.
Thankfully, our argument didn’t drag on too much as it had intruded into Mom’s weekly dose of Saturday night football. Other girls’ mothers spent time watching soap melodramas. Mine is into sports. Secretly I think it’s more about the varied six packs on display than about the actual mechanics of the game. But I have no patience to actually sit through an entire game and catch Mom red-handed ogling at some hunky quarterback.
Now, I’m standing outside the shop waiting discreetly in the shadows, trying hard not to terrorize the passers-by and failing completely. I push myself deeper against the wall as an old couple hurries past me, throwing nervous looks in my direction. Can’t blame them. A huge coat topped with a green mask and a toupee lurking on a dark street would scare the shit out of me as well. A sudden loud roar startles my ugly hat hair right off my scalp.
I watch with dread as a huge-ass bike turns the corner up ahead. My whole body stiffens with alarm as the lone rider starts closing in towards my side of the road and then stops right in front of me! As I stand there contemplating flight or fight scenarios, the rider takes off his helmet and I realize it’s…Neil!
Shouldn’t he be grinding into Ms. Stiletto somewhere against a wall or maybe taking care of his Mom or should I say, Agnas? And what the hell is that all about anyways?
As I contemplate these weighty thoughts, my traitorous eyes roam over his black-booted leg, the distressed jeans, the leather jacket, the bristly jaw, the broken nose and the tousled silk of his hair. Holy! Smoking mother of hell! As my eyes reach up and meet his, he winks and my stomach dives straight into the abyss. Never to be heard from again.
“Like what you see?” he says in his deep voice and I blush, which only succeeds in broadening the grin on his face.
My brain immediately snaps back to reality. “What are you doing here?”
Frown lines crease his beautiful forehead. “Picking you up? Nalini told me you needed a ride?”
Christ! I’m going to kill that girl! “Really? Did she?”
I walk up to the bike and stand there, wondering how to climb it. Do I swing my leg back and then hop on? Will my skinny jeans take that much of a stretch? Or maybe I should sit sideways and then fold my knees like a mantis? Decisions. Decisions.
“Angel, if you’d spend this much time exploring me instead of my ride…”
Without wasting another second or risking another innuendo, I fling my leg around and hop on to the bike. There! Not so tough after all. Only. Now I don’t know what to hold on to. I haven’t been near a boy since… I can’t possibly hold him! My arms around his torso? Christ! No way!
“Here, this one’s for you,” Neil says, handing over a helmet. I remove my mask, tuck it in my coat pocket and put on the helmet. My body stiffens as I suddenly feel Neil’s hands gripping me by my knees. A sharp tug and he pulls me forward, smack into his back. When I gasp in shock, he stills his hands and slowly raises them up in surrender.
“Just making sure my angel doesn’t fly off,” he says softly.
While my heart goes thumpy thump, my head is still reeling from the suddenness of his move. That and his use of that possessive noun. My…angel?! But before I can process any of this, Neil speaks up again, “Please be careful not to clasp me too hard. I don’t like being pawed upon. Okay?” His voice is without any inflection or even a shred of humor.
I grin and reply, “Okay.”
And then I wrap my hands around his torso without any hesitation or discomfort, something I’d thought impossible just a few seconds ago. This guy. This. Guy. He’s going to break my heart.
As I get comfortable, I marvel on the way my body fits his on the bike. Like it’s designed to be that way. Which I guess it is. I mean not his specifically but the whole male, female biological thing? I mean not just male, female of course. LBT included. Or is it LBTQ or LBTI? Christ!
“By the way, love your mask,” Neil says huskily but before I can reply, his bike takes off. Then all my jumbled wayward thoughts are immediately smashed to bits. There’s just one
word to describe what I feel right then. Exhilaration.
The thrum of the machine beats through my body making me feel alive, wild and free. The rush I feel is so electric that I feel like roaring right along with the bike. But all too soon it stops and when it does I realize my cheeks ache. I must have grinned all the way through.
I remove my helmet and hand it over to Neil. Then I put my mask back on, just as he hooks up both our helmets to the bike. Once he’s done, Neil shoves his hand inside his jacket and pulls out a black mask. It’s only when he puts it on that I realize what it is and my jaw does a bungee jump towards the tarred road below.
Batman! Holy! Mother of sweet Jesus! If Neil looked hot before, he looks positively scorching now.
“All good?” he asks me from behind the mask. I somehow manage to nod my head in spite of all giddiness fuddling up my brain.
Then Batman and I, we march towards the club.
We’re still walking shoulder to shoulder when I feel his fingers lacing through mine. My heart flips and I wonder again about why it feels so easy. Maybe he’s doing it as a protective gesture, like he did when we crossed the road the day before or maybe I’m just not used to having considerate male figures in my life. Either ways. The fact remains. Not 48 hours ago he’d been exchanging saliva and probably a whole lot else with Ms. Stiletto. How could I ever forget that? I stiffen my back. Man up, Kari. This will never end well.
I shrug Neil’s hand off and he looks at me in surprise.
“I can take care of myself,” I tell him.
His lips twitch in response. “Oh, I’m sure you can, little shrub.”
“You are warned!” I take my voice down a notch and point my ring at him, “I’ll tunnel your leathery knighthood right out of this galaxy!”
Neil suddenly halts in his tracks and pins me down with his eyes. “Batman vs. Green Lantern? Batman wins. Every. Single. Time.”
“Ohmygod! So not true. In the…”
He cuts me. “One word…yellow.” I stare at him with my mouth half-open.