Her lip was between her teeth. She was wearing the same high-waisted shorts she’d had on that first night with the buttons on the front with a T-shirt that said, Feed Me Tacos and Tell Me I’m Pretty, in red iron-on letters that matched her lipstick. But the best part was that she had on tall black wedges, her legs long and knees together, toes pointed in. She looked like a goddamn calendar girl, and the way she was eye-fucking me had me wishing the booth had four walls and a door.
She blinked and walked over, hips swaying, lips smiling. “Is this too big?” she asked, holding up the transfer.
I opened my legs a little wider. “No such thing.”
Penny laughed at that and held it over my arm, inspecting it. “I do like it when it’s extra big.”
She stood at the arm of the chair, and I slid my hand up the outside of her thigh.
“Oh, I know all about that.”
She was unfazed other than shifting to lean into me as best she could with an armrest in the way. “I think it’ll work. Let me put it on, and we can look at it.”
She went to work, arranging the transfer before wetting it down with a paper towel. When she smiled down at me, a little jolt shot through me.
“You ready for this?”
“Always,” I answered.
She peeled the transfer off and blotted my skin dry, inspecting it all the while. It was like she had flipped a switch and was all business and then flipped it again, all pleasure.
“Okay. Take a look.”
I stood and checked out the placement. It started just above my elbow and moved up and around my bicep and the cap of my shoulder — it was bigger than I’d imagined but exactly what it should be.
“I like it,” I said.
“Good. Me too.” She nodded to her chair. “Go ahead and have a seat.”
Her station seemed to already be set up, and she took a seat on a saddle stool with wheels, straddling it before rolling over to me, pulling on black rubber gloves.
Several reactions hit me. The sight of her rolling over to me with her legs open, snapping those rubber gloves, hit me below the belt. The realization that she was about to take a needle to me sent adrenaline shooting through my veins in a cold burst. And the look in her eyes got me right in the rib cage.
“All right,” she said as she poured black ink into a little cup. “So here’s the deal. This is way too big to do all at once if you want color. But I kinda think it’ll look better all black, just the outline. We’ve got to do that first anyway, so if you want to have it filled in later, you totally can.”
“How long until I can have more done?”
“A couple of months is usually wise.” She loaded her gun, wrapping a rubber band around the base of it. When she hit the pedal to test it, she smiled. “But anybody can do it. The line work is the hard part. You don’t have to come back to me to get it filled in.”
My heart deflated just a bit, just enough. Penny was putting space between us, telling me we wouldn’t be together in a few months, giving me permission to have it finished somewhere else.
She rolled her tray where she wanted it, scooting close to me with her eyes on my arm.
“Here we go.” She pressed that buzzing needle into my skin.
The thing about tattoos is that when it starts, you think it’s not so bad. Four hours in, and you feel like you’ve been carved like a turkey. So I enjoyed the burn before it consumed me.
Hearts worked the same way, I figured.
“You okay?” she asked after a moment, her eyes darting to mine for a solid second before looking back to my arm.
“I’m good.”
I watched her work, admiring the sureness of her hand, competence radiating from her. She was confident, so certain, completely capable. Penny could take over the world if she wanted to. She could take me over.
She kind of already had.
I looked over the shop and realized I’d met all the important people in her life — her family. I was in her chair as a customer, but it was more than that. There was an intimacy to the act and intimacy to her bringing me to the place that meant so much to her. Not that she’d made a big deal about it, but I knew by how she talked about everyone I’d met that they were her people. And that filled me with hope and pleasure at the connection to her.
Of course, that connection scared me too. Because I knew deep down that I didn’t have as much control as I’d thought I did over the situation. Every single day, she’d marked me in more ways than one, and I couldn’t turn back any more from my heart than I could from the needle in her hand.