Spider: A tattoo romance (Rough Ink Book 2) Read online

  I wanted to look him in the eyes. I really did. But I just couldn’t pull my focus from my shoes. The shame, guilt, and fear I felt were too overwhelming to face those kind gray eyes I’d looked into earlier, while silently pleading for help.

  Shame that I’d gotten myself into such a mess with Tommy and let it escalate to the point where he’d been about to kill me and many other people. Guilt that the ugly chaos of my life had spilled over into the lives of complete strangers who were just minding their own, before I made my bullshit their business. Fear that his eyes would show pity, or worse still, anger or disgust. I couldn’t cope with pity from anyone. Especially not from him.

  “No.” My voice was quieter than I intended it to be. “I’m the one who needs to apologize. This sorry mess was my fault, and now you’ve been dragged into it. I’m so, so, sor—”

  Two police officers interrupted our conversation, leading us out of the store in different directions.

  Once outside, the female officer with me explained that they’d drive us downtown to give our statements, and then they’d take it from there with their investigation. I cast my eyes around the crowd, looking for Spider, but couldn’t see him amid the chaos of NYPD, patrol cars, news vehicles, journalists, and gawking passersby. I’d catch up with him and Kota at the station, maybe. I wanted to thank them for risking their lives to save mine.

  In the meantime, as I took in the scene unfolding in front of me, a sick feeling of dread swept over me. There were people gathered on the sidewalk. Lots of people, armed with phones filming the entire ordeal. Not only that, but there were news crews—plural—with video cameras and telephoto lenses. I ducked my head, trying to stay out of view but fearing that no matter which way I turned, I’d be caught on camera.

  I had an ominous feeling that what had been my own private shame for so long was about to become very public knowledge. My mouth filled with bile at the thought that the pretense of normality I’d tried so hard to keep would soon crumble to dust. I choked down the bitter liquid, not wanting to add vomiting in public to my humiliation for the day. How the fuck I’d ever be able to look my colleagues in the eye again—least of all Stacey, whom I referred to as my work wifey—was beyond me.

  But I was an adult. I was supposed to have the mental and emotional resources to cope with the fallout. Noah wasn’t so lucky. My mind jumped forward to the range of playground taunts and teasing he was likely to face if anyone figured out what had happened. One more reason for me to feel like the worst mom on the planet, who was on track to ruin his childhood, just as my parents had ruined mine.

  If guilt were a tangible thing, it would be a Grim Reaper-like figure that followed me everywhere I went, clawing at me, trying to drag me down. Most of the time, it succeeded. Often it had its hands around my neck in a death grip, squeezing the joy out of me bit by bit. I tried to peel away its steely, hard claws, but its hold was too tight. It was too determined. It knew how to apply the pressure to hurt me the most. Guilt was a demanding master, and I was ever its fragile and humble servant. All day, every day.

  Though I knew I had to do it, I dreaded going through with the police interview. Where did I start? With the events of that morning? The past few days? Months? Years? The list of ways Tommy had hurt me was long and extensive. What was relevant to today? I wanted to tell them enough to make sure Tommy paid for what he’d done but still hold back enough to leave there with at least a shred of my dignity intact.

  I guessed they’d guide me, though. Ask the right questions. Draw out the information they needed. I had no idea how it worked. Thankfully, I’d never been through it before. As bad as Tommy was, it was the first time he’d taken me hostage at gunpoint, threatening to kill me. It wasn’t something I’d be ticking off the bucket list. Not that I had one, but if I did, “armed siege and near-death experience with psychotic and deranged boyfriend” wouldn’t be on it.

  The officer led me to the car and settled me in the back. She’d told me her name, but I couldn’t recall what she’d said moments later. It had gone in one ear and out the other, floating away in fragments, like confetti at a wedding.

  As we pulled away from the curb, my mind rewound to earlier in the day and how I’d ended up there.

  3

  Spider

  Three hours earlier

  I sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with me, because there was nothing wrong with me. I didn’t mean that in an arrogant “I’m Mr. Perfect” kind of way. I just meant that I was a well-adjusted person. At least by my own not-at-all qualified standards. That was how it had always been. The weird thing was that I was questioning whether there was something wrong with having nothing wrong.

  What sane person didn’t have any problems? Or worries? Or insecurities? Weren’t those the things that made us human—setting us apart from other animals? That and our opposable thumbs. Weren’t we supposed to think and feel things? Without that stuff I might as well have been a dog, only worried about licking my balls and where my next Schmacko was coming from. Although, to be fair, as a dude, I’d often wondered what it would be like to suck my own dick, but that was a story for another time.

  I was at the shop setting up and getting things ready for the day. I’d been more or less running the place for a while now, since Zed proved us all wrong and somehow found a woman who broke through his defenses and got close to him. More than close, in fact. Zed and Vivi were now a real deal loved-up couple, and it couldn’t have happened to a better dude.

  Zed had a heart of one-hundred-carat solid gold, though he mostly came across as a cranky douchehole. Those who knew him well knew better, but until Vivi waltzed into his life and changed the game, I couldn’t imagine him as anything other than the typical lonely, bitter bachelor when he was older.

  Now that he was a new man, he’d been spending an increasing amount of time running his new art outreach project and less time at the studio. Of course, he still had his room and saw a select few clients by arrangement a few times a week, but he wasn’t there to deal with the daily grind like he used to be.

  I got it. If I were him, I’d be less interested in ordering ink and more interested in dipping my pen in Vivi’s ink too. The fact was, I didn’t mind stepping up and taking on a bigger role at the studio. And if we were being honest, I was more suited to the business side of things than Zed anyway, so it was a win-win.

  Not that I loved admin, but who did? I found it more tolerable and achievable than Zed did, though. Not only that, but for a little while before he met Vivi, I’d noticed a change in his approach and attitude to the studio. It was subtle but there. I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it, but it was like he’d lost his energy or spark or something. He was there in body but not in spirit. His head wasn’t in the game the way it had been when we’d first opened SK:eTCH.

  It was possible that it was just plain boredom. Maybe there wasn’t enough variety. Whatever the reason, he’d been going through the motions rather than putting his whole heart and mind into the job. I’d tried to broach the subject with him a few times, but he’d shut me down in his typical rough way, telling me that everything was the same as it had always been.

  I knew he was full of shit, but I didn’t want to push the issue, so I’d started taking on a little extra work here and there to make up for the shortfall. We’d never discussed it; it was just something that had happened. That was just me. I’d always been a team player, so much better in a group than alone.

  In my ball-playing days at high school, that was one thing my coaches had always praised me for: being the guy who always put the needs of the team ahead of my own. Even the need for personal glory. Not that I was a saint—I was as much of a testosterone-riddled dumbass as the next meathead jock—but on the field, they could rely on me not to put the I in team.

  I walked around the store turning on lights and noting the outstanding daily tasks, then I fired up Kota’s computer to take a look at the bookings. I liked to see how the day would pan out fo
r everyone—knowing things may change with walk-ins—so I could figure out what jobs to assign to other artists, what to ask Kota to do, and what to do myself. I wasn’t fully booked, which was rare.

  SK:eTCH was one of the best-known ink joints in the city—thanks to Zed’s hard work in building it from the ground up—so most days we were more likely to have a waitlist than available slots. I’d been there from day one, so I’d played a big part in developing our profile as well, especially with PR or any promotional activity.

  Zed’s camera shyness made him even more monosyllabic than usual when he gave interviews—to the point where it was painful to witness. The level of awkwardness in the room would cause me to clench so hard that my sphincter would end up somewhere near my earlobes, and I swore I developed a stomach ulcer the size of a grapefruit.

  One day I’d offered to do an interview for him, and from the look on his face, you’d think I’d handed him the keys to Fort Knox. From that point on, unless I wasn’t available—i.e. never—I handled interviews and, along with Arlo Jones, the rock star who owned SK:eTCH, became the public face of the operation.

  It was a relief for all concerned, not the least being the poor journalists and bloggers who’d been unlucky enough to try to extract meaningful words from Zed. He didn’t talk much at the best of times— weighing each word before he spoke, as though they were made of fine crystal and he didn’t want to break them—let alone when someone thrust a camera and recording device in his face.

  With the lights on and the sound system up and running, I headed out back to the office. I didn’t have an early booking, so I decided to use the time to get some shit done—namely working on a side hustle for Arlo.

  Based on SK:eTCH’s success, he’d hatched a plan to expand his empire across to the West Coast. Having lived in LA for years before moving back to New York, he wanted a SoCal location and was working on the concept for the place, which was going to be quite different from SK:eTCH but no doubt equally awesome.

  Not only were my ideas pretty damned good, but the fact was, Arlo had the Midas touch. Everything he put his name to turned not just to gold, but platinum, and then some. His band, the Heartless Few, was pretty much the biggest thing on the planet, he owned a club that was the hottest ticket in town, and SK:eTCH was legendary in ink circles. We had clients clamoring to get a booking, and artists were constantly vying for a chair here.

  I flopped down at the desk and fired up the Mac. Everything was still technically Zed’s, but I suspected that in time, he’d make formal what had been an informal arrangement for a while.

  I opened the documents I was working on and let my fingers glide over the keyboard, ideas flowing like water. It was weird—although art was at the center of everything I did, I didn’t imagine I’d be creative in this way. It was hard to explain, but for as long as I could remember, I’d thought in pictures. I’d believed that everybody did until I’d discovered that people’s brains processed information differently, so some people’s mind’s eye showed them words, some footage like a movie, others numbers.

  Mine had always been pictures. Static images, like looking at a picture book. On rare occasions, that picture book was kind of animated, like one of those little stick figure flip-book things we used to make as kids—the ones with a slightly different stick person on the corner of each page so that it looked like they were moving when you flicked through it, albeit jerkily and amateurish. But more often than not, my thoughts were just messages delivered via drawings, paintings, sketches, even graffiti.

  So color me shocked that I was able to easily translate those images into ideas that I could shape into the business plan I was working on with Arlo. I’d had to Google exactly what a business plan looked like and what it should contain, but once I knew that, I’d found it surprisingly easy to populate. Not only that, but I’d actually enjoyed it. That was probably the biggest revelation of the whole exercise.

  I’d always believed I didn’t have a head for business, or order and structure, like my dad did, that I was more scattered like my mom. Turned out I was wrong about that—maybe it was just that I’d never found anything that unlocked that particular part of my brain like working on the project for the new shop did.

  Truth was, I was loving it. It was the yin to the yang of my daily creative flow—planning and putting out tattoos for my clients. That would always be my first love, but it had been a beautifully refreshing change to use a different part of my brain and realize that I didn’t suck at it.

  Better still, Arlo seemed totally down for almost all of the ideas I had in mind. He was cool like that, which was weird, because in many ways, he wasn’t cool at all. He was legendary for having an ego the size of a small country and a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush. But in my close dealings with him, I hadn’t seen a lot of that. The language, yes, but that didn’t bother me; much to my mom’s endless disappointment, I cursed like the world was ending, all day, every day.

  I hadn’t really witnessed the other stuff—the throwing his weight around, “my way or the highway” shit he was famous for—but maybe it was because he’d liked everything I’d put on the table so far. Maybe if something came up that he wasn’t down for, things would be different. Much like what I was seeing happening with Zed, Arlo was also rumored to have calmed down a lot since he got with his woman, so maybe that was it too.

  All of those thoughts raced through my mind as I worked. One thing that hadn’t changed with me was the chronic inability to focus on just one task at a time, or to sit still. It just wasn’t in me. I thought of my brain like a computer that always had one hundred tabs open and a whole bunch of programs running behind the scenes while the main program got to work.

  I’d never been assessed, but my cousin Jenner always said she thought that if I had been, I probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD or whatnot, even if only mildly. I wasn’t so sure, and neither were my parents, hence never looking for a diagnosis. All that mattered was I functioned perfectly well, and the business in my mind didn’t bother me. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was what fueled my creative energy, so I was happy with the way things were.

  4

  Emi

  Tommy pushed my face into the bed, squeezing my neck hard. I pressed my forehead into the mattress, then moved my face to the side, freeing my nose and mouth just enough so I could breathe a little. It was all I could manage given his viselike grip around my neck, but it was better than suffocating. I always wondered what went through his mind when he did this. Was he trying to kill me? Did he think about me enough to even care one way or another?

  While I tried not to choke to death—feeling my eyes bulge out of my head, and starting to water due to the pressure—Tommy got on with what he was there to do. He’d already hauled down my pants and his own, so he cut straight to dragging my thong aside and thrusting into me. No foreplay. No concern for whether or not I was wet. I wasn’t. Or if I wanted sex. I didn’t. This wasn’t about me. It was about him. About power and dominance and showing me who was boss. Not that I was under any illusion about that.

  He pummeled into me deep, hard, and fast, and I did what was required of me—nothing. I needed to be there, and that was it. My enjoyment or even participation in our sex life wasn’t a concern for him above and beyond providing the flesh, the hole—and it was always his choice which hole—into which he could drive himself until he was done.

  Sex for him wasn’t about a connection or creating something together; it was about working out his pain, anger, and frustration. I was always his human punching bag, but in the bedroom, or wherever the mood struck him, he pounded and pummeled me in a different way.

  As he pistoned in and out of me, I tried like always not to think too much about what was happening, but I could never tap out. Not just because I could feel him ramming into me, but because his vanity demanded that I act satisfied when he was done, even if his savagery prevented him from doing anything to make sure that was the case. I had to stay aw
are of his cues so I could stroke his ego and fake the grand finish he wanted. I was getting so polished at it that I could win a porn award for Best Faked Orgasm for sure.

  He picked up the pace, grabbing a huge handful of my hair and yanking my head back toward him—a sure sign he was about to come. I ignored the pain and waited.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  He emptied into me, and on cue, I joined him with my own moaning, groaning, and spasming. He pulled out, not even waiting until he’d fully finished coming. As usual, he let go of my hair and pushed my head back into the mattress. He always discarded me with less care and finesse than he would a soiled Kleenex and a bottle of lotion after jerking off.

  He stalked out of the room with a throwaway comment over his shoulder.

  “Make yourself decent. We’re going out.”

  In the bathroom a little while later, a loud rap at the door interrupted my thoughts.

  “The fuck are you doing in there? Trying to climb out of the fucking window? Hurry it along before I kick the goddamn door off and drag you out myself.” His voice was gruff as ever.

  “I’m sorry. I’m… it’s my time of the month. It just started. There was a little mess. I needed to clean up.”

  “Jesus. All right, don’t give me a blow-by-blow of your gross shit. Just hurry up so we can go.”

  I knew that would get rid of him. Little did he know that religiously taking birth control for years—not wanting to repeat all of the mistakes of my past—had reduced my period to a sometimes almost-unnoticeable trickle. There was never the river of blood I was sure he was imagining.

  Despite being the most brutal person I’d ever met apart from my father, Tommy had an irrational aversion to anything relating to “gross women’s shit.” That included periods and everything they entailed, childbirth, breastfeeding, and female-specific cancers. He turned green at the mere thought.