“Jesus, Katie. Don’t apologize. I’m the one who should say I’m sorry. I wish you knew . . .” His voice drifts and he shakes his head, as if he could get rid of his thoughts.
“You wish I knew what?”
“How I feel about you.” He hangs his head, as if he doesn’t want to look at me. Is he ashamed of making this confession? “How I’ve always felt about you. I’ve been wandering through my life like I’m in search of a missing piece and when I finally found you again, everything seemed to click into place.”
My voice has left me. There’s so much I want to say to him. I feel the same way. The same exact way, but I’m scared to tell him. He could use it against me.
“It’s too soon, I know it is,” Ethan continues. “I get it, I totally get it, and I would never push you to do something you’re not ready for.” He makes a frustrated noise. “But having you so close right now, hell, spending the entire day with you, has been a slow form of torture.”
“I know what you mean,” I say breathlessly, snapping my mouth shut the moment the words leave me. Even the smallest admission feels like too much.
He lifts his head, his gaze imploring. Almost pleading with me to understand. “Can I at least . . . hug you? As a thank-you for your help in picking out Molly?”
We stare at each other in silence. I’m hesitant, unsure. Letting him touch me would be such a relief. Yet giving in would feel like a failure, too. I need to be strong. I need to hold on to my anger over his betrayal and make him suffer.
But when he suffers, I suffer, too.
Giving in, giving up, I walk into his arms. They close around me as I wrap my arms around his middle, rest my hands on his back. He places his mouth on the top of my forehead, a sort of half kiss that lands right along my hairline, and I close my eyes. Clutch the back of his fleece jacket, marveling at how soft it is.
He’s big and warm, and being in his strong arms makes me feel safe. Protected. He presses his face into my hair, seeming to breathe in deep, and I close my eyes, resting the side of my head against his chest so I can feel the constant boom, boom, boom of his heart close to my ear.
“You should go,” I finally say, my voice muffled against his chest. I don’t want him to leave. I’d rather he stay, slip into my bed and just hold me. I don’t want anything else. Just to know he’s with me is enough.
Though eventually he’d want more. And I probably would, too.
Slowly I disentangle myself from his grip and he releases his hold on me, his arms hanging loose at his sides. He takes a step back, appearing so forlorn and sad I almost want to ask him to stay the night at my place.
Almost.
“Yeah. I should go.” He smiles, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “See you tomorrow?”
“I’ll text you,” I remind him.
“I’ll count on it,” he says.
I’m sure without a doubt that he will.
I was seventeen when I went to the tattoo shop. Saved up some money I earned working various odd jobs, all of them under the table. Had a fake ID in case they questioned my age and told me I needed to get my parents’ permission. I didn’t have parents. The people who ran the group home didn’t count. Not that they’d sign anything that had to do with a tattoo.
Not that they cared what I did with my body, either. They didn’t care about me at all. I was just another number, another punk kid they had to feed, make sure he did his homework and kept his shit together.
The girl who sat at the front desk hadn’t asked to see my ID, let alone mentioned a parental permission slip. She just checked her appointment book while I checked her out. She was a few years older than me, her right arm covered in a tattooed sleeve, her eyebrow pierced, as well as her lip.
Cute, but not my type. Her hair was too dark, her body too curvy, her eyes too knowing.
She looked up, her ruby-red lips curved into a sultry smile when she told me to sit and wait. The artist I made an appointment with was wrapping up his previous appointment with another client.
I fell into a skinny chair that was right next to the window and grabbed a magazine, flipping through it and checking out all the various tattoo designs. Some of them were badass, some were hideous, but most of them were pretty cool. I already knew exactly what I wanted to get. I had the piece of paper tucked into an envelope after making a copy of it at school. I wasn’t too excited about letting a needle touch my skin, but I’d already suffered through enough pain in my life to know I could stand it.
What was taking a needle for a few minutes?
After waiting for almost fifteen minutes, I was finally called back into the studio. The artist ran through all the prep, I handed over the piece of paper, and the artist—his name was Otto—looked at it, then lifted his head to look at me.
“Where you want it?”
I tugged my T-shirt over my head and pointed to the spot on my side, right below my ribs. “Right there.”
Otto nodded and sketched out his own interpretation of the drawing I showed him, while I hung over his shoulder watching him work. He was a great artist. The wings seemed to come alive, each individual feather perfectly detailed. Way better than the original sketch.
Of course, a scared thirteen-year-old had drawn those original angel wings, so I couldn’t knock them too hard. I couldn’t. That drawing came from the heart. From a girl I still missed.
So bad I never wanted to forget her.
“I don’t want them to look too different from the original,” I told Otto, and he nodded in answer.