Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 130380 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 652(@200wpm)___ 522(@250wpm)___ 435(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130380 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 652(@200wpm)___ 522(@250wpm)___ 435(@300wpm)
Any time I looked over to where Nero had his own client, I caught him watching us. I was sure Mary would see it only as a tattoo artist watching his apprentice and making sure she didn’t fuck up.
I knew better.
The needle vibrating my chest again made me grit my teeth. “You talk,” I managed. “Distract me.”
“What do you want me to talk about?” she asked calmly, smiling a bit as she wiped the mixture of ink and blood away from my skin. When she smiled like that, so effortlessly, it tugged on a string tied to the deepest part of my gut.
How did I not know it was her?
The thought had played on repeat in my mind all night and all day, too. I racked my brain mercilessly, rummaging through it in my desperate attempt to remember that day, to remember her. But I couldn’t — not more than I had last night, anyway.
It was so cruel, how her life had plummeted that day because of me, and I hadn’t even noticed. And my life had shifted, too, but it was because I lost her. I lost her by my own fucking hand.
Thinking of how my team had treated her after, how I had been so broken I hadn’t even noticed…
And even if I did back then, I didn’t care. I couldn’t care about anything or anyone other than the girl online who’d left me like a ghost in the night.
It was all so gut-wrenching, it made it hard to think straight.
Inhaling a breath back to the present, I tried to look down at what Mary was carving into me, but she covered it with her hand.
“No peeking!”
I chuckled, letting my head fall back against the chair again. “Your username,” I said. “Octostigma. What the hell does it mean?”
Her smile bloomed. “In ancient Greek, stigma is the word for tattoo.”
“No shit?”
She nodded. “Kind of fitting, considering the overall view of tattoos over the centuries.” She dipped the tip of her needle into a cap filled with black ink, which she’d explained to me was a way of reloading the ink, before she started again.
“And the octo part?”
“I just think octopus are cool as shit.”
I smiled. “Explains why you draw so many of them.”
“Well, they expel ink, so obviously that attracted me to them,” she explained. “Dreams of being a tattoo artist and all. But they’re also super fucking intelligent. And two thirds of their neurons are in their fucking arms — and they are arms by the way, not tentacles.”
I held my hand up in mock surrender. “I’ll never make the mistake again.”
Her eyes twinkled a bit as she smiled and continued working, and I had to admit, listening to her talk was helping me not to focus so much on the pain.
“They have three hearts, which I thought was pretty rad. But I think the connection I really made was with the fact that with three organs pumping blood into them, and eight arms that essentially all have a mind of their own — they must feel pulled in so many different directions, you know? Like they’re made up of too much to be confined into one little being.”
She paused, wiping my skin, her eyes floating up to mine.
“I could relate to that, feeling like eight people at once, especially at that time in my life.”
“And so, you were Octostigma.”
She smiled in confirmation, sitting back in her chair and cracking her neck. “Want to take a little break?”
“Nah, I’m good. Keep on with the torture.”
Mary rolled her eyes, but then dipped the needle again before resuming her position over me.
I let my gaze drag over every centimeter of her face, noting how she had a line between her brows from concentrating. Everything else was smooth, though, and serene.
Again, I searched and searched, waiting for some sort of recognition to hit me, for my stupid brain to piece the girl tattooing me now with the one who bared her soul to me when I was a dumb teenager. I waited for it to hit me, for me to suddenly see that young girl’s face, how her hair was styled, what notebook she held, the drawing, any of it.
But I couldn’t place her.
I couldn’t remember anything specific about that day, about that moment that had seemed so insignificant to me, but had meant everything to Mary.
Well, that was a lie.
I remembered that day, but not for the same reason. My life shifted later that evening, when I logged on and Mary immediately blocked me, when I called her and she didn’t answer, when all of my texts went unanswered.
I never noticed how my friends reacted to the girl who showed me her notebook because I was too busy obsessing over the girl who wiped me out her life for seemingly no reason.