Page 40 of Tempting Eden

I roamed his body with my gaze, analyzing the images as I went. “You are like the black Adonis, now with more tats.”

He laughed. “You got me. That was my street name back in the day. Black Adonis.”

I trailed my fingers along the fanciful burst of flowers done over his heart. It should have looked odd, wrong even, for a man like him to have what amounted to a girly tattoo. But it was done in such a way that it spoke of something more than just ink. One look and you knew it represented much more than skin; it was his heart.

“Helen?” I asked, my voice a whisper.

“Yes.”

“When did you get it?”

“When I got out. I spent what little money I’d earned while I was on the inside to go to an artist who could reproduce my own drawing.”

“It’s beautiful. These look like zinnias. Why?”

“Helen kept a little flower garden next to our apartment. These grew every year. Remember late last year, when the gas explosion happened out there?”

“Yeah, was your old apartment the one that blew?” I hoped it was, for his sake, wiping away the bad memories that no doubt lingered in the Reed home. The blast had rocked Lowood and leveled one of the tenement buildings, damaging the neighboring structures. One woman was killed and several others injured. It was big news for a day … until the city turned its gaze back inward and southward, away from the poorer neighborhoods.

“I passed by there not long after that, and there were still some of her flowers, just a couple of scraggly plants with the same beautiful blooms. They seem to have persevered somehow, even though the apartments right next door were obliterated by the explosion. Anyway, I sketched and painted my memory of her flowers and waited until I got out to have it done. I let the resident prison ‘artist’ do the rest of my ink. He was actually pretty good, but he couldn’t do the colors like I wanted for Helen’s piece.”

“It’s beautiful, Jack.”

“Thanks.”

I smiled. “I think you are officially the first man I’ve ever seen who can pull off a flower tattoo.”

He snugged me in closer so that my head lay against his right breast. Then he whipped the sheet over us.

“What about the other ones?”

He shrugged beneath me. “My arms are the usual hyper-masculine tribal stuff.”

I raised my head to look him in the eye. “Hey, don’t knock it. It’s sexy as hell.”

His smile made me melt all over again. It was like some secret weapon.

“And there are some random things here and there. Some images that stick with me.”

“Like the bars across your ribs?” They were evenly spaced and clearly prison bars, dark and shadowed.

“Yes, like those. I have one bar for each year I spent inside.”

“Why would you want to remember that by getting it permanently in ink?” I traced each bar with my index finger.

He stroked down my back, his fingertips creating goosebumps as they went. “Promise you won’t laugh?”

“I can’t make any such promise. But I promise I’lltrynot to.”

“I was actually thinking of a quote from Thoreau when I had that one done.”

I didn’t manage to stifle a small giggle. “I’m beginning to suspect you’re smarter than I am.”

He dropped a kiss on my forehead. “Not at all.”

“Adele certainly seems to think so. But go on, professor.”

“Well, Thoreau wrote something like, ‘Things do not change; we change.’”

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