Page 119 of Let the Game Begin
Terrified, the two other guys gave their phones to Xavier and Luke. I crouched down and felt the pockets of Wes’s jeans while he was still on the ground, staring off into space.
I avoiding glancing at his naked body and took the thing I was interested in, rising back up to my feet.
“Get dressed. Your little cock hanging out in plain sight is making me nauseous.” I slipped his phone into the inside pocket of my jacket and looked down at him from on high, noting as he eyes dropped in shame.
Wes didn’t have anything to say now. He’d quit acting like the leader. Now, he was just a guy who had encountered a bigger monster than himself.
Once I had what I needed, I turned my back on all of them and headed for home, alone.
***
The day after our assault on The Royal, I headed over to Xavier’s tattooparlor. For two years he’d managed to own and operate it by himself. Xavier was the oldest of all of us, despite his frequent immaturity and tendency to act without thinking things through.
“Easy, man,” Luke huffed. He lay stomach-down on the table, his jeans pulled up over his calf, which was at Xavier’s mercy as he concentrated on giving him a tattoo.
“Stop whining like a bitch!” Xavier scolded him, irritated.
I’d snuck into the shop without announcing myself, like I always did, and neither of them had noticed my presence. Then, I pulled back the black curtain that divided me from them and made my entrance.
“You know I saw you come in, right?” Xavier grumbled, continuing to jab Luke’s skin. Luke had surrendered by that point, resting his forehead on his flexed forearms.
“And I smelled your body wash,” Luke added before lifting his face and wrinkling his nose. “How much of that shit do you use?”
“It’s true, you do smell like a high-priced prostitute,” Xavier sneered, pausing for a moment to look at me. He was wearing black gloves and held the tattoo gun in one hand.
I gave them both a hard look, not particularly entertained by their musings. No one knew why I was such a freak about hygiene or why I had an obsessive compulsion to shower, least of all these two, who immediately realized I wasn’t in the mood to deal with their bullshit. Appropriately, Xavier went back to his work, and Luke went back to enduring the pain.
I moved closer to them and sat down on a stool, bending one knee. I looked around, bored, as Luke continued to mumble complaints at Xavier. I examined the dark walls, splattered with red paint; the sterilization tools; and needles of various types and sizes—shaders, round, flat, and otherwise. I concentrated on the sound of the gun as the needle repeatedly pierced Luke’s reddened skin.
It was his second tattoo, and he’d chosen a thorny skull.
“It barely hurts on the calf; I don’t know what you’re crying about,” Xavier said, continuing to follow along the lines of the design he’d stenciled on.
When I got the toki on my bicep at sixteen, I didn’t feel much pain.Probably because I was so excited about getting my first tattoo that I didn’t even notice. The pain I experienced when I got the pikorua on my left flank, however, I remembered vividly. It had felt like the needle was sticking all the way into my bones.
“You need to send me all the material you get off Carter’s friends,” I told them.
“You know that everyone is going to know what we did, right? They all recognized us at that party,” Luke cut in, gritting his teeth while Xavier continued to labor over his calf.
“So what? They also know we’re the Krew,” a female voice responded. A second later, Alexia shoved aside the black curtain and advanced on us. She was wearing another short leather skirt and teetering atop a pair of knee-high boots. Xavier shot her a quick look then immediately returned to concentrating.
“Hey, Neil,” she greeted me with a wicked smile. I looked her up and down, admiring her body and paying special attention to her ass, which was the part of her I liked best.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, meeting her eyes again.
“Lynn has a fever. I’m filling in to help out with client appointments.”
Lynn was a friend of Xavier’s, one of the rare girls he didn’t sleep with because she was anything but the easy type. And also because she was a bit butch and would punch anyone who dared to touch her without her consent.
Alexia approached her pseudo-boyfriend and folded her arms over her chest, watching him admiringly as he continued Luke’s tattoo. Xavier hated to talk while he worked, and he could get really focused when he wasn’t high. Honestly, when he was sober, he was a pretty calm person.
“Why are you over here? You should be waiting for calls,” he scolded her. He treated Alexia like a friend and like a sex partner, but never like a woman he actually wanted.
I had no room to judge since I regularly did much worse, but Alexia had obviously been in love with him for years. We all knew it. We all could see it, except for him, apparently.
“I like to watch you work,” she admitted, sounding sickeningly sweet. Iwas surprised by her tone; she wasn’t usually like that.
“And I don’t like you hovering around,” he snapped back.
