Page 58 of Dirty Roulette
“So, this is where you murder people?” I ask.
“Haha, no!”
I sit on the black leather chair and stare at a wall covered with framed designs of diversified tattoos. There has to be over a hundred options, from flowers to dangerous animals, lettering, and crosses.
One piques my interest. “The dandelion one is cute.” I point a finger at the picture. The wind blows through the fluffy seeds, carrying them off. There are small butterflies tangled within them, flying off into the sky.
“I drew that last night. You like it?” He pulls the frame off the wall.
“Yeah, it’s cute.”
“I’ll do it right now. All you gotta do is let me take a picture of it to gain some attention on my page.” He says. I’m already numb, and doing dangerous new things seems to be on my bucket list of bad decisions. I think a needle piercing my skin will ease all the demons caged inside. Maybe it will perform the long-awaiting exorcism I’ve needed for centuries.
“Yeah. How about getting it here?” I rub against my upper arm.
“Hell yeah! You’ll need to remove that sleeve.”
I wiggle my arm out of the shirt, lay flat in the chair, and stare up at the red ceiling as he rummages around the drawers and cabinets putting everything together.
The smell of antiseptic lingers in the room as he wipes down the area on my shoulder. It doesn’t take him long to get a stencil of the design, and he places it on my arm. Once I approve the placement he rummages around for other things. The buzzing of the needle fills the air, and it hits my skin.
“That game we played was pretty nuts,” he says.
“Oh yeah, you were there.” A sharp, bearable pain shoots through my skin as his eyes are dedicated to his art.
“That guy running the show has some crazy ego shit going on,” Omen keeps the conversation alive.
“Brody... Yeah, he’s an asshole.”
“Did you really have to sleep with that guy who came into the room?” It tingles and dances on my nerves and a faint aroma of ink swirls in the air.
“You saw that? Oh my god, you saw me dry-humping him?”
“Looked like you were having the time of your life with him.”
Now I’m red in the face. I can feel it. “Umm... Well, did Charlie sleep with Noah and film it?”
“I don’t know about the filming part, but yeah she’s been coming over with him a lot. Half the time he’s not practicing with us, they are sucking face in the hot tub.” The buzz continues as he presses a hand into my skin. “You know that guy you sucked face with kinda looks like Charlie... are they related?” He asks.
“Have you mentioned any of this to Noah or Charlie?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like what you saw?” I ask.
“Nah... why?”
“It’s Charlie’s brother.”
“Oh shit! No way.”
“I don’t know how I feel about any of it. I don’t want to lose my scholarship, and I really don’t want to lose Charlie... and if I lose him... I’m definitely screwed.” There I said it. It came out of my mouth. I repented, and Omen is now a priest. Let me do the sign of the cross and pray for forgiveness. “I haven’t figured out how to sit there and tell her. He’s getting over some bitch who cheated on him, but her hands are on him all the time.”
“It didn’t look like he was hung up on some bitch, dude looked like he had it bad for you.”
“I wish it felt like that.”
I say nothing else and let him work. The buzz drowns out everything. Eventually, there are no feelings in my arm. Staring into space instead of my phone takes away a fragment of the ache. At some point, I must have fallen asleep because I sat there for almost three hours when the buzz stopped, and I’m back to reality.
