Whitney sighed and dropped all semblance of pretending to eat, her fork clattering down on the table. “All right, so what would you do if Graves left for three years? Wrote you a letter every couple of months, and then didn’t write for a year, Chlo.”
“Graves wouldn’t do that,” Chloe said brightly.
“That’s what I thought of Andrew,” Whitney returned with a meaningful lift of her brows. “Now would you expect Graves to come back without even explaining why the hell he left for so long?”
Chloe’s mouth pursed thinly, and lightly she drummed her fingers on the table. “Honestly even talking about it makes me queasy, because—”
“Because you love Graves and he loves you. You don’t think you could possibly be without him for so long.”
“Okay, so I see your point.” She lifted both her hands up in a placating gesture, then dropped them with a dreary sigh. “So what are you going to do?”
“If I can even hope to have something meaningful with him in the future, I think we need a redo.” Lifting the sleeves of her silk button-down shirt, Whitney revealed one of her tattoos over the table, and her stomach lurched nervously once more. “I really think I need to have this removed.”
Sheer horror widened Chloe’s eyes. “Whitney!” she cried, curling her hand around the tattoo as though protecting it from Whitney’s thoughts. “That’s like a divorce to you. You took that so seriously. You kiss it and stroke it like it’s actually Andrew.”
“Obviously he didn’t take it as seriously as I did.”
Frowning at that, she covered the tattoo back up and dropped her arm. The thought of not wearing his name on her skin tomorrow made her stomach churn, but honestly, deep down, she’d known it months ago, when Andrew had stopped sending letters, that she would have to have it removed. It was the only way she could think of to put their relationship back into perspective and allow for a fresh new start.
And yet knowing what had to be done didn’t make it any easier.
Half an hour later, she stared at the tattoo parlor sign and wanted to vomit up the food she hadn’t even eaten. Fralo’s Tattoo Parlor was the same small corner place they’d visited three years before, when Whitney was barely turning twenty, young and in love, ready to promise Andrew the world. He’d been older, wiser, and he’d been her everything.
They’d shared two wonderful years together.
But now, they had been apart even longer.
Her throat was on fire when she walked up to the man behind the counter and showed him her wrists. “Can you take these off?”
The embodiment of ink with a “beard” tattoo failed to remember her.
He didn’t seem to be acting as though what she asked was something monumental. He merely studied the design, nodded as though very pleased with his work, and said, “Tattoos are permanent, everyone knows that, but I can hide it with a color close to your skin tone.”
She asked the price, then nodded at the number he gave her, and hated that she wanted to cry. “So can you do it now?”
Within minutes, she was sitting in that same chair, the one that had made her feel flutters of excitement while sitting there before, as the man got everything prepared. Soon the machine began to buzz on her right wrist. The pricks didn’t feel good this time. They didn’t feel like it was Andrew, branding himself to her.
Instead they brought a rush of memories so deep, it overwhelmed her, a part of her screaming for her not to do this, that she didn’t really want to do this.
She saw Andrew in all the years of her life. The first time she’d seen him at Chloe’s house. Dark, next to Daniel Lexington’s blondeness, Andrew kept staring and staring at her, making Whitney blush the color of her hair. She saw him when he’d smiled at her, an I see you smile that told her he very much liked what he saw. That same smile always stole her breath away.
She saw him listening to her with quiet rage as she told him her uncle had touched her, his eyes brimming with determination to make it better for her.
Then, then he was making love to her that first time, gently, lovingly, telling her she was so pretty . . .
Her body had been used before. But nobody, not even Whitney, had ever loved it like Andrew.
She watched the artist work while a part of her screamed that this was a mistake. That this was the man she loved, the man she would fight for. Oh, God. Did she really want to do this? “Wait!” She sat up and stared down in horror at the damage. “Wait, wait!”
Fralo lifted his head, his bearded face pinching in displeasure. “You still owe me, lady, whatever you decide. So just tell me. Are we doing this or not?”
She stirred uneasily in the chair, remembering Andrew’s fierce protectiveness, how he made love to her, how fiercely truthful his eyes shone every time he told her. She remembered his text. I want to talk to you. Tonight.
She looked hastily back at the man, and said, “I guess not.”
She wasn’t ready to give up on him, on them. Instead she clung to the hope that he planned to talk to her honestly this evening and arranged her shirt to cover her wrists, ignoring the little chip he’d taken off from the W. A souvenir.
“Crap,” she murmured when she noticed she was missing a button from her sleeve. It had probably popped off at Starbucks when she had eagerly showed Chloe what she would do.
Feeling crafty, she seized the little spider over her right breast and pinned it to the lapel of her shirt. She figured it would also give her easier access, too, if she needed to use it. Once she paid the man and stepped out, she squinted in the glare of the sun and started for the side alley where Jerry had said he’d be waiting for her.
She was going to talk to him tonight. He’d either come clean, or these came off tomorrow—
A body stepped right before her.
“Whitney, Whitney.”
She tipped her head back and froze in disbelief. A face from her past stared back at her. A face that contained stony-looking eyes that scrutinized her with puzzling intensity.
“Joe. Wow, what a coincidence,” she said, gathering her breath.
Her cousin looked much older than she remembered. And it seemed that he’d been eating every second of those five or more years since she’d seen him.
He grabbed her head from behind and rammed a cloth against her mouth and nose, and as she inhaled to scream, she felt herself fall into his arms as he whispered, “No, Whitney, it’s not a coincidence at all.”