Well, imagine it with Penelope, and it doesn’t sound too bad. Waking up next to her every single morning? Making love to her every single morning? Every single night?
Tasting her, smelling her… having her every single day? Seeing her smile, making her laugh… pissing her off? That’s fucking heaven.
That’s what I want. I want her. I want her to be mine. She is mine… she just doesn’t know it yet.
Fuck.
Of course, we wouldn’t just be some asshole couple with rich-guilt and fake smiles. We’d be cool, do things our way. She’d run her tattoo shop, pick her clients, succeed in her life. She’d do whatever she wanted, because she can.
I recognize the fire in people. The burning will to win, to succeed.
My stomach crunches as I realize that I might just be derailing that.
But Fallon’s threat was clear. I’ll do this fight, win, and walk away with Penelope in my arms. If I listen to her, if I don’t fight, then he’s going after her. Shit, Fallon goes after both of us.
I can beat a man half to death in seven seconds, but I can’t take on the mob, no matter how much I want to. At least, not without a plan.
I need a plan.
All my winning, all my showboating, all my fame, and it just made me a target. Not just me, but Penelope, too.
Fuck them. Fuck them all.
I down a bottle of Gatorade, shake off the brain-freeze, and then start skipping again. I need to get my conditioning to peak level, and I’ve got less than a week to do so.
I’ve got to get Penny out of my mind… for now. Because if I don’t, I might just lose this fight.
Chapter Twenty Six
Tina Azume is beaming at me, and I feel the welcome flutter of pride in my chest and belly.
Before me, she holds up the imitation skin, a bespoke fabric designed to emulate real skin for tattoo artists to practice on.
Of course, nothing is the same as real skin. Nothing is the same as inking a living, breathing human who bleeds, whose temperature changes, who sweats, who feels pain.
But damn it if I haven’t done a good job. Tina had me draw that optical illusion where everybody is walking up and down steps, but there’s no way to tell which way is the right way up. It’s a visual trick; the lines are dishonest, but that we can’t make total sense of that reveals the brain’s willingness to try and interpret anything, and to mold information into something understandable.
Like with spelling errors, the brain can usually skip over them, automatically fill in the blanks. The same is true for perspective.
The point of the exercise was to evaluate my feel for perspective, to see if I easily confuse, or if I can orient myself quickly. The optical illusion is, of course, a cheat. But at first glance, it looks like a window into some weird dimension.
“It’s perfect,” Tina says, grinning. “Even on my first go I couldn’t emulate it right.”
“The needle sometimes stuck a little,” I tell her. “There was some, I don’t know, drag?”
“Well, if people clam up you’ll definitely experience some of that. Different people have different skin, too. You wouldn’t know it on the outside, but I’ve tattooed two people who looked basically the same in terms of their skin, but one was far more difficult than the other.”
Tina gestures for me to sit down, and she comes over to the small sofa we’ve got. When she sits next to me, she doesn’t fall into it like I do. Even the way she sits is precise, practiced, and, fittingly, severe. She crosses a leg, her back is straight as can be, and her shoulders are pulled back.
Tina looks like the kind of woman who never, ever is unprepared. She’s confident, not because she’s cocky, but because she understands… well, everything.
I want to be like that. I want to be in charge of my own domain, successful, judgers be damned. The tattoo industry, like most others, is still dominated by men. Women are only just finding their foothold, only just reclaiming back territory that should have been theirs for the taking.
Tina is the top female artist, and one of the top overall artists in the world, and she knows it. More than that, she has the respect of all the male artists. They fawn over her, defer to her. She’s a fucking superstar.
I want that. My ambition won’t let me settle for anything less.
“Look,” she says, showing me one of her tattoo books. It’s so clients can see tattoos she’s done on others, or otherwise reference designs. Tina flicks through to a girl with a shaved head. There’s a tattoo of a tribal-ish dragon on the back of her neck.
“For some reason, with Claire here—”
“You remembered her name? This photo is four years ago.” I point at the small date stamp.
“I expect you to remember all our clients’ names, too.”
“Right.”
“Anyway,” Tina explains. “The ink just wouldn’t take to the back of her neck. It was the skin type. It took me forever just to get the outline.”
“But she’s so pale,” I say. “And her skin looks really soft.”
“Exactly.” Tina quickly flips through the book. “Now this was another client I worked on. Her skin looks practically identical, right?”
I study the photo, and for all I know it might just be the same woman with hair. Her skin looks the same, her shoulder shape is the same.
“The ink took exceptionally well here. I scheduled myself twice as much time as I needed to do this piece.”
This time it’s a black eight-ball on the back of her neck. I’m fairly astonished, as that requires a lot of ink. To do it in half the expected time…
“I didn’t realize skin could vary so much.”
“It can, and certain inks do well on some skin types.”
“Has this been studied?”
Tina shakes her head. “Not exhaustively, no. Most tricks and tips you learn are anecdotal, from experience. There is no scientific journal measuring the differences between skin types, and how they pertain to ease of tattooing.”
“Why not?”
“Who would fund such a study? We’re already stigmatized as it is, though it is much better now than ten years ago.”
I nod, and hum. “The imitation skin took the ink well, but it felt sticky.”
“That’s because it’s not real skin. Tomorrow we’ll do another exercise, on imitation skin that doesn’t take ink well. It’s deliberately made more fragile, so you can see how you can damage the skin if you try too hard.”