Page 20 of Center of Gravity
I couldn’t see his face because he was still tucked under the cabinets. I watched him lay down another line of paint. He had really well-shaped calves. The arms weren’t bad, either. Not ripped with muscle, but nicely-toned.
“Nope. No grand scheme. I was hooking up with a guy who did piercings and tattoos. Had his own shop, so…it just kind of happened.”
Rob came out from under the counter, dipping his brush into the paint pan while he studied me.
“I actually took a lot of them out.” I pointed to my eyebrows, then my nose.
He snorted. “Why’d you take them out?”
“Outgrew them, I guess.”
“Seems sort of arbitrary.”
“It wasn’t really a conscious decision, I just did it.” I started to feel like he was critiquing me somehow, but I wasn’t sure why and found myself saying, “Not everything has to have a thesis statement and dissertation behind it, you know, sometimes you just do things because…because it feels good at the time or…for fuck knows why. And it felt good to get pierced by Slade. It was intimate and hot being stretched out on a chair, having my skin in his hands, the anticipation and the pain—which sounds kinky, but it wasn’t, not really. It was intimate in a way, and the sex afterward was amazing.” I’d unintentionally lapsed into a passionate ode to piercings while my paint brush dripped audibly into the tray at my feet.
“And his name was Slade.”
The guy was impossible. My jaw dropped and then he laughed that laugh I’d heard before, the one that wrapped me in warmth, ran up my back, and drizzled like syrup into my stomach. And then I was laughing, too. “Well, he was a tattoo artist, what do you expect: Bob? William Henry the 4th?” I hoped somewhere out there was a tattoo artist named Bob who was winning at life.
“You done being a dick yet, or should we go through the rest of my life choices for your amusement?”
He arched a brow at me, gave me that smug smile, then turned back to his painting. But a handful of minutes later, he said, “I have a tattoo.”
“An ex’s name?” My turn to be amused, though I couldn’t say I was surprised because the deal with Rob was that hewassurprising in these small, interstitial ways that didn’t quite add up. Like the random cursing. “Where?”
“Right above my hip. And no, nobody’s name. I’m not that stupid or romantic.”
“So what is it?”
Rob’s features broke in a crooked slant, like he was preparing for my reaction.
“A slice of pizza.”
“A fucking slice of pizza?”
There came the grin.
“A very ornate, very detailed slice of pizza. We were hammered and had this grand idea that we were making some kind of social commentary. Also, I was twenty.”
“So you basically got ‘pretentious idiot’ tattooed on your hip?” I was loving this. “With a boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“What was his name?”
Rob was quiet for a second and then he reluctantly said, “Wayne Weidermeyer.”
I laughed, and his smile broke into another crest of laughter.
“So what I’m hearing is that you’ve got no room to be talking shit.”
* * *
The crowd wassizeable for a Wednesday night, but Tom had gotten there early enough to snag us one of the hightops squeezed onto the decking of The Tap House. Tiki torches sent up little puffs of oily smoke and light that bled into the surrounding heat and flickered when the fans oscillated by. The fans were barely moving the air, but I’d long since gotten used to the wet-blanket feel of humid air around my shoulders. That was Georgia in the summer: a giant, fifty-nine-thousand square mile wet blanket.
Rob and I had finished the kitchen and powder room, and I’d run home long enough to sit down to dinner before meeting up with Tom. I hadn’t had time for a shower, so I was still in my cut-offs and paint-spattered T-shirt, my neck and back slicked with a mix of salt air and sweat. It was so packed probably no one would’ve noticed or cared anyway.
Tom had a bucket of beers on the table and was sizing up the potential as usual, checking out the length of skirts, making over-unders on a crew of what appeared to be freshmen. He wasn’t a douchebag by any means, but the guy was always looking. I looked too, because I could appreciate a nice set of legs on either a man or a woman. But if I was going to pick one to go home with, I’d pick the guy every time.