The Start of Us: Book 1 in the No Regrets series Read online

  “It’s just to make sure there aren’t any tiny hairs that could get in the way,” he says, then flashes me a smile, one of those knowing smiles that only hot guys can get away with. “You actually have quite a smooth shoulder, Harley. It’s the perfect canvas.” He leans in so close I can smell his hair, and it smells like oranges, like some kind of fresh and clean shampoo. As he shaves the nearly nonexistent hairs on my shoulder, I’m keenly aware of his nearness.

  And how much I like it.

  And how much I don’t know what to do about liking it.

  Then he tosses the razor in the trash can, pulls on a pair of rubber gloves, wets my skin with a damp washcloth and soap, and presses the transfer paper against my shoulder.

  “So, do you go to school around here? At the university?”

  I nod. “Yes. I’m studying English. I’m a sophomore.”

  “Cool. I’m finishing up my history degree. And working here.”

  “How long have you done this?” I ask as he removes the needles and tubes from their sterile pouches.

  “Started yesterday.” He brandishes the needle at me, and everything in me halts, my skin prickling with worry. Then the gold flecks in his eyes twinkle, and I sure hope they mean he’s kidding.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “You don’t mind a virgin tattoo artist, do you?” he asks in a low, sexy voice, and my face flushes instantly. Virgin. Like me.

  “Not at all,” I say, trying to recover my cool. “Happy to be your first.”

  His eyes widen, and he hitches in a breath, and that’s when I realize I’m affecting him too. “I’ve actually been doing this for four years. I’ve done a ton of tats, and yours is going to be a thing of beauty. I promise,” he says, fixing me with his eyes. “I’m going to start now. You ready?”

  I nod resolutely.

  “I’d tell you to hold my hand if it hurts, but I think we both want to make sure my hands stay on the design.”

  “So if it hurts, I’ll just pretend I’m digging my nails into you and transferring all the pain.”

  I’m rewarded with another sweet smirk, and the knowledge that I like this kind of back-and-forth when no one is paying for me, when I’m not pretending to like someone, when there’s no exchange of power or money or goods. When we are just a guy and a girl spending an hour together on a Tuesday night in the Village in Manhattan.

  And holy hell, that hurts. I bite down hard on my lower lip, almost certain I’ve drawn blood.

  “Breathe,” he says. “You can do this. Your skin will get used to it.”

  His voice is soothing, his smell delicious, his hands steady, so I close my eyes and let him work. “Do your thing.”

  At first, I feel as if I’m being stabbed by nail scissors, but then the stinging abates and I’m left with only the consistent buzzing against my skin, like a tooth being drilled. It’s not pleasurable, not by any stretch, but I’m doing it, I’m getting a tattoo, and for some reason, I’m glad this guy is my first.

  That word flicks through my brain. As I close my eyes, I picture Trey kissing me, and for the first time, I want a kiss.

  2

  Trey

  Her wild-cherry scent floods my nostrils. I’m close to her, as close as a doctor and patient, and she smells amazing. She looks like someone my age, and she dresses like it too. There’s no earthly reason I should find her so damn hot because my type has always been that of a fine wine. Women are better with age, and I’ve gravitated toward those a few years older than me. Okay, maybe a decade or two older.

  But this girl…

  I’m not even going to say there’s something about her. Because it’s not some random something that makes her hot. It’s everything.

  It’s her long blonde hair, her deep brown eyes, her body and the way she looks in that skirt and those Mary Janes. It’s the way she’s flirty and also reserved at the same time. As if she’s not quite sure what to do, and then she’s suddenly sure. And maybe it’s because of where I’m at right now in my life, maybe it’s because of this scar on my face and why I have it and what I’m doing about…changing my ways…that I find this girl so alluring.

  Or it could be simpler. It could be that her fingers are digging into my thigh as I finish the linework and move on to the shading of her ribbon. I glance briefly at her hand. Her nails are unpolished. She’s gripping me hard as she takes deep, measured breaths. I fight the impulse to hug her, to tell her it’ll be okay. She doesn’t need that from me. She needs me to do my job, to do it well, to do it precisely, so she can have what she came here for—art on her body. I switch to a different needle for shading, but she doesn’t let go. It honestly doesn’t bother me that she’s got her hands on me. She’s some kind of intoxicating combination of sweet and sexy at the same time.

  Innocent but worldly.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I notice her breathe in sharply. I keep my focus on the needle, making small talk to distract her from the pain.

  “If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?” I ask as I brighten her ribbon with a fire-engine shade of red.

  A smile plays at the corner of her lips. She opens her eyes, glances up at me. “You’ll laugh, but I’ll tell you anyway.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Because it’s not someplace exotic. Or foreign. Or the kind of place everyone wants to go. It’s just California.”

  “I’m not laughing,” I say. “Why California?”

  “Because it’s far away from here. Because it’s warm. Because of the ocean. Because of the beach.”

  I nod as I work. Her reasons rock. “Because of the waves. Because of the sand,” I say, continuing, picking up where she left off, like we’re in some kind of perfect sync.

  “Because of the sunshine,” she adds, and as I’m finishing the shading, the song playing overhead shifts to Arcade Fire.

  “Best. Band. Ever,” she says as the opening notes grow louder.

  “No. Questions. Asked.”

  She turns to look at me, wonder in those pretty brown eyes. “Arcade Fire is your favorite band too?”

  “Like that’s even a question? Hell yeah. I’d do anything to see them live. I hear their shows are epic.”

  “I’ve heard that too. All those instruments—violins playing alongside guitars to make big, anthemic music. I would love to see them live,” she says wistfully.

  “Maybe in California someday.”

  “On the beach. Let’s have them play on the beach,” I say, and she sings a few words from “Intervention” under her breath. I join in for a line, and she smiles at me at the same moment I remove the needle from her shoulder.

  “You’re done.”

  Her eyes widen. “Really? I’m all done?”

  “Yeah. Can’t you tell it doesn’t hurt anymore?”

  “Yes. Of course,” she says, a fierce blush spreading through her cheeks. “But I wasn’t even thinking about the pain anymore because of the whole California thing.”

  “Good. That’s my job. Want to see your ink?”

  “Yes.”

  She turns to check out her shoulder, her eyes sparkling as she surveys the design. “It’s amazing. It’s just amazing.”

  “Thank you,” I say, filled with pride. I’m always glad when customers like my work. I’m doubly glad that this smoking hot girl who picked me to ink her for the first time likes it. Especially since she’s not the type to get a tat. She’s so Manhattan preppy, all lip gloss and perfect blow-dried hair, no punk vibe or badass edge to her. Maybe that’s why I like that I marked her. That she found me, trusted me, and didn’t freak out. It happens at least once in a shift. Someone comes in and they back out before the needle hits the skin. And hey, that’s the time to back out. But I’m glad Harley didn’t. She seems like she needs this, maybe as much as I need the ink that’s on my arms.

  “I’ll be right back. Stay here,” I say as I head to the sink, run some hot water on a towel, and return to her, patting the to
wel against her shoulder to clean up. “Now it’s perfect. You want me to take a picture for you?”

  She reaches into her purse and hands me her phone after scrolling to the camera icon. I snap a quick picture and show it to her. “I love it,” she says, then tucks her phone away.

  I raise an eyebrow. “You’re not going to slather it all over Facebook for everyone to see?”

  She scoffs and shakes her head. “Nope. I’m not a big Facebook person, but even so, this tat is for me, not the world.”

  I feel a rush of heat in my veins, her words connecting with me on an almost elemental level, hitting me in the heart. That’s how I feel about my ink. I don’t hide it, but the art on my body is for me, not for show, not to prove a point, not so I can look cool. Because it means something to me. It’s how I remember those who aren’t here anymore.

  I apply Vaseline to her shoulder. “This is just to protect the skin since, you know, I’ve been digging into it with a needle for thirty minutes.”

  “Oh, was that all? Seemed like only seconds.”

  “Oh yeah? Only seconds? Was that while you were gripping my thigh?” I ask, teasing her and enjoying the hell out of this back-and-forth I never expected to have.

  She shrugs her other shoulder. “What can I say? You have a strong thigh.”

  “Glad you found my leg useful.”

  As I spread the Vaseline on her skin, I try to approach it like it’s my job, which it is, and try to tell myself I don’t enjoy it any more than with any other customer. But that’s a pathetic lie, because even touching her skin like this is making me want to touch her in other ways. To learn how her wrist feels against my thumb, to discover how smooth her calves are in my palms, to find out if her hair smells like that wild-cherry scent on her skin.

  My head’s getting cloudy as a movie reel flashes by of how the night could play out. I want to shake these images away, to clear her out of my mind. But I also don’t want that one bit.

  I don’t want this to end.

  I press a bandage onto her skin, drawing out the process of patting down the corners, taking my time, trying to work up the courage to ask her something. I don’t even know what. To hang out? To go out? To spend more time with me? But I don’t date, I don’t ask out girls, I don’t have the words. I should be able to spin a thousand lines, rattle off plenty of words of seduction like I did for the ladies in my building, but she’s not a cougar and she’s not a MILF and she’s not eyeing me up and down in the brass-paneled elevator in the building where I grew up.

  She’s just a girl in college, getting inked. And for the first time in my life, I feel like just a guy wanting to ask a girl out.

  I don’t have a clue what to say.

  “There you go,” I say when I finish the bandage.

  “Thanks, Trey.” She stands up, slings her purse over her shoulder. “For everything. You made this all feel good. Or really, you made it not so painful.”

  My shift is over, so I walk her to the front of the shop, running through a million stupid combinations of words I’ll never be able to say, until she reaches the door and I am scrambling for a way to spend more time with her. I blurt out, “Don’t go.”

  She tilts her head to the side, raises an eyebrow curiously. “You don’t want me to leave the shop?”

  I shake my head. Then I nod. Fuck, I’m a mess. “Yes. No.” I scrub a hand across my jaw. “What I mean is, do you want to hang out? Get a coffee?” Once I ask, I find my confidence returning, so I continue, getting my groove back. “Talk about music? Or just talk about where you’d want to be in California?”

  Hell, this is my last night before everything changes tomorrow. Might as well spend it with the first girl my age I’ve ever been attracted to.

  3

  Harley

  A gigantic coffee cup beckons us, the sign for Big Cup Coffee.

  I’m not so sure coffee is the best idea right now, since I’m more nervous than I ever was walking into a hotel lobby to meet a client. I knew what to do then. There were guidelines, expectations. Different for each man because they all had different preferences. But the rules of the road were ironclad—nothing below the waist, you paid your money, you got your kicks. Everything was prescribed and then delivered according to the order.

  With Trey, I’m going off the menu. So far off that we’re having a different kind of cuisine. Something I’ve never tasted or tried. Because I’ve never gone on a date with someone I wanted to date. Someone I chose to date.

  He’s the first guy I want to sit down with, have a cup of coffee with, get to know. I want to flirt, I want to talk, I want to feel his hands on my body again. This might be the last time—or maybe the only time—I have this chance.

  He holds open the bright-yellow door to the coffee shop, and I head in first, shucking off my jacket quickly since it’s warm inside. He does the same, and I like when he doesn’t wear a jacket because his arms are amazing. Not just the artwork, but the shape of them, the firm, taut muscles, the way T-shirts were made for guys like Trey.

  At the counter, we peruse the chalkboard menu, and he stands close to me. Shoulder to shoulder, his bicep touching my skin. A ribbon of heat runs through me, sweeping across my body, and it’s a foreign feeling—this very first inkling of want. But I like it, this want. I want more of it, and I’m dying to know how nights unfold when they aren’t bought, sold, or arranged in advance.

  After our drinks are ready, we sink down into a red couch, my espresso and his coffee on the wooden table. There’s an awkward silence, and I don’t know if I should go first or if he will. It’s uncomfortable, but I also kind of love it because I think it’s normal. Right? That great unknown of what to do or say.

  “So,” he begins, then clears his throat.

  “So,” I repeat, and the silence expands, spreads between us.

  “So you go to school?”

  “Yeah. You too?”

  “Yeah. Senior year.”

  “I’m a sophomore,” I say, even though we’ve had this conversation already.

  “Cool.”

  There’s another pause, and it’s like we’re on the radio and we’ve created dead air.

  “And you’re studying English?”

  “Yep. And history for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Another bout of nothing to say. Another round of meaningless chatter.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Definitely. You?”

  “Yep,” I say, and it feels like we’re simply repeating our chat from earlier, only this time it’s because we have nothing to say. Maybe this is how dates go.

  Dully.

  I better drink this espresso stat and get the hell out of here. Because this night is sliding downhill as we retread the same terrain. “I’m so thirsty,” I say. I take a hearty gulp of my espresso, and it scalds my mouth. “Ouch.”

  He quirks up his eyebrows. “You okay?”

  “I think I burned my tongue,” I say, wincing.

  “Let me check for you,” he says, all deadpan and toneless.

  I raise an eyebrow, shooting him a skeptical look.

  “C’mon. I’ve had a needle in your skin. You won’t let me inspect your tongue for burns?”

  “You’re going to inspect my tongue for espresso burns?”

  He nods seriously. “It’s part of our secondary training as tattoo artists. Needles, ink, and tongue burns. Now let me see that tongue, Harley.”

  When I stick out my tongue and say “Ahh,” the date that had been crash-landing pulls out of the nosedive. He touches the tip of my tongue with his finger as if he’s inspecting it. It tickles, and I laugh more.

  He parks his hands on his hips. “If you’re laughing, I can’t check out your tongue properly.”

  I adopt a serious look and stick out my tongue again. He pretends to examine it. “I’ve arrived at a diagnosis.”

  “Okay. Tell me.”

  “You do not have a burned tongue. What you have is a desire to end this coffee
date as soon as possible.” His eyes pin me, and his words are so searingly honest that I blush, look away, then back.

  “Was it that obvious?”

  He nods. “Yeah. But it was kinda going downhill fast, right?”

  “Coding big time.”

  “Do you think we pulled it out?”

  I shrug playfully. “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “I think we can if we stop talking about pointless things like school and majors—which is my fault,” he says, tapping his chest. “Because I have to be honest here, I don’t usually have coffee with girls who walk into my shop, and I don’t usually talk about school, and I’m a little bit nervous because I think you’re both badass and beautiful. So, can we make a pact for tonight to get rid of the bullshit and just talk about stuff that matters? Like why you want to go to the beach, and how you feel when you listen to your favorite band, and whether you love or hate New York as much as I do, and what you want out of life.”

  My heart thumps loudly, and I half wonder if he can hear it, because that is the coolest, most real thing anyone has ever said to me. It might be a line, but it doesn’t feel like a line—it feels like the truth of one night, and that is all I want. A night without lies or lines or pretending.

  “I’ve never had coffee after a tattoo either. Since, you know, first tattoo. Second, I’d love to talk about the beach and why I love it, especially because I never get the chance. Third, Arcade Fire’s music makes me feel as if I can feel. Like I’m feeling everything inside me that I don’t usually let myself experience. The music does that to me, like it’s turning me inside out.”

  Trey’s shoulders relax, and he grins. “I love that. I think music can be like that. That when you don’t know what to do or say, sometimes you listen to a song and it makes you, I don’t know, brave or crazy or just makes it seem like a bad day isn’t so bad.”