Spider: A tattoo romance (Rough Ink Book 2) by MV Ellis

Author:MV Ellis [Ellis, MV]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925853865
Publisher: Hot Tree Publishing
Published: 2019-11-15T18:30:00+00:00

23

Emi

The pause on the other end of the line was so long and loaded that I figured I’d overstepped. I was trying to find a way of apologizing for inserting myself where I was neither wanted nor needed without saying the word sorry, when Chris finally spoke.

“He was one of a kind. Everybody loved him—even those who feared him, and plenty did. He’d worked his way through the ranks from the bottom up. He came from dirt and made his way to the top through sheer hard work, determination, and blood, sweat, and tears. No West Point or Citadel shortcutting the process for him. He earned every stripe the old-fashioned way.”

His words caused a pang of regret in my chest. I was sad that I’d never get to meet someone who had clearly been influential in Chris’s life.

“I think it made him extra driven but also unreasonably hard on himself and on us around certain issues. For example, though he left the day-to-day discipline mostly to Mom, he went through the roof when he found out that not only did I not want to go to college, but I wanted to spray-paint shit for a living. To this day, I don’t think he ever really understood graffiti, or my attraction to that world.”

I would have liked to learn more about that side of Chris too, but it wasn’t the time or place.

“It was Mom who’d talked him down from the ledge. I inherited her unconventional and creative genes. He came around slowly, then in time he was proud of me, in his own way.”

His voice cracked as he spoke, and so did my heart. His pain was palpable, and I hated that there was nothing I could do to ease it.

“He was supportive in the end?”

“Yeah. He was this big scary, heavily decorated soldier, but what most people didn’t know was that he had a huge heart. He just wanted Benji and me to be happy, so once he was done being pissed, he embraced it and pretended to the world that I never did anything on the margins of the law, let alone on the wrong side of it.

“He’d never been someone anybody would have accused of being naive, so I figured he knew the deal, just overlooked it. Whenever it came up in conversation, which was rare, Dad used to caution me to be careful, which I was sure was code for ‘Don’t get caught and cause a fucking scandal.’ I never got caught.”

I could hear the slight laughter in his voice as he recalled his dad and was glad to be able to help him relive fond memories at such a heartbreaking time.

“Then when I transitioned from graff to tats, Dad was the one to reassure Mom that it wasn’t the end of civilization as we knew it, and that most studios weren’t money-laundering vehicles for gangs and cartels. Somehow in her mind, she jumped straight from me becoming a tattoo artist to my charred and hacked-up corpse turning up in a body bag on her stoop.

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