“Are you staying late?” With hands planted on her hips, she leans back and stretches, cracking her spine after a full day of work. Seven o’clock, closing time. The setting sun shines through the two big picture windows on either side of the front door, casting a warm glow inside the shop. She chuckles.
“What am I saying, of course you are.”
I grin and return to the shop’s overflowing inbox asking when our artists’ books are reopening and if they would make any exceptions. I’m willing to take commissions on the days we’re closed if the client is willing to pay one and a half times my normal rate.
“I was thinking of ordering some food . . . Wanna get in on that?” she asks.
When I glance up, she’s got her elbows planted on the front desk, hands propping up her chin. She bats her lashes, showing off her bright-green eyes, and tosses me a hopeful smile.
The corner of my mouth turns up, and I sigh. “Yeah. I suppose,” I grumble, typing out replies to hopeful client emails at the front desk. I could be doing this from my office, but she just finished up with her last client of the day, so I was covering the desk until we closed at seven o’clock p.m.
These days I only tattoo four days a week, but still, I find myself here almost seven to make sure things are running smoothly. I inherited the shop almost five years ago and still haven’t mastered the work-life balance. Not sure I ever will. Maybe someday I’ll hire a shop manager, but it would have to be someone worthy, and I doubt I’ll ever trust anyone enough to give them control of the reins. This is too important, and I can’t risk it ending up in the wrong hands again.
This isn’t just any tattoo shop, it’s Clyde Everhart’s studio, Black Rabbit —and the woman standing in front of me is his one and only descendant, Kelly.
She rounds the desk and looks over my shoulder. “Hey, are you going through emails? That’s my job, get outta here.” She shoos me away and slips into the chair I was sitting in.
Kelly is still wrapping up her apprenticeship, so she previously managed our inbox as one of her duties, but technically, Francesca—Frankie—handles the front desk on the days we’re open, Tuesday through Saturday. I hired her about eight months ago to answer phones and schedule appointments. She is great at keeping us organized. However, her work days usually end around six o’clock, so anything important outside those hours is done by me or Kelly.
“But first, I’m putting in a dinner order,” she announces, pulling out her
phone.
“Expense it,” I tell her.
She spins in the chair to beam at me and says, “Don’t worry, I am,” then rotates away from me.
I hover behind her as she scrolls through restaurants listed on one of those food delivery apps.
A text notification pops up at the top of her screen.
JASON Hey beautiful. How was your day?
She squeals.
This fuckin’ guy.
“I love that he texts me to ask how my day was,” she says, opening the text thread and tapping out a response.
“Yeah, Chaos, his chivalry is really breaking new ground,” I grumble.
She doesn’t even hear me.
I can’t watch this shit, so I step away and cut open the boxes from our earlier delivery. This woman occupies way too much real estate in my brain, especially considering she has a new boyfriend—the man is a complete waste of her time. He doesn’t know how to handle a woman like Kelly Everhart.
Kelly is five feet, two inches of pure edgy adorableness, with her black hair, black nails, tattooed arms, and nipple piercings that occasionally poke through her shirt just to torture me. Not to mention those thick thighs and hips that I’m dying to sink my teeth into. Jason, you lucky son of a bitch.
She’s kind and sweet, always making sure everyone she comes in contact with feels appreciated and welcome. Though if it were up to me, her gorgeous smiles would be exclusively mine.
Jason is the most milquetoast motherfucker I’ve had the displeasure of meeting. Unfortunately, she’s been with so many clowns over the years, this guy’s stock features—like asking about her day—have somehow been twisted into grand romantic gestures. I have no idea why she puts up with him. He’s a cold sore personified, annoying, and hopefully just as temporary.
She giggles, smiling at her phone screen, and I roll my eyes, pulling out the boxes of blue shop towels from the shipment.
They’ve only been seeing each other for a month and a half. Eventually, she’ll come to her senses. Until then, I will continue to bide my time as her best friend. Our close friendship provides me with special privileges, which is enough to hold me over. The line of more than friends has never been breached outside of my thoughts. I’m pretty sure she sees me as an older brother—or worse, an extension of her dad.
“Okay, we’re getting burritos,” she announces. Kelly leans back in the chair until her head is practically upside down, plush lips slightly parted as she glances up at me. “What do you want?”
To see your head hanging off the edge of my bed, just like this, before I fuck your pretty mouth.
The scent of her perfume wafts in my direction, and my gaze finds hers before returning to those goddamn lips. I envision grasping her chin and taking her in a firm kiss. What does she taste like? Is she eager and greedy or shy and submissive? Are her lips as soft as I imagine them to be?
“I’ve got to put this stock away. Order me whatever you’re having.” I retreat a couple steps to keep from doing something stupid.
“You don’t even know what I’m getting,” she counters while I load the remaining boxes into my arms and put some distance between us.
“Carne asada, beans, rice, cilantro, lime, onion, salsa,” I call in her
direction as I head toward my office.
She laughs. “Freak!”
As if we haven’t had enough burritos at this point for me to not memorize her order, as if I didn’t commit it to memory the first time she placed it.
In the stock room, I stack the boxes of towels on the shelf, then take a deep breath, dropping my head and shaking it. We’ve been friends for years, and friends know things about each other—but there’s nothing friendly about the way I feel toward her.
We first met when she was a teenager, and it was like having a goofy kid sister in the shop. Being Clyde’s kid, she earned the nickname Junior, which still carries on with our other two tattoo artists, Casper and Thor. It was fitting. She made me smile with her stupid jokes and quirky antics. After she left Minnesota for college, I continued to focus on my apprenticeship with Clyde, occasionally seeing her when she came home during breaks and holidays from art school in New York.
It wasn’t until she graduated and moved back home that we really became friends. I had gotten out of a toxic relationship that almost ended my career, and despite Kelly being six years younger, she had matured a lot over the years.
She learned to hone her natural talent in art school, returning home with remarkable dexterity compared to when I’d first met her years prior. She’d also completed a piercing apprenticeship while out east and convinced Clyde to let her pierce at Black Rabbit. It was an easy sell; he was always so proud of his daughter, and rightfully so. She’s a skilled body piercer, but when armed with a pencil and pen, the woman is fearless—which is why she became Clyde’s newest tattoo apprentice almost immediately.
Despite being only twenty-one years old and having her dad as her mentor, she understood the significance of the opportunity and made every effort to practice her technique. Kelly may float through life as carefree and lively as a leaf in the wind, but she doesn’t fuck around when it comes to art.
The shop was always chill whenever Kelly and I worked the same shift.
Clyde loved having her around too. We talked mostly about our favorite artists, tattooing, and random shit. Our friendship was exactly what I needed.
Her heart of gold was so bright in comparison to my dull black one—and she possessed the same creative mind Clyde had. It was inspiring to watch her genius unfold. Her style had evolved into something beautiful, reminiscent of
her dad’s early work.
After a few months, I began to notice her more. Paying attention to things I hadn’t previously cared about, like the small birthmark on the back of her neck, or that her natural hair color is a warm chestnut brown—not the black she dyes it every eight weeks—or her burrito order. That was when I stopped calling her Junior and started referring to her as Chaos. Because that’s what she was, my own personal chaos.
Somehow, the girl who was once like a kid sister had returned from school a completely different woman. One who sent my head spinning with how confident, creative, and gorgeous she was.
Apparently, I wasn’t good at hiding it back then either, because I’ll never forget the day Clyde cornered me in his office.
“What’s going on with you and Kelly?” he asks, shutting the door behind him.
“What?” I’ve been asking myself that same question for weeks.
“I’ve seen the way you watch her . . . In case no one’s told you, you’re about as subtle as a shotgun.”
“You’re losing it, old man.” I avert my eyes and chuckle, then try to change the subject. “Hey, I’ve got some questions about those forms Billy is supposed to be submitting. Can we chat later today?”
He stares at me, and I gather every ounce of denial I have to stare right back. Our standoff seems to last forever, but once he’s decided I’ve been tortured enough, he speaks. “Give her a chance to grow up first, yeah?”
The son of a bitch is astute, I’ll give him that.
He coughs a couple times and clears his throat. His cough has gotten so much worse in the last couple weeks. “She’s too young. She’s not ready for someone like you.”
Someone like me. Not someone my age, not someone who shares a resemblance, someone like me. I raise a brow and cross my arms over my chest. What the hell is that supposed to mean?
“Don’t look at me like that. You know as well as I do that still waters run deep.”
I shake my head. “I’m not interested in your daughter.”
His eyes gleam with emotion in the overhead fluorescent lights. Whoa.
This might be the closest I’ll ever be to seeing Clyde Everhart get choked up.
“I won’t be around forever. I’m going to need you to look after her. Based on this conversation, I’ll probably be a bag of charred dust bunnies by the time
you’re ready to admit it. But when that day comes . . . be good to her.
Promise me you’ll let her choose.”
“Clyde—”
With a shaky grip, he fists my shirt, yanking me down so we’re eye level.
“And if you ever break her heart, I’ll claw my way outta the great beyond and drag you back to hell with me just to bask in your infinite misery.”
He releases me from his hold and brushes past me, where I’m left
standing alone in his office.
“I promise.”
We sit across from each other in my office as we eat our meal. I swear food tastes better when I eat with Kelly.
“I finalized my design for the Bozeman expo. Wanna see?” she asks. I nod, taking a bite. More than anything.
Kelly grabs her tablet from beside her and taps the screen to wake it up, then swipes a couple times and leans forward to hand the device to me across the desk. When I take it from her, she returns to her meal, and I look away before I witness how well she can fit her mouth around the massive burrito.
Swallowing, I adjust my glasses while inspecting her artwork. It’s a realism piece. Her gaze is hot on my skin as I examine the casually floating astronaut. The buoyant posing is fantastic. Across from the astronaut is a deep-sea diver. My lips turn up in a smile. “Talk to me about it,” I say, keeping my eyes on the piece while she speaks.
“I was thinking about Dad. I wanted something that evokes the idea of being caught between worlds, because that’s how it feels sometimes. Like we’re still together but just stuck on different planes.”
I exhale through my nose and glimpse at her briefly. “Then if you zoom into their visors . . .”
My fingers pinch and stretch on the screen over the astronaut’s helmet, and I see she’s added the reflection of the deep-sea diver’s helmet, and vice versa.
“You have your model already, right?” I’m sure it wasn’t hard for her to find someone to volunteer to be her canvas for the event.
“Yeah, she’s actually local to Bozeman. So we’re going to have one on her left thigh and the other on her right, facing each other . . . I thought about putting them on the same part of the body, it might get me more points if I have to curve them around a leg or something, but I kind of like the idea of the distance changing between them throughout the day, whether walking or sitting still . . . So, yeah . . . What do you think?”
When I look up, she’s biting the corner of her lip, her eyes darting back and forth between the screen and me. I fucking love the way this woman’s brain works. I zoom in and out of different areas, admiring the detail and use
of shadows. “This is rad, Kelly.”
A slow smile spreads. “Really?”
She holds her hand out for the tablet, and I give it back to her, smiling. “I love it. It’s going to show a lot of skill. Keeping your lines and shading clean will give it the biggest impact.”
“I’m nervous, realism is so hard. And I don’t have any faces. The winners almost always show faces. Maybe I should just do something simple, enter one of the smaller competitions.”
“Are you doing it for your dad?” She nods.
I point my finger at her tablet. “Then do it for your dad.”
Kelly has a unique style. I’m confident that in a lineup of five hundred tattoos, I’d spot hers in a heartbeat. It’s expressive. Sharp. Bold, yet somehow delicate—and always whimsical. Clyde was always a little cheeky in his designs, that’s something they have in common. He was a stoic man, but the joy he had for tattooing was always present.
“Have you come up with any ideas for flash at the event?”
Each of us is designing a few sheets of exclusive flash designs for Bozeman. Keeping the designs we’re offering limited helps us know how much time will be spent on each client so we can fit more people into the schedule.
She chews while nodding, then swallows. “Yeah, I’m thinking of doing like western-themed centaurs. Like cowgirls and cowboys, except half horse.
Get it?”
Like I said, whimsical.
“Very cool,” I say, with a small chuckle. “Is that what you’re practicing
tonight?”
“Nah, tonight I gotta ask the hat.”
The hat is one of Clyde’s old trucker caps she keeps in my office; in it are
a bunch of small crumpled pieces of paper. Each paper has a different tattoo style and subject, and she uses the random picks from the hat as a prompt because it takes away the decision fatigue. It’s very Kelly to do it this way, leaving things to fate. She’s into crystals and tarot and all that witchy shit.
It’s frustrating as hell sometimes, but it’s part of her charm.
When I was Clyde’s apprentice, he made me practice so many different styles before I landed on what my specialties were: traditional, black and gray, blackwork, and to my own surprise, surrealism. Adding realism to my repertoire was challenging. In the beginning, I was annoyed with Clyde for making me learn styles I didn’t ever plan on using professionally. I was a fan of his work, I wanted him to teach me his style of tattooing. He was quick to correct me in saying no one would ever tattoo exactly like him, and no one would ever tattoo exactly like me, either—and every artist had a responsibility to find that out for themself.
Art was a journey and couldn’t be kept in a box. Learning various mediums and styles would make me a more well-rounded artist. And he was right. Black and gray taught me how to master smooth shading, traditional taught me about design and silhouette, Japanese helped me understand composition, realism helped me conquer light sources and shadow. It was in this that I discovered my passion for painting. And I plan to teach Kelly the same way her dad taught me.
Leaning over, I grab the brim of the hat and hold it out in front of her to pick from. She makes a big display of covering her eyes with one hand while she takes a big pinch and draws three papers with the other.
Pick one: Anatomy
Pick two: Food
Pick three: Woodcut “Hearts.”
I shake my head. She’s done hundreds of anatomical hearts already.
“Skulls,” she counters.
“No.” She knows what she needs to practice.
She groans. “But I hate hands!”
“Maybe if you sign more, they won’t seem so foreign,” I say, signing in American Sign Language. Kelly asked me to teach her how to sign because she wants to contribute to making our shop more inclusive. I’ve signed since I was little, so we often cater to deaf clients, and she wants to be able to communicate with everyone we work with—she’s a chatty little thing by
nature. Spending extra time teaching her ASL was a no-brainer.
“I hate hands,” she signs back with an unamused expression. Then pauses a moment to roughly sign that “the knuckles always look like shit.”
"Stop bitching and get to work."
My mother was deaf. She died after being hit by a drunk driver, but I’ve never stopped practicing ASL. She’s the one who taught me to sign. We have several clients who sign, so I encourage the other artists to learn. I even taught Clyde a little. It’s a good skill to have either way. Kelly is a quick study; she’s picked up a lot just from watching me talk to deaf clients, and the rest we cover with lessons or by making her sign while she speaks in our casual conversations.
Her phone dings, and she grins at the screen. God, what on earth could this guy be saying to make her look so smitten?
“What now?” I ask.
“Jason.” She sighs all dreamily. Give me a fucking break. “I dunno, I just really like him. He’s so sweet. Since Dad died, it’s really nice to have somebody to make me feel good about myself. And who knows, maybe this will turn serious. I know that sounds crazy, but —”
“It doesn’t sound crazy, it is crazy. You’ve only been with him a month.”
This is the first time I’ve ever heard her express interest in something long-term with a guy. Usually, she’s just dating and keeps it casual, or I scare him off before he gets any ideas. I’m letting her get it out of her system because once she’s mine, I’m not giving her back. The level of restraint I show even letting her go out with other men is beyond generous, and only because of a stupid fucking promise I made to her dad, who I, unfortunately, have great respect for. My patience should be studied.
“Six weeks,” she argues.
My jaw tenses. “You’re only twenty-five.”
“I’m turning twenty-six soon. Half of the people I graduated high school
with are engaged or married —”
Marriage? Is she fucking serious?
“So what!” I snap. “Do you really think you’re ready to settle down with somebody?”
She flinches, but I still see the remnants of stars in her eyes. Holy shit.
Have I not been paying attention? Somehow it snuck past me that she’s actually developing feelings for this poster child of mediocrity.
“I’m not saying I’m ready to recite vows with Jason. I’m just ready for
something more serious. I feel like I’ve had my fun, but now I’m ready for the next step. I’m not saying I’m there yet, but I think this guy has . . . I don’t know, potential. It’s time for me to grow up, ya know?”
“If you wanna settle down, that’s great. But you’re not going to find it with that guy.”
Well, Clyde, I waited. Kelly may like to leave her decisions up to fate, but when it comes to this, I control the strings. I’ve invested too much. I gave her freedom, but just because I let her wander doesn’t mean I’ll let her get lost.
“How would you know?”
I scoff. “Because I know you. You’re dressing him up to be something worth wanting. That’s not love, that’s settling. If you have to chase love that hard, you won’t find it.”
Knowing she wants to be locked down is all the confirmation I need. It would be cruel to stand by and watch her look for the thing she wants most while I hold it behind my back. Love isn’t something she needs to chase.
Her phone chimes, and she smiles down at the screen again. “I told him I had to work. He’s pouting.”
He’s pouting? “Three-year-olds pout, Chaos.” This guy is a clown.
She rolls her eyes at me and switches her phone to silent, then tosses it up on the countertop.
That’s right, you piece of shit. Pout all you want. I get your girl tonight.
