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No shit.
Yet I’m not completely robotic.
“Do you think me incapable of feeling that toward you?”
Her focus slices up to me so fast that I automatically know the answer is no. But I really didn’t give her much else to go on, did I? “You’ve been here, how many times?”
“This is my first.”
“You’re gonna hate it,” she says confidently, which has me mindlessly cocking my head to the side.
“You don’t.”
“I’m built for people.” Her eyes narrow a bit. “You’re not.”
I step forward. “I do tattoos for a living, Opie. I manage just fine.”
“Hudson…I love that you’re here. Honestly, it’s like a dream.” I can feel the but coming any second now. “But I can’t be afraid that, at any given minute, you’re going to leave because you hate it here. I can’t get attached to you like that again, because I did. No matter how many times I kept trying to justify that we were just a temporary thing, to me, we weren’t. I fell for you and?—”
“You said that in past tense,” I interrupt, fully cognitive that she’s scared but I’m hung up on how she’s feeling now and what she wants to do with me. “I need to know the present tense Opie, and what she wishes for now.”
“I don’t get to manage that.”
“You do,” I retort softly. “Right here and now. The relationship we had will only blossom and bloom from here on out. There are no gray lines. You’re my girl and I’m your guy. We’re a team.”
Liv frowns. “How much is this going to cost you?”
“Not whatever number is floating around in your head right now because you look like I just told you that you had a bug infestation or that I just got caught up by the mob or something.”
“I’m thinking five digits.”
I shake my head. “Not even close if I had someone move my shit for me.”
“I mean with the business. You have to relocate. You have to get a place. Marketing, competing with shops that are already here?—”
“Baby, have you seen the ink on these West Coast boys?” I scoff inwardly. “It’s stupid as shit.”
Liv begins fidgeting with her fingers. “What about Winslow, Miles, and Devin?”
There’s the girl I know and love.
Liv grew a relationship with them even though half the time it was lengthy and nonproductive, but we grew a little family. The guys adore her, miss fucking with her, and I miss everything in between.
“Miles is comin’ with,” I tell her. “If this works out in my favor. Winslow has a whole damn family of kids and a wife. He wants for nothing.”
“He needs a job,” she retorts through her increasing pout. “He has mouths to feed and?—”
“He’s already been starting some design business and has been working on it for years,” I disclose. “He’ll be fine.”
“Devin needs something.”
“Devin will probably come because he’s Miles’s butt buddy and he broke up with his girl. The two of them should probably get married because no woman is going to deal?—”
“Don’t go talkin’ about how they can’t nab a woman because if you did, they sure as hell will.”
My face skews. “The fuck does that mean?”
Liv doesn’t double back, just holds my stare placidly. “You know exactly what that shit means, so don’t go actin’ like you’re God’s gift to us measly women down here.”
