Page 56 of The Boyfriend Experience

She blushes. And oh, fuck, yeah. I love that blush. I mean, I do realize that I just met her two days ago, but I don’t like to see her sad. Which gives me an idea for later. But first—“So if I say yes, I need to go somewhere good. A real artist, ya know? Not someone who draws cartoons, because that’s not what I’m looking for.”

“I have just the place,” she whispers.

“And I need to think of something worthy. Something I can look back on over the years and say, ‘Yeah, I’d do it again.’”

“OK,” she says. “So let’s see what we can come up with. What is meaningful to you?”

I just blink at her.

“Like, what symbol do you use for inspiration?”

More blinking.

“For instance,” she says, understanding that I’m just a dude who doesn’t give much thought to symbols, “I relate to… well, it’s stupid to say beer, but that’s exactly right. It’s my life. It reminds of family, and good times, and of course, the business. I don’t make all the labels anymore but that’s what I did when I was a kid. I made labels. Came up with clever names. Because each beer has a history. Each beer we’ve come up with has memories attached to it. And yeah, Bucked Up was invented before I was even born, but I was there when it rose to fame. I remember my dad’s face when he won that first international award. So if I were going to get more tattoos, I’d use beer as my inspiration.”

“You’d get beer bottles?” I ask. “Or labels?” I try to picture her like Larry over there, only instead carnival people, she’s got six-packs of beer on her arms.

“No, dummy.” She laughs. “Words are my thing. I’d get our beer names done up in the same calligraphy as it is on the label. But no pictures. Just words.”

“Interesting,” I say.

“Maybe if I was really clever,” she adds, looking up at the ceiling, like this idea just popped into her head, “I’d take the beer names and make them into a poem. Then write that all down my back. And all the regular words would be in one font and all the beer names would be in their original font.” She smiles and sits back, apparently satisfied with her future tattoo plan. “Yeah. That’s what I’d do.”

“Well, I don’t think I want words.”

“Of course not. That’s my symbol.” She smiles at me. “You just need to find your roots. The one thing that can describe you in a picture. And then go from there. Like my dad, he had an Old West theme. A whole herd of mustangs on his back. Six-shooters on his upper arms. And of course, the infamous bucking bronco as his main front piece.”

“He was all bucked up, huh?”

She nods. Tilting her head a little like she’s remembering him. All his tattoos. All their time together when she was young.

“So,” I say. “Not to be pushy, but what happened to your mom?”

“She’s dead to me.”

“Dead… to you?” I ask. “Or really dead?”

“It’s all the same to me. My dad got a woman pregnant. She never told him about the baby, just disappeared, and then one day he found a four-year-old on his doorstep.”

“He did not!” I bellow.

“I swear to God! She brought me to the brewery, dropped me off in the lobby, told the hostess I was his kid, and left me there. She never came back. I never saw her again. It was just the two of us after that.”

“So you know her name though.”

“Yeah. I looked her up when I was fifteen. She was dead by then.”

“Wow,” I say. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”

Oaklee shrugs. “Don’t feel sorry for me, that’s for sure. I got as good a childhood as any kid could ask for. And my dad might’ve been a beer-making biker on the outside, but he was an astute businessman. He saw the craft beer trend before anyone else and took Bronco Brews to the next level. When he died I inherited a five-hundred-million-dollar portfolio.”

I whistle. You know that whistle people do when they’re amazed at something? That’s what I do.

“Jesus,” I say. “That’s a lot of money. Is that why you decided to renovate your building? You just have so much money you don’t know what to do with it?”

“Sorta. But also, he’d always wanted to fix the building up. Just didn’t have the time or inclination to deal with it. So I figured I’d do it. We’d already planned it all out before he died. So really, all I did was see it through to the end. And you know what’s funny?”

“No, but I can’t wait to hear it.”