More Than Meets the Ink by Elle Aycart

before getting properly laid. No way; it would be such a downer he might run away. Although lying there in the dark, talking to him, it felt so…intimate. It’d be such a relief to share her problems with him. That was what friends were for, right? But of course, that wasn’t what was going on here.
    An ironic chuckle bubbled up. “No, things are by far not okay at Rosita’s, but I really don’t want to talk about it. Or about my mother either. Please, let’s talk about something else.”
    He was silent for a pregnant moment, then caved in. “What do you want to talk about?”
    That was a no-brainer. “You. Let’s talk about you, your life.”
    “Too broad a topic. Could you narrow it down a bit for me?”
    “Okay, let me see,” she said, taking her time. Where to start? “Tell me, if your tats signal pivotal moments in your life, why didn’t you get one when you got married? I’d say getting married is a huge turning point in a man’s life.”
    More silence. Leave it to her to choose the worst topic.
    When Tate was almost convinced he wasn’t going to answer, he began, “Elaine and I were high school sweethearts. After I came back from the military, we hooked up again, and she got pregnant. Despite our regular clashes, I insisted on marrying her. No child of mine was going to be raised without me; that was totally nonnegotiable. She miscarried in the fourth month, just before the wedding. Deep down I knew we weren’t right for each other, but she was so devastated from losing the baby I didn’t have the heart to call the whole thing off. And hell, I loved her, or so I thought. My subconscious knew better, though. It never felt right to celebrate with a tattoo, so I didn’t. It turned out the pivotal moment wasn’t the wedding, but the divorce. Life’s a bitch sometimes. The tattoo is there to remind me of how royally I fucked up, just in case I ever feel like getting married again.”
    “Sorry.”
    “No need for sorrys; that’s just the way things are. I wasn’t what she wanted, so she cheated on me and dumped me. I believe she called it ‘upgrading husbands.’”
    “Ouch.”
    He chuckled. “Yeah, fucking ouch. At the time, though, it shattered my pride more than my heart.”
    She didn’t say anything for a long while. What could she say? She’d been dumped too, several times actually, but never upgraded to a better model, at least not right away.
    Well, now that they were on touchy ground…
    “Where’s your mom? Is she back in Boston?”
    “Nope. Or maybe she is, I don’t know,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Never cared enough to go looking for her.” She winced. Jeez, wasn’t she a buzzkill today. “She bailed out on us when I was small.”
    “Sorry,” she mumbled. “That must’ve been hard.”
    “Not really.” She could almost hear the shrug in his voice. He didn’t sound upset or uncomfortable with the subject. “She wasn’t such a great mom to begin with. Pretty absent from what I recall. So I wouldn’t say it was that hard when she left. I had a strong safety net behind me. Aunt Maggie, Dad’s older sister, moved in with us to help, and between her and Dad, they managed quite well. Me and my bros turned out pretty fine.” Yeah, you could see in the easy and self-confident way he carried himself and how he interacted with his father that James had emotionally lacked for nothing while growing up. “For the most part, I was cool with my mother’s absence. Besides, it wasn’t unexpected or as if we lost her all of a sudden. Yes, she left one day and didn’t come back, but it was a long time coming.”
    Well, a sudden and unexpected loss was definitely worse, she could attest to that, at least as far as feeling abandoned and lost was concerned. Her safety net, as he called it, had disintegrated in a fraction of a second, leaving her scared, alone, and in free fall ever since. All she could think most days was how much longer she’d fall until she hit bottom. Her