Alison's Wonderland (29 page)

The benches had been moved to clear the hall for dancing, and the musicians were tuning their instruments. The court was in a merry mood. Edward had spared no expense at dinner; the match pleased him, no one knew quite why. But a contented king meant a happy court. The musicians struck up the first number. Everyone waited politely for Edward and Elizabeth to take the floor, but he waved them away. He was too fat to dance. He indicated Lord Scales, who bowed to the girl and led her to the middle of the floor. They had found a proper dress for her. It was palest rose, shot through with gold thread and even to the dowager’s old eyes, she glowed like sunrise. Before they had danced a measure, a disruption at the front of the hall drew everyone’s attention.

A disembodied voice rose up to the beamed ceiling. “An audience! I have an audience with the lady affianced to Lord Scales.” When the servants moved aside and he strode forward, he was revealed as the dwarf, only not the scraggly little man who had made Madchen’s acquaintance. This dwarf wore a tiny, immaculate suit tailored of cloth-of-gold with brocade edging and gilt shoes, turned up at the toes, on his little feet. Reaching Madchen, he bowed, low and grand. “I have come to claim my prize—the firstborn son of Madchen Sprynger
and Piers Wydeville!” He made his announcement triumphantly, the culmination of a lifetime of planning.

A shocked hush descended upon the room, surprise lighting every face except that of Piers Wydeville. Madchen only looked sorrowful. She stepped forward. “I’m sorry,” she said, bending down to the little man, and she meant it. “I didn’t know that I would marry him.”

“You were supposed to marry him,” the dwarf answered. “I’ve come to claim the child. My child.” Madchen only shook her head. “Come with me. I have something to tell you.”

All eyes were riveted to the play. Into this hush came her father’s voice, loud and bewildered. “What child? She had the scarlet fever when she was seven. She’s barren.”

The dwarf stared at Madchen, a dull red rising into his features. “Barren? Barren? Childless, barren, horrible girl!” Piers stepped forward at that, but Madchen stopped him, a hand on his arm. The dwarf began to stamp his feet in uncontrollable, inchoate anger, his voice rising to a shriek. A low murmur began in the room, rising like a hive of bees about to swarm.

“Be silent!”
The dowager had pulled herself to her feet and stepped down from the dais. Reaching the relative safety of the floor, she advanced on the dwarf. “You thorn in my side,” she hissed. “You insolent little man. I thought I was rid of you years ago.”

“Little man!” he screeched. “
Little
is the only insult I ever hear! Why not evil, why not insufferable, why not traitorous? No one ever—” he pointed wildly at Piers “—accuses him of being
tall!
” The look of shocked wonder on Piers’s face changed to delight and he began to laugh. The dwarf was nearly apoplectic. “My father loved you, and you banished him because he was a dwarf. You stole him from me. You broke him. My mother never saw him again. And for that, you deserve to pay.”

“All right, you evil, insufferable, traitorous
little
man,” the dowager said. “I’ll tell you the truth, if you can bear to hear it. I never banished your father from this court. I took your father as my lover and he was the best lover I’ve had, then or ever. He would lay between my legs for hours, giving me the most unspeakable pleasure and taking what I gave him willingly in return. He never asked me for anything other than my body and my affections. In a way you could never fathom, he was wealthy beyond measure.”

“What about me?” the dwarf said.

The court held its collective breath. She would either give quarter or she would not.

“He had to choose,” the dowager said. “You were the price he paid for me.” Giving the awestruck crowd a fierce, haughty glance, she turned, gathering the train of her gown in one hand, and surged back up the dais. Throwing herself into her gilt chair, she sat glowering like Methuselah on the throne.

There was another ten seconds of impeccable restraint, then a rising babble of voices broke out as one. The secret! The court did not like secrets. Everyone present felt tremendously buoyed by its exposure.

Ignoring the chaos, Piers gave Madchen a charming, lopsided grin. He put his arms around her. “Is there a place to begin?” he asked. “And would you know where it is? You’re so lovely.”

She smiled up at him, her head tilted back, exposing the pale column of her throat, so he could not resist bending to kiss it.

She said, “I think we begin here.”

Most women I know linger over the diamond rings shimmering in jewelry-store windows. They spend their lunch hours designing their own engagement rings online, whether or not there’s a fiancé in sight. And they can’t help but drool during those sappy “Diamonds are Forever” commercials that tend to pop up oh so innocently during reruns of
Friends.

But not me.

That doesn’t mean I don’t swoon over carefully crafted window displays—simply not the ones at Tiffany & Co. My fantasy fodder can be found in a slightly seedier part of town, on Sunset Boulevard, in a window filled with emeralds and sapphires and deep hearty rubies, just like any exclusive jewelry haven. But the items for sale in this neon-encrusted store aren’t gems, but hues. Pigments. Images on paper to be transferred to willing, waiting flesh.

Recently, diamond merchants have tried to sell women on expensive jewelry for the right hand. Left hand equals married. Right equals independence.
Buy more diamonds,
the ads suggest,
to show what a strong, brave woman you are.

Tattoo stores don’t go in for similar campaigns.
Anyone
can
get adorned, if your wallet holds the cash and your soul possesses the appropriate appetite for pain. But that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t need to prove my strength, my confidence, my independence. I wanted to be tattooed for a reason. I craved the commitment accompanying the ink. The permanence of artwork as tribal, as traditional, as a ring on my finger. One that would never come off.

So I watched the windows every time I passed by.

And I waited.

My friends married up. They settled into their lives. Not white-picket-fence lives—not in Los Angeles, where fences tend to be chain-link and heavily padlocked—but cojoined, smug, satisfied lives. My buddies sported rings on their fingers that sparkled even in the dimmest light over cocktails at our favorite shady little place in Hollywood.

“Don’t you
want
to get married?” Cassie cooed to me during one girls’ night out. We were four high-school friends nestled into a blood-red leather booth—three married girlies and me. Which of these things was not like the others? That was obvious on sight. I felt as if I had a nobody-loves-me aura permanently stapled to my slender frame.

“I don’t know what I want,” I said, lying.

Of course, I knew. Yet it wasn’t a what that I desired, but a who.

Janelle twirled her princess-cut ring, and rainbows shot on the walls. It was a sick habit, in my opinion, one she’d invented as soon as Blake slipped the engagement ring on her finger. I stared at the dizzying, dancing swirl of colors, and thought immediately of Brody.

Brody, the handsome tattoo artist who worked on Sunset Boulevard. Brody, with the heavy sand-colored hair that fell to his shoulders, the dark blue eyes that looked black in the right light. During his breaks, he always came into the bookstore where I worked, and I liked to try to guess which genre
he was going to read next. No matter what I bet on, I was always surprised. He started with noir, which suited him, the old-school detective mysteries: Chandler, Hammett, Spillane. Then he moved to some coffee-table art books, especially those featuring artists from the early 1900s, such as Klimt and Egon Schiele, before choosing a recent best seller, in French. He was quiet, but not sullen or shaky like some of the rockers who came in to buy the latest copies of
Spin
and
Rolling Stone.
And every so often he’d give me a stare that made me want to melt away into a pool of liquid lust.

What color would lust be? Gold-streaked crimson, for sure. Brody could dip his needle into me, paint with the color I’d become.

When I walked home, I’d pass by the window of his parlor and peer in. I couldn’t see the tattoo rooms from the street. Only the pictures in the window, and sometimes Brody behind the counter, reading his most recent purchase.

Read me,
I wanted to beg him. Or, more accurately:
Write on me. Draw on me. Make me your own.

Cassie tried to set me up. She felt that married life was vastly superior to singlehood, and she wanted me to be as happy as she was. That’s what she said, anyway. But I could guess the truth. She wanted to understand me.

How could she, if I didn’t understand myself?

“It’s different,” she claimed. “Being married, I mean. You’re not desperate anymore. You’ve got a whole part of your brain back. You no longer have to lose sleep over whether someone else will be sharing your bed.”

That wasn’t something I
ever
lost sleep over. There were plenty of men who wanted to share my bed. And when there weren’t—well, I had the whole damn bed to myself. Company wasn’t what I craved.

What I wanted was Brody. And not just Brody, himself. But
Brody’s intensity. I wanted him to look at me the way he looked at his books. To focus his attention fully on me, not in stolen little glances over the tops of paperbacks. I wanted Brody to spread me out on his tattoo table and mark me up. To claim me, to find me, to make me his own.

Truly? I wanted rings on my fingers, but not the diamond kind.

The next time he slid into the store, I was ready. I had the latest four-color tattoo magazine out and open on the counter, and when he reached the front of the line, I made sure that the image I liked the best was the one facing him. The photograph of the girl with pale skin like mine, long dark hair and ravenous purple-blue eyes. The one with the girl showing off her latest adornment, a visual design by Klimt. Swirls of colors. Like rainbows dancing on a barroom wall. A tapestry. A painting. Done on skin with a needle rather than on canvas with a brush.

Brody raised his eyebrows. “You like that?” He seemed surprised.

“And
this,
” I said, pointing specifically to the close-up inset photo of the woman’s hands. The rings on her fingers. Rings that would never come off. There were people behind Brody in line, but he didn’t seem in the slightest bit of a hurry. I liked that about him. He refused to rush.

“Have you ever been inked?”

I shook my head and he grinned. “A virgin,” and I felt my breath catch. Wasn’t that the name of the Klimt piece? The same one he’d been looking at in one of those high-end art books. The same one as the image on the girl’s back in the magazine. A shudder ran through me, and Brody’s smile broadened, wolfish and hungry.

“I’ve seen you looking,” he said softly, and I felt as if the rest of the store had disappeared. Vanished in a magical puff
of L.A. smog. “Window-shopping,” he continued, a taunt in his voice. “When are you going to work up the nerve to come inside?”

I had an instant answer for that. “When you work up the nerve to ask me out.”

We locked eyes for a moment, and his grin faded, but the force of his expression remained. I could have touched the power between us, held it in my hands, electric and hot.

“After work,” he said, his voice low and dark. “We’ll have a drink.”

I nodded, feeling as if every minute would last an hour. Every hour a day.

Time crawled, yes, as I’d known it would. But ultimately, I was able to clock out. And when I finally snagged my thrift-store leather jacket from the back room and made my way to his store, I felt as if I’d been set free. He was waiting for me. Sitting on the chipped front steps of the tattoo parlor. A paperback in his hands that he was clearly not reading. The tension hovered in the air between us—ripe and ready.

“Where to?” I murmured as he stood up to greet me. But I didn’t have to ask. We went to my place, because that was closest. Went to my bed. Or
almost
to my bed. To the wall outside my bedroom, where he waited for me to kick off my boots before he tore my clothes off me: the black T-shirt with Blondie’s face on the front, the indigo stovepipe jeans, the plum-colored satin bikinis. His hands moved fast for once. I’d misread him. He
did
rush. When it was necessary, he rushed.

But once he’d gotten me naked, he stopped and stared.

I could feel him drinking me in—my skin, so pale, so fresh. He seemed in awe for a moment, but only a moment, because then he was in motion once more, and his own clothes were quickly shed, a rumpled pile of denim and black, like mine. And I could see the colors on his skin. The waves of blues
and gold and reds. The fish on his forearm. The mermaid on his back, when he turned for a moment, her tail a deep serpentine green. As he seemed in awe of my blank canvas, I was in love with the designs on his body, and I watched him with the reverence of an art student at the Louvre. A hush had fallen on us. A wave of respect.

We touched each other slowly at first, each tracing, each learning, my fingertips following the lines of every piece of artwork, his hands caressing the muscles and sinews beneath my naked skin. And then suddenly we were fucking, hard, the type of fucking that leaves you breathless and wanting more. His body on mine, firm hands lifting me, legs balancing my weight. He was strong, maneuvering me exactly how he craved. Turning me this way and that, so that first I was astride him, atop him, and then I was faced away, hands on the wall, hips arched.

“I want to be the one,” he said against the nape of my neck, a rush of air, an ebony whisper. “I want to be the one to do it.”

I shivered all over, knowing what he meant, seeing my future, spread out on his table. The way he’d look at me, the way he’d focus.

“Yes,” I echoed. “Yes.”

He fucked me until I came, crying out, biting on my bottom lip to stifle the sound. But he didn’t stop. He merely spun me once more and gripped me up in his arms, hands cradling my ass. Then he pushed through my bedroom door, so that we were in my tiny space and up on the bed, fucking again, this time slower, more carefully. The mirror reflected us: his tattooed skin, my naked flesh. Brody on top this time. My black sheets beneath us. Rumpled. Wrinkled. His mouth on my neck, and then down, lower, to my breasts, and lower still, to my pussy.

“I want to mark you,” he murmured. Fingers tracing everywhere. “Here.” A heart shape drawn effortlessly on my hip. “And here.” A butterfly outline flickering to flight on my lower belly. “And here.” A dagger on my thigh, blade pointed down, drips of crimson blood trailing along my tender skin. And then his mouth became sealed to my nether lips, so that he couldn’t speak anymore, and I could no longer think.

In my head, he’d already done the deed.

In my mind, I was as decorated, as adorned, as he was. Freshly inked. Colored like a painting, a living, breathing work of art.

We didn’t sleep afterward. We talked in crazy whispers. With him confessing how he’d tried for months to impress me. Choosing his titles carefully. Which books would make him stand out from the crowd? The noir was cliché, he felt. The art books too pompous. The French one a gimmick, just to throw me off my guard.

He’d been window-shopping, too. Craving something behind the glass, something just out of reach. And that something was me.

When Janelle twirled her ring on the following Thursday night, for once I didn’t feel sick with longing. Instead, I watched transfixed as the light hit the walls in crazy spirals of color, watched the colors dance and gleam, watched the way my friends’ faces appeared smug and satisfied in the blood-red booth.

Did they truly have what they wanted?

Diamonds are forever—the ads proclaim this as truth. But a diamond ring can twist and turn. The metal band can wear away. The stone can come loose and fall free, leaving a hollow space behind, an empty hole, a gaping wound.

I looked down at my hand, under the table, slid my silver ring aside to see the band of ink Brody had intricately designed.

“You know what you need,” Cassie began in her regular Thursday-night mantra, but I tuned her out easily.

I had what I needed.

Or if not a what, then a who.