Freefall (2 page)

“Alex, oh good, you’re there. Tell Nana that I’ll be a little late. I have to take Jamie to the dentist this morning.” I could hear my nephew screaming ‘no dentist’ in the background. “Then you should brush your teeth more,” Diana yelled to him without covering the receiver. “You don’t have time to take her to the store, do you?”

“I’ve got a client coming in, Di. I’ll tell her you’re coming late, but it won’t matter. She won’t remember two seconds after I’ve told her.”

There was a pause, and I knew exactly what was coming next. “We really need to look into a home for her,” Diana spoke quietly as if Nana could hear her.

“Soon, but not yet.” Every time the topic came up, it made me want to slam my fist through a wall. Life carried far too much shit with it. “I’ll tell her you’ll be late.” I hung up.

Nana had walked out to her living room. Like she often did, she’d walked over to the line of pictures on the mantle. It was a part of her morning ritual, a lesson of sorts. She would walk along the line of photos and recite the names of the people. Sometimes she’d even force herself to repeat the occasion of the picture. It was as hard for me to watch as it was for her to remember. For now, the faces there were still familiar, but it wouldn’t be long before they became strangers.

Her shaky fingers took hold of a picture with a shiny silver frame. It was the photo she picked up every time. “Your father looked so gallant in his racing suit.” She stared down at the picture and ran her forefinger over it. “He was such a good boy.” And then as always her face smoothed with sadness.

I walked over and put an arm around her shoulder. She seemed to be shrinking with each passing day. My dad’s face smiled up at me from the picture. He was leaning against his race car, the car that he’d died in just a year after the picture was taken. My sister and I had been watching the monitor inside the racing trailer when it happened. I was sipping a wild cherry slush not really paying attention to the race. Mom was sitting on the little leather couch where Dad and his crew always played poker during down time. She couldn’t have been bothered with watching the race. She was busy on the phone making plane reservations for her next trip to France. At that time, I was too young and self-absorbed to know that Mom had been seeing someone else. Diana gasped and I pulled my attention away from my drink and looked up at the monitor. It was a minor crash, just a little twisted front end as the car hit the divider. Not like his previous wrecks where the car had broken up apart or burst into flames. And after those crashes, Dad had always emerged with a wave and a smile. Diana and I watched as his pit crew meandered out to the car with smiles, seemingly joking about the silly crash. But halfway across the field, their faces changed and they started to run. A horrified hush fell over the crowd. Diana grabbed my arm, and my drink fell to the floor splattering my shoes with red ice. Dad never stepped out of the car.

The doctors had concluded that a weak blood vessel in Dad’s head had burst. He was dead before his pit crew got to him. Mom left three weeks after the funeral and stayed in France. Nana and Grandpa took us in. My dad’s death had nearly killed my grandmother, and I was certain the shock of it had brought on the dementia. My grandfather died three years after burying his son. He’d left me a nice chunk of change and the Zany Lucy, the boat he’d named after my grandmother, and the boat I called home. I had been blowing through the cash like a snowplow in powder when Clutch persuaded me to invest in the one true skill I’d had in high school, other than getting suspended— my art. My life had been in a freefall until I opened the doors of my tattoo shop. It was easy to name the place.

Nana placed the picture back on the mantle and stared at it a few moments longer. Then she smiled up at me. “Will you be coming for dinner tonight?”

I shook my head. “Not tonight, Nana. Diana is coming over later to take you shopping.”

“That’s nice,” she said. There was a time when the woman could recite every line of an Emily Dickinson poem, and now she had to write down the word ‘milk’ on paper so she wouldn’t forget to buy it.

I kissed her forehead. “I’ll stop by tomorrow.”

“Will you be coming for dinner tonight?”

“No, Nana,” I said quietly, “not tonight.” I walked into the kitchen to make sure the stove was off. A small note with Nana’s wavering handwriting was taped to the hood. It read, ‘turn off stove’. Nana’s grocery list was on the table. I wrote a note telling her I wouldn’t be coming tonight and that Diana would be late. But I could still expect at least three phone calls during the day asking if I’d be coming for dinner. I didn’t mind the calls though. Hearing her voice let me know that she was all right.

C
HAPTER 2

Scotlyn

Lincoln threw back the drapes, and I placed a hand over my eyes to block out the harsh daylight. “Are you going to sleep all day?” he asked as he answered his cell phone. He walked into the sitting room adjacent to the master suite and shut the door behind him. I had no interest in listening in on his calls just as I had no interest in anything he did.

I sat up and glanced down at the clock. It was noon. I’d actually only slept for a few hours. I’d spent most of the night sitting in the chair on the balcony overlooking the pool. I preferred empty darkness to the visions that haunted my sleep.

I picked up the picture I kept on the nightstand and stared down at my family. We’d been on a trip to Jamaica that summer. I remember not wanting the trip to end. I held the picture closer. My mom’s fingers were wrapped around my sun-browned shoulder. I was skinny and gawky with that awkward physique only a girl of thirteen could pull off well. Mom’s fingernails were painted with her favorite color, Hot Pink Lemonade. It was the color that came back to me when my mind drifted back to the awful day, back to the last true day of my life, back to when everything went cold. My mom’s pink fingernails were the last flicker of movement I’d seen in the twisted metal and glass of what was left of our car after we’d gone over the side of a mountain.

Lincoln opened the sitting room door ushering in the icy sterile air that seemed to follow him wherever he went in his sprawling house of sparkling glass and polished steel. “There are a few people coming over later for a small get-together by the pool. You should wear that new bikini I bought you.” He smoothed down his moustache, a useless habit considering the man never had a hair out of place. Lincoln wouldn’t allow it. Everything, even his hair had to be completely under his control. He leaned over and kissed the top of my head. I’d trained myself to hold my breath and avoid the stench of his hundred dollar aftershave, an expensive fragrance I’d come to loathe along with his touch.

It hadn’t always been that way. At one time, I’d looked at him as my savior, my only true family, but slowly his arrogance, his cruelty, and his sense of entitlement had pushed away any feelings I’d had for him. I’d tried for a long time to feel nothing around him. Feeling nothing had been a skill I’d perfected after the accident. It was the easiest way for me to cope with the horror of it all. I’d honed the skill further during the year of hell I’d spent with my dad’s sister, Marcie, a woman who’d taken me in only because she worried that God would smite her if she didn’t. She was rigid and harsh and so completely the opposite of my free-spirited dad, it was hard to fathom how they’d grown up in the same family. A year of her strict rules, hours of reading the bible, and her constant criticism of my parents’ wild ways was too much. I ran away. And not surprisingly, Aunt Marcie hadn’t followed.

When Lincoln had rescued me from the streets as a half-starved sixteen-year-old junkie, I’d allowed myself to feel for the first time since I’d lost my family. And it felt good at first. But after a year, it dawned on me that I’d left one hopeless, ugly situation to be stuck in another. This one came with gourmet dinners instead of the soup kitchen, and silken sheets instead of a cardboard box, but it was still just as unbearable. In fact, there were times when I longed for the filth and hardness of an abandoned park bench.

I picked up the pad of paper and pen that I kept on the nightstand.

Lincoln creased his brows. “What happened to the tablet I bought you?”

I shrugged and hugged the paper pad to my chest to show him that I preferred the paper and pen. I scribbled a sentence. “I’m not really in the mood to swim.”

He read the paper. “Who said anything about swimming?” His voice was edged with anger. It happened more and more as he realized that I was pulling away from him. It was killing him that something was out of his control, and he was trying like hell to take hold of the reins again. But it was far too late. He’d lost me, and I knew that there was nothing that would bring me back to him. My silence usually frustrated him, but it also served him well. Without a voice, I had little opportunity to go out on my own. Sometimes my silence served me well too. Sometimes I feared that if my voice did return, I would scream and never stop . . . like I had while trapped in the overturned car with my family. My parents and sister were dead long before my pleas were answered by a passing policeman. Aunt Marcie had told me that God had smiled down on me that day, but it had always seemed to me that if he’d been smiling down on me he would have let me die with the rest of the people I loved.

“Put on the suit,” Lincoln said, leaving no room for argument. And arguing with pen and paper was annoyingly ineffective. He turned to leave but then snapped his fingers and spun back around. “I nearly forgot— the artist finished the drawings for the tattoo. She gave me the name of a great tattoo shop in the city, Freefall, or something like that. I’m going to call the guy today and get an afterhours appointment.”

I nodded.

The hard lines of his face softened, and for a brief second I saw the handsome face that had charmed me off the streets. He walked over, leaned down, and kissed my lips lightly. I shut my eyes and clenched my teeth as his mouth crossed mine. His smooth fingers ran over the silk of my nightgown, tracing along the scar that ran the length of my torso where the firemen had pulled a large slice of windshield from my side. One hundred stitches had kept my insides from falling out, but my heart had already been washed away in the river of blood. “We’ll cover this up and you’ll never have to look at that horrible reminder again.” I knew him well enough to know that covering my scar with a tattoo had more to do with him finding it hideous than covering it to help me forget.

C
HAPTER 3

Nix

The last client of the day stood for a good ten minutes admiring his new tattoo, looking at it as if the idea of a skull and crossbones on his arm was new and original. But he was pleased with the way it turned out and that’s all I cared about. Skull man walked up to the counter, pulled out his wallet, and cleared his throat loudly to get Cassie’s attention.

She looked up from her book. In her spare moments, Cassie always had her nose in a book and most of the time it was one of those funky romance novels with the long-haired dudes with white shirts opened enough to reveal a steroid-built chest on the cover. The corny looking novels were completely inconsistent with her dyed black hair and piercings. She hopped off the stool and walked over to write up the invoice.

The guy smiled at her as she entered some things in the computer and handed him a bill. Her mind was always so caught up with thoughts of Dray, she rarely noticed when another guy was flirting with her. “I like your glasses,” he said. He fidgeted awkwardly with his wallet, but it seemed his new tattoo was giving him the confidence he needed to talk to Cassie.

She smiled at him and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Thanks.”

He paid for his tattoo, and I was sure he was going to ask for her number, but the question stuck in his mouth. Cassie had not given him any signs of encouragement, so the guy walked out slightly disappointed.

I finished cleaning up my tools as Cassie straightened up her jewelry display, a small side business she’d started on my counter.

“That guy was totally into you,” I called to her.

She turned around and looked at me over the rim of her glasses. She could see much better far away than close up. “What guy?”

I rolled my eyes. As hard as I tried to discourage her from setting her sights on Dray, none of it ever seemed to work. She had it bad for him, and my self-centered friend hardly acknowledged her existence. I walked over, picked up her book, and carried it to the front counter.

“You know, Cass, one of these shirtless pirate guys is not going to walk into this shop any time soon.”

She rolled her eyes and grabbed the book from my hand. “Pirates were in the eighteenth century, stupid. This is a Regency era duke.” She looked pointedly at the anchor on my arm. “You’d think a guy covered with vintage sailor tattoos would know a thing or two about pirates.”

“Sorry, I didn’t pay much attention in history.” I walked over to turn the door sign around. “Or any other subject, for that matter.” I didn’t usually give romance advice but something made me speak up this time. “I don’t know a lot about the way girls work, but I do know that sometimes the best way to get a guy’s attention is to throw in a healthy dose of competition.”

Smart as she was, Cassie understood exactly what I meant. She stared at the door the guy had just walked out of. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m just saying.” It was probably stupid of me to get her hopes up. Dray had a hard shell around his heart, and I didn’t know if anything or anyone could ever penetrate it.

The phone rang and Cassie picked it up. “Freefall.” She paused. “Yes, he’s here.” She held out the phone and shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Wants to talk to the owner.”

I took the phone from her. “I haven’t cleaned the coffee pot yet.” I winked flirtatiously at her hoping she’d volunteer to do it. She grunted and walked to the back office.

“Hello.”

“Hey, how’s it going? Is this Alexander Pierce, the tattoo artist?” The guy sounded slick like a car salesman.