Fireball (Cheap Thrills #1)(57)

“Hey, Raoul, if you’re scared of needles, how did you end up with your tattoo?”

The man’s face went red, but then he straightened away from the desk he’d been using as a butt support and looked toward the door. “Hey, we gotta go. Mrs. Kline and Mrs. Bane are at it again.”

Looking in the direction he was staring, I saw one old lady take out another one, tackling her down to the floor. Both Dave and Raoul ran out of the door, but I didn’t have it in me to sneak a peek at his ass, not when handbags were flying – literally,

“My bets are on the woman with the black purse,” Jose mused. “It looks like she’s carrying…oh, that’s just wrong.”

I shit you not, and even Raoul and Dave stopping in the middle of the road and covering their eyes with their hands proved it – the woman with the pale pink purse reached up, pinched some of the fabric in the chest region of the other woman’s dress, and twisted hard. The scream that came out of the woman was unreal, like a pterodactyl or something.

“Did she just give her a nurple?” I gasped, still watching in horror as the woman kept twisting.

“How did she know it was there? There’s so much fabric on that dress, and the flowers make you dizzy. How did she get it on the first try?” Jose groaned, wincing as the other woman tried doing the same back to her, succeeding on her third try.

We must have watched them do this to each other for at least five minutes. Those women were determined though, and it took Dave and Raoul pulling them apart for it to stop. As soon as it did, we turned back to Ellis, finding him and Liv gone. Because it was him holding her, all we did was calmly walk toward his room, discussing what we’d just seen, knowing she was safe with her biggest fan.

“Can y’all stop before you get in here,” he growled as we walked through the doorway to see him sitting on a recliner with Liv on his lap. He had his hand palm side up and she was trying to slap it. Or at least she had been, what we saw was her quit trying and decide she wanted to eat it. “I don’t want her scarred before she even turns one, and that shit outside would change her for life. I don’t even know how Dave and Raoul are gonna get it out of their heads,” he shuddered, not even caring that Liv was gumming and drooling all over him.

Taking a quick look at Jose, I saw her watching them in awe. I was hoping she’d hold on to this memory and what she was feeling right now when it came to what she and Olivia could potentially have with this man in the future. It was early days still, but every day made a difference.

After a couple of minutes, he got up and walked over to Jose, reluctantly passing Liv back to her. Apparently Liv wasn’t all that fired up to be away from him either because she whined and tried to look for him, which at her age consisted of her turning her head slightly to the left and right.

Leaning in over her shoulder, Ellis gave her a soft peck on the nose and then tapped it with his finger. “Boop! I’m just going to be right there, pretty princess. Ok?”

I’d never had a reason to look up the cognitive functions of an almost two-month-old, so I wasn’t sure if she could actually understand what he meant. Regardless, she swayed and made a noise back at him, before resting her head down on Jose’s shoulder like she understood every word.

Grinning, he shook his head and walked over to the plastic-covered table. I had questions about this, which I asked ten minutes later when he was tattooing the new ink on my ribs. “Hey, how much plastic wrap do y’all get through?”

Not looking up from his work (thankfully), he muttered, “A lot.”

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer I guess.

“I have issues even putting a small piece of it over the top of a bowl. How do you manage to do it without it getting all twisty and clumpy?”

“Practice.”

And again.

“Ok, what about when you put it on a bowl or wrap up leftovers? Does it clump when you do it then?” When he didn’t answer, I moved onto the next question. “Do you wrap it all the way around the table?”

“Yup, it’s quicker.”

How could that be? Yeah cutting strips of the stuff would be time consuming, and it had a tendency to stick to itself, but wrapping the whole bed-table thing? “Hey, do they do an extra wide roll so it doesn’t take you as long?”

Sighing, he leaned back and stretched his neck out and glared at me. “No. Anything else?”

I shook my head when I couldn’t think of anymore, but before he could go back to his work, Jose asked, “Do you buy the huge catering packs of it, or do you have to use the same small rolls we get in the store?”

Lifting a hand, he pointed to the corner of the room, and we saw a stack of four large boxes of Saran Wrap, with another two in front of them. Hey, at least he saved money buying them in bulk. Not one more word was said as he worked the needle across my ribs, and I went into my ink Zen zone. Which was why when the buzzing of the machine stopped, I snapped my eyes open and looked up at the ceiling in confusion.

“That’s you done. I think he’ll like it!” he announced, wiping over the area with a piece of paper towel. “Have a look in the mirror.”

As I got up and did just that, Jose started laughing. “Have you ever seen those tattoos where the person got it wrong? Like no regerts?”

It had to be every tattoo artist’s nightmare, someone coming in with a fucked up tattoo they expected to get fixed. Something which Ellis confirmed himself. “Yeah, we get those in quite a lot. Chinese and Japanese symbols which don’t mean what they thought it did, words spelled wrongly, portraits that look like something from your worst nightmares, or even people getting dates wrong.”