KING(43)

King stood and removed a glove. He opened another drawer on the toolbox and removed something, tossing it over to me. A sketchbook landed next to me on the couch, followed by a box of colored pencils.

“Maybe, this will help you stop f*cking fidgeting,” he said. “It always helped me.”

Then, he turned up the volume on the iPod docking station before picking up his tattoo gun and diving back into his work.

I opened the sketchbook, which wasn’t blank. The first few sketches were variations of the orange tree tattoo I’d seen King tattoo on the redhead earlier. Each one better than the next until I got to the one he used as a template for her tattoo.

Several pages of stunning artwork later, a beautiful dragon, a skull made completely of flowers, and a pin-up girl dressed as a nurse, and I was finally at a blank page. Doodling, I quickly found, was a much better way to pass the time than wondering about the man who made my head spin, and other parts of me throb.

I drew happy faces and stick figures at first. But then I started shading and one of the stick figures started to look like a person. I wasn’t actually drawing. It felt more like I could already see the completed design in my mind and was just filling in what was already on the page.

When I finished, I was staring into the chestnut eyes from my dream. I looked up at King, who was still engrossed in his work. I quietly tore the page from the book and folded it up, shoving it deep between the cushions of the couch. Part of me was hiding it so I could come back to it later and maybe add to it. Another part of me wanted to keep this one thing that I knew was somehow connected to my past to myself.

I then decided to sketch the bird I saw earlier flying over the water. I visualized it just as I had with the eyes I’d just drawn. Before I knew it, my pencil was flying over the page. I wasn’t just drawing. I was shading, smudging, and contouring.

When I was done, it wasn’t exactly the bird I’d seen earlier, but a more exotic version of it. Dark. Fierce. Its feathers were ruffled wildly, and the snake dangling from his beak had it’s mouth open with it’s fangs exposed. I created smoke billowing out of the small nostrils on the bird’s beak, as if he could breathe fire. But then I decided that he looked too harsh, too intimidating, so I gave the bird a broken wing, and in the reflection of his eye, I drew the snake before he’d killed it, swallowing a mouse. The final product was both brilliant beauty and vulnerability. Tears formed in my eyes, and I wiped them away before they could spill onto my cheek.

I can draw.

Not only could I draw, but I could draw well. It came as naturally as breathing.

The second thing connecting me to her.

When I put the book down, I looked up, and King’s client was gone. King sat on his stool alone, watching me. “You were in the zone,” he said. “You looked so f*cking cute sitting there concentrating.”

I swallowed hard, “I…uuuhhh…got caught up.”

His words took me by surprise. I visualized stalking over to him and climbing onto his lap. His big strong hands coming around my back and resting underneath my shirt on my bare skin. I thought about what it would be like to let him do more than what he’d done before.

What would it be like if he used more than his fingers?

I shuddered.

“Bring it here,” King said, holding out his hand, snapping me out of my own imagination where I was naked and writhing underneath him.

“No, you don’t want to see it. I was just messing around. I’ll just put it back in the drawer and clean up now.” I walked over to the sink with the book under my arm. King reached out and snatched it away from me, flipping the pages in search of my sketch.

“Holy Go-go-Gadget arms,” I quipped. I’d clearly underestimated King’s reach.

“How do you know that?” He asked.

“What do you mean? How do I know what?” I asked.

“The ‘Go-go gadget’ thing. That’s a reference to a cartoon. Have you ever even seen it?”

“Um…I think so. It’s this guy who wears a trench coat and has a billion little gadgets all over the place that usually don’t work the way he wants them to.”

“I know who it is. What I want to know is have you watched it since you lost your memory?”

“No, I haven’t watched any TV until earlier tonight when Preppy put on something called American Ninja Warrior.” I stepped back and leaned against the counter. “What are you trying to get at? I thought you believed me.”