Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(24)

“I don’t know. You seem . . . subdued.”

I shrugged, but I couldn’t really argue the point. The whole music thing—and the money I wasn’t saving—definitely had me distracted. My mind kept turning the problem over, looking for some solution I hadn’t seen yet. But beyond that, I’d been feeling subdued since that night with Jace . . . or maybe it’d been the next evening, when I’d talked with Brendan. I hadn’t meant to spill my guts to him the way I had, but he was so damned earnest about wanting to hear about me, it had all just poured out. He was comforting and reassuring and it felt good to have someone like him think good things about me. Until him, no one but Mo (or my therapists) had ever asked me about myself like that, or if they did, they got uncomfortable when I answered honestly. No one wanted to hear about that shit. Hell, even I didn’t want to hear about it.

At any rate, between Jace and Brendan, two layers of purging had happened in that twenty-four-hour stretch which had left me very tranquil: one relieving my physical needs, and the other my emotional.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating to call the night with Jace my lifetime best (to date). It made every other sexual encounter I’d ever had seem like backseat fumbling in comparison. It had set the bar for my future experiences; I’d be expecting a lot more out of future partners, and myself as well. From here on out, I didn’t think I’d be going home with random guys I wasn’t really all that attracted to or interested in, just to have a piece of ass. There would have to be something approaching that incredible chemistry I’d had with Jace.

As for the emotional stuff . . . since that night of the belated birthday dinner, Brendan and I had been spending a lot of time talking and hanging out together when he wasn’t working on his book. He was nice. He was funny. He was downright mischievous in a very sneaky, understated way. He listened and he was interested and concerned with me. I hadn’t had a lot of that in my life, at least not without co-payments attached.

So, yeah, I was subdued. But it wasn’t because I was down. It was because—for the first time in as long as I could remember—I was calm. Bordering on content, in those moments when I managed to stop obsessing about the money situation.

The matter of getting a job aside, I felt more emotionally stable than I had in the year and a half since my mother’s suicide attempt. Not merely grudgingly functional, but driven enough to really try to make things work. Whatever foreboding I’d dealt with at the beginning of the summer had faded away, and I had hope.

Hell, I was even looking forward to Brendan’s return, because I wanted to spend more time with him, and had my crush under control enough that I could do so safely. We were becoming friends, he and I. That had happened before; I’d always related to adults better than people my own age, ever since I was a kid. It was why my teachers had adored me and my peers had loathed me. Being with Brendan was sort of the way things had been with my choir director in high school, at least until my family had insinuated that it was inappropriate for me to spend time with him. This time, though, there was no danger of anyone interfering. I could be friends with him without anyone spoiling it for me.

“Topher?” Mo was staring at me now, and I realized I still hadn’t answered.

“Sorry.” I shook myself, linking my arm with hers. “If I am, it’s not a bad thing. I’m actually feeling all right at the moment. Better than I have for a long time. If I’m quiet, I guess it’s just because I’m spending a lot of time in my head. In a good way.”

“Okay. If so, I’m glad.” She leaned her head on my shoulder, and we strolled along in comfortable silence until we passed the tattoo and piercing parlor whose designs we’d admired the last time we were in town.

“He got them here,” I blurted before I even knew I’d meant to speak.

“What?”

“Jace. His tattoos. They were amazing. I think he got them here. The designs . . . well, they’re not the same, but they’re familiar. Similar.”

She stopped walking and admired the sketches and snapshots in the window again. The diamond stud in the side of her nostril caught little glints of the setting sun. “You think he comes here often?”

“I don’t know. He had a lot of ink, so maybe in the past he did? But if he’s done, he wouldn’t necessarily have to come back.”

“True.” Mo sighed, one corner of her mouth drawn down. Then she nodded once, more to herself than me, I think. “I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna get another one.”

“What? Now?”

She shrugged. “Why not, if there’s an opening? If I do it now, I’ll have a few days to heal up before I have to go back to camp.”

If the tattoo shop was a surprise—so clean and upscale looking that it didn’t appear out of place on the pretty streets of Saugatuck—the tattoo artist inside was even more so. No bears inked head to toe or heavily pierced goth girls here. Thin and bespectacled, he could have been a banker, a lawyer, or some sort of businessman who went to work in three-piece suits and had teleconferences. He wasn’t actually wearing a suit, but he just looked so . . . clean-cut compared to what you’d normally envision in a tattoo artist that it was a little jarring.

He was good-looking, maybe in his early thirties, and he didn’t have a bit of ink on him. At least, not any that could be seen outside his clothing. I was pretty sure that violated some sort of cardinal rule of tattoo artists.