She told me on the way home, "When you make a hole in something--anything--something else will want to get in through it.
"Or out."
She had flounced away after that--flounced, with her sparkling brown hair bouncing and shimmering in the sunlight, dancing across the freckles on her bare shoulders. I remember how her hair had smelled then, sunny and clean and vitally alive. I can inhale even now and draw in the ghost of its presence; haunting in its intoxication.
And she had smiled. I saw a glance of it before she turned to walk away, bright and sharp enough to cut and cauterize in one swipe.
Or out, she had said.
Christ....
As she turned, her midriff top hiked up a bit--just a bit--to expose her taut, early summer belly, the smooth curve of her abdomen as it swept up to her breasts.
And her tattoo.
It was supposed to be a rose, red and black with touches of green here and there. Its stem began at her diaphragm, with the petals of the flower unfolding within the valley of her breasts.
A flower. That's what she had wanted.
To me, it never looked like a flower.
But this is now, and that was...
...Before....
"You want a what?" I asked as we sat shoulder to shoulder at the coffee bar in one of the more Bohemian parts of town she preferred.
"A tattoo," she said as if it were the most natural of desires. "Don't tell me you of all people have a problem with that?"
She giggled over her double latte, and that sound irritated something deep inside me; something whose existence, up to that point, I had been unaware of.
)
A dark jealousy festers in the imagination of a deadbeat gen-x dropout as his girlfriend gets a tattoo from an old lover. When she recovers from the procedure, the 'flower' on her heart turns out to be something quite different from what it appears to be.... [Strong Sexual Content]
