Page 32 of Love What's Left
“They’re bagged as evidence. My brother has them.”
“Why are they with him, not the cops?”
“The NYPD was on your case to start but lost jurisdiction when we realized you’d been kidnapped across state lines. The FBI came in at the last moment, after we’d already found you. You appeared to be attached to the dress. I asked Henry to take it and called it ‘lost.’” What the hell difference did it make? Once they found Markov’s home, and we had Sydney back, there was no need to use it as evidence of a crime. Her DNA was all over that New Jersey basement.
“I want my r-red dress. That was it, right? Red.”
“Yes.” I stand, pull the phone from my pocket and call my brother. After a brief exchange, I hit End Call and put the phone away. “We’ll have it here tomorrow.”
I freeze when she reaches out with a single finger and traces the path of one of the black line-art tattoos on my forearm. The touch is so familiar, so craved, that an inadvertent shudder rolls through me.
She snatches her hand away.
“I don’t mind. These are your tattoos,” I say.
She frowns in confusion. “They’re your tattoos.”
I shake my head slightly. “Wait right there.”
I clear the dishes from the table, then move to a drawer in the kitchen island. I find the opaque plastic box of “skin-safe” water-based markers right where I expect them to be. The box is dinged up at the corners, and a few of the colors inside, an orangey-yellow and a violet, have been used enough that the logo is nearly rubbed off in places.
I click open the latch, place the markers on the table in front of Sydney, then sit across from her, stretching out both arms in offering. “Draw me like one of your French girls.”
Her gaze skims over my forearms, then, without a moment’s hesitation, she snatches up a purple marker, the orangey-yellow one, and the violet. She pops off the cap on the violet marker and goes straight to work, unerringly finding the inked outline of a primrose just beneath the inner bend of my right elbow.
From the moment I brought her home, I’ve been here. Holding her. Bathing her. Dressing her. And yet, for all that I’ve touched her, she hasn’t touched me. Not while she was conscious and thinking clearly, at any rate. Until today.
This isn’t even skin on skin. It’s the stroke of the brush tip of her violet marker gliding against me like a kiss.
At one point in our past, this was a fun little game. She got a kick out of changing the colors to coordinate with her outfit. And I wore her mark like the badge of honor it was.
Today, it’s a ritual of intimacy. She’s claiming her territory in a way the ring on my finger doesn’t. Because the woman who put that piece of gold on me isn’t here.
“The color will wash away, but that makes it b-better. It means I can do it a-again tomorrow.”
I take a shuddering breath. Planning tomorrow with me is even bigger than remembering yesterday. “You can color them every day if you like.”
Her hand shakes, and her primrose doesn’t stay completely in the lines, but it looks good, blending from orangey-yellow to violet to purple so deep and velvety, it’s nearly black. Only then does she select a green marker and move on to fill in a vine.
It’s the wrong shade, one she’d jokingly named “Baby-Poop Green” in the past, and more than once claimed she was going to throw away as a favor to humanity. She doesn’t falter or choose a different shade. Maybe she never hated it at all and found it funny to banter with me. Or maybe she’s changed so much that even the colors she likes are different.
My brows pull together, grief written on my heart as clearly as the ink on my arms.
Partway through, she glances up at my face, then goes still, the brush tip pressed to my skin, but no longer moving. Her eyes grow wide. “I’m hurting you.”
I shake my head in mute denial.
She tightens her fingers on the marker, then dips her chin toward my arms. “Those . . . are my tattoos.”
13
Sydney
His lips twitch. “They’re your tattoos,” he agrees.
I switch to a lavender marker and fill in the borders of a Gerbera daisy located midway down his muscled forearm. He tricked me into going with him to get this ink on an early autumn day in a small town in upstate New York. Or maybe I’dwantedto be tricked.
I’d followed him into a tattoo shop with exposed brick walls and scuffed hardwood floors stained a rich shade of espresso. A classic rock soundtrack pumped through ceiling-mounted speakers.
