Page 158 of Fly's Path

When he means lean, he means lean. On occasion, it has felt like we’re riding parallel to the ground. “Ready.” I squeeze him tighter and focus on his movements.

As we hit the curve, we become one being with only a single goal: stay alive…I’m part of him.

“Perfect. Good girl.”

***

“That was absolutely the best meal I’ve ever eaten. Is there anything you can’t do on a level beyond anyone else? I mean, I can cook, nothing fancy, but my food always tastes good. That was a journey on a plate. You didn’t just create a meal. You tookus to the Caribbean. All I would have needed was a few crashing waves, and I would have believed we were there. Then we ended up in New England.”

“It wasn’t all that complex.” He grabs our glasses of wine and walks over to the couch.

“Is this the part where you hug me until I forget everything else?”

“That was my plan. Also, I thought I might con you into telling me one of your secrets. Just a little something so that I know you better.”

Fly sinks down on the oversized couch and holds his arms open, like the completely, hopelessly, desperately needy woman I am, I collapse into them. “You want to know a secret? Something I’ve never told anyone?”

“It doesn’t have to be a secret. Just something I don’t know about you.”

“Something you don’t know. Do you want it to shock you? Or just a mild surprise?”

“Shock me.” He squeezes me and places a soft kiss on my cheek.

What can I tell him that won’t leave me feeling raw and exposed? Something silly. My life doesn’t have a lot of silliness in it. Most of that involves my writer friends…except…Oh, that’s perfect. “I have a tattoo.”

“What?” He sits up straighter. “You have a tattoo? Where?”

“I’d love to tell you it’s a small one on my ankle or something like that. But it’s not. When I turned eighteen, I was feeling, I don’t know, a little rebellious, so I went to a tattoo artist in town and got her to give me one.”

“What did you get?”

“You’re going to think it’s silly. Do you have a tattoo?”

“Sheri, you need to stop that. I don’t think you’re silly. And I definitely don’t feel that anything you ever put on your bodyis silly. And I only have one tattoo. It was a bit traumatizing. Since then, I haven’t ever thought about getting another one, even though almost all my brothers have the club tattoo on their bodies somewhere.”

“How was it traumatizing? They hurt a little, but not much.”

“I didn’t feel mine at all. It happened while I was black out drunk.”

Wait, what? “Tattoo artists won’t tattoo you drunk. It’s a law or something.”

“It’s not when you’re dumb and get drunk for the first time around stupid people you can’t trust.”

“They tattooed you without your permission.”

He nods. “It was a stupid mistake. A hard lesson to learn.”

“What did they tattoo on you?”

“My name.”

What does that mean? “Why your name?”

“The name they gave me. It’s a thing in the biker world to give a person a call name. Well, they thought they were funny, and they started calling me something rude. I must have said something to irritate them. So when I passed out, they tattooed it on my butt.”

“On your bottom. They wrote Fly across your bottom.”

“No. They tattooed a butterfly on my left cheek.”