Page 44 of Sing For Me

And no sooner have we sat down does the guy arrive at our table. The man is short and stocky, dressed in a white t-shirt and grease covered apron over jeans. His battered ball cap sports the restaurant’s logo—a logo that’s repeated prominently in one of the many tattoos covering his arms.

“Will, my man.” My date pops up out of his seat and the two do a complicated looking handshake/back slap hug thing. “How’s it going?”

“All good, man.” Will looks over at me. “Eva, this is Ollie, he owns this joint. Ollie, this is Eva.”

“Nice to meet you, Eva.” We shake hands and Ollie tilts his head towards Will. “How’d this guy get a pretty girl like you to have lunch with him?”

“Complete unprofessionalism while giving a tattoo,” I say, throwing back the words Will had used that day when he programmed his number in my phone. Across the table, his eyes spark with amusement.

Ollie laughs. “Whatever works, I guess.”

Will looks around. “Business looks as busy as ever.”

Ollie wipes his hands on his apron. “Yeah. Things haven’t really slowed down since your dad and uncles started coming in here.”

“Nah, man. That might have gotten you some attention, but the food is what keeps people coming back.”

Ollie grins. “Whatever it is, I’ll take it.” He pulls a small pad of paper from his pocket. “I’ve got fries and onion rings coming out for you in a minute. What do you want on your burgers?”

Will looks over at me and I shrug. “You want the heavy,” he says. “Trust me.”

“Sure. I like pretty much everything.”

“You like root beer? Ollie’s brother brews it right here.”

“Sounds great.”

Ollie jots down our order. “I’ll have someone bring it out ASAP.” He slaps Will on the back and nods at me. “Nice to meet you, Eva. Enjoy your meal.”

“He seems nice,” I say to Will, and he laughs.

“Ollie is an asshole. He rules that kitchen with an iron fist, and every other word out of his mouth is usually an f-bomb. He was just putting it on for the pretty girl. I swear I’ve never seen him smile so much.”

“How’d you meet him?”

Will tells me about Ollie coming into the shop for a tattoo a year ago. It was a pretty expansive piece, meaning several long sessions, and they got to talking about Ollie’s plans for opening a burger joint in the neighborhood. “I know the owner of this building,” he explains, “so I set up a meeting and the rest is history. I get great burgers in walking distance and he’s come back for two more tattoos. In return, I try to convert everyone I know into Ollie devotees.”

I wonder if Will had purposefully asked his dad and uncles to come in, knowing it would cause a publicity stir. It seems like the kind of thing he would do for a friend. Before I can ask about it, a server stops by with overflowing baskets of fries and onion rings plus our sodas. The smell of fried food hits my senses hard and I have to hold back an inappropriate moan.

But there’s no hiding my whimper of pleasure when the first onion ring hits my tongue. “These aresogood.”

“Right? Wait until you try the burgers.”

We munch in quiet for a few minutes. “How’s your day been?” I ask when I’ve finally taken the edge off my hunger for fried food. “Have you done lots of amazing tattoos?”

He takes a long sip of his root beer—which is also delicious. Just the right amount of sweet to balance out the bite.

“No tattoos yet,” Will says, wiping root beer foam from his top lip. I try very hard not to stare at that lip. “We don’t get a ton of customers in the morning, so I usually take that time for paperwork and all that boring office shit.”

“Not your favorite part of the job?”

He snorts. “Not so much. I hate sitting in an office.” He grabs another onion ring. “I need to hire an office manager, but I keep putting it off.”

“Why’s that?”

He shrugs, chewing his onion ring, and I get the impression he’s not going to elaborate. But eventually he does. “I got the startup money for the shop from my uncle. I’m pretty close to being able to pay him back and the more streamlined I can keep the payroll, the faster that will happen.”

I stare at him, surprised. From what I’ve heard, the Ransome brothers are some of the wealthiest men in the industry. They were rich as hell from the band before they started their record label, but now that they’ve moved into the production side of things, they’re on a completely different level. I would imagine the startup capital for a tattoo shop would be a drop in the bucket compared to what they bring in on a weekly basis.