The Collector | 18+

【39】Friendly Fire

Instead of removing my foot from his agile hands, I accepted my fate and looked at him working. His arms moved with his gestures, and my eyes were naturally drawn to them. Silently, I admired his tattoos, which were finally fully revealed to my eyes. He had the face of a bear inked over his solid shoulder, to the right side. Its mouth wide open with impressive fangs, its expression fierce and lethal. This one looked Celtic more than Viking, but it still fit the whole picture. There was a Ringerike-style wolf on his left pectoral muscle, its delicate profile ornate with slim ribbons.

A large Christian cross, filled with intricate Celtic knots, was right in the middle of him, starting in the space between his pecs and ending shortly before his navel. It made me wonder if he was religious in any way, or if he'd gotten this one for the sake of aesthetics. It looked, by any means, very good on him. I was lost in the details of a big one he had on his left flank when he spoke, tearing me out of my wonderment.

"You have one too, right?" he asked.

"One what?"

"Tattoo."

"Oh..." I wondered for an instant how he knew, and then remembered he'd seen me in a towel the day I'd twisted my ankle. "I have two, yeah. No, wait, three."

"You're not sure?" he noted with amusement.

"There's one that I tend to...forget."

"Now I'm curious."

I considered showing him my tattoos, which was only fair given that I was seeing all of his. And we were being friendly, weren't we? I could indulge and show him.

"Close your eyes," I told him.

He raised an eyebrow but cooperated upon reading my expression. His hands never stopped massaging my foot as I straightened up. I questioned my decision as I pushed away the left side of my robe and slipped my arm out of it. Maybe I should be thankful that I didn't have anything in a more revealing area. With my hand, I covered as much as I could of my exposed breast, adjusting the robe on the other side.

"You can open them back up," I said, my voice slightly trembling.

A couple of seconds went by before he complied, and when he did, his mesmerizing irises darkened, and his hands halted his ministrations on my foot. Although nothing of importance was visible, I was still more exposed to him than I'd ever been. But as he'd told me when I'd found him naked, it was just a body, right? Nothing to be mortified about.

But the way he was looking at me wasn't that of someone unaffected by nudity. Or at least, he was looking at me like mine affected him. The tension rose at once in our heated booth, and I regretted my decision to show him my silly tattoos. Eager to be done with it, I lifted my breast a little and pointed at the four tiny letters inked below it, right over my heart.

"This one is a matching tattoo I did with Gigi," I explained. "Hers says 'Mimi,' and it's in the same spot. We did it about a year and a half ago."

He eyed it for a moment, and I wondered if he was staring so intently at the letters, or if the curvy underside of my boob held his interest.

"Then I have this one," I continued, twisting a little to the side and angling my arm so he could see the one I had over my left triceps. "I was in the first year of my history studies in London, and we were out with other students to let out some steam with a few beers. One of the girls started talking about dodos and how they are misunderstood creatures, how they weren't actually dumb but that they evolved without predators, so they had no survival instinct."

"So you had a dodo tattooed in commemoration?" he wondered, visibly very amused.

"We were all very drunk. Four of us actually had dodos tattooed that night, in a show of support for those poor, misunderstood creatures we exterminated in a hundred years."