Page 1 of Waiting for You

ONE

SLOANE

"It's going to hurt," the woman blurted before she'd even settled into the chair.

I dragged my stool closer and set up in front of her bare arm. "Who told you that?"

"Everyone."

"Has everyone been to a tattoo parlor?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Everyone who hasn't."

I laughed. Her shoulders loosened a fraction, and her white-knuckled grip eased to a firm hold. She was in her early twenties at most, with wide eyes, her mouth pulled tight as a bowstring while she tried to look unbothered.

She'd come in alone. I'd clocked that the second she walked in, since most first-timers brought a human shield.

I pressed the purple stencil to the inside of her forearm and held it against her skin.

"You want to know the honest version or the kind version?" I asked, raising a brow.

"Honest."

"It'll sting. The inner arm isn't the worst spot, but it's no walk in the park either." I peeled the paper back to check the transfer. The word again stuck to her skin, framed by an infinity symbol that looped around it like a promise. "You'll live, though."

She stared down at the purple ink. "What if I can't handle it?"

"Just say the word and I'll stop." I snapped on my black nitrile gloves. "But if you think it's going to hurt more than you can take, you don't have to go through with it. Nobody's holding you hostage here."

The woman tipped her chin up. "I want it," she declared. "I just have to get my head right. No pain, no gain."

"Good mindset." I stepped on the coil machine pedal, bringing it to life.

She gave a curt nod, set her jaw, and locked her eyes on the ceiling tiles.

The needle bit into her skin. But instead of pulling away, she leaned into the sting, biting her lip and breathing out in a slow hiss through her nose. She never asked me to stop.

So, I zeroed in on the linework and recalled when she'd booked the appointment. She'd told me what the design meant: beginning again.

I knew that logic down to the bone.

Everything around me was the result of a grueling rebuild. I'd spent years pruning the dead weight that tied me to the ghost of who I used to be. It started with cutting off a father who tried to draft my identity before I could hold a pen. And it ended with walking away from a relationship I'd entered knowing what it would cost me.

I'd chosen that love with my eyes wide open. And the woman trembling in my chair was doing the same thing, sitting square in her discomfort and refusing to give up on what she wanted.

My father had made his contempt for that relationship clear, broadcasting his disapproval early and often. He didn't bother with outright cruelty. He used the insidious brand of love that masquerades as concern.

He doesn't have the right foundation. You deserve stability. I only want the best for you, he'd said.

He'd hand down those verdicts with a set jaw and eyes that had already closed the subject, never once stopping to ask how I saw it.

But I stayed anyway.

I loved that man long past the point where logic gave up, surviving two years of my father's biting commentary, then one frozen stretch of dead silence after I finally quit answering his interrogations. When the relationship ended, it tore a jagged wound in me that kept finding new ways to bleed for years.

The love had been as real as the needle buzzing in my hand. It had shaped me into a truer version of myself than I'd ever managed before.

And the heartbreak was the price of admission.