The Purest Hook (Second Circle Tattoos) (13 page)

Pixie picked up the hand that wasn’t holding the case and kissed his knuckles gently.

A car horn sounded outside, and he hurried them down the stairs. The driver put her case in the back and they sat in silence the entire ride. His head was filled with noise. Memories of his mom’s idea of caring for a child swarmed him. One summer when he’d been around seven, she’d taken him to a small park around the corner to play. When it went dark, he began to worry. When it got really late, and strangers started to appear, he’d hidden behind the large bushes. He’d finally run home to find the front door unlocked and his mom passed out on the sofa. The clock had told him it was one a.m.

The limo pulled up alongside the curb at her terminal, and the driver got out to open her door.

“Are you getting out?” Pixie asked. He hated the uncertainty in her voice, detested the fact that he’d put it there.

“It’s probably best I don’t.” Was he really going to let her go like this?

“Okay, well . . . I’ll see you, I guess.”

This isn’t fair to her.
“Bye, Pixie.”

He watched her exit the car and head for the terminal.
Look back at me. Please, Snowflake.
But she didn’t. With shoulders hunched, and her step missing its usual playful pep, she walked toward the terminal. The doors slid open then shut, and Pixie disappeared.

The driver got back into the car. “Back to the same location, sir?”

Did he go back to the house where his ever-present past existed, while his future boarded the first available flight out of his life?

“Wait,” he said to the driver as he grabbed the door handle, flinging it open wide. Dodging a family with as many cases as children, he sprinted into the terminal.
What airline had she been flying? American?
Dred scanned the departures screen quickly and found the check-in desk numbers.

Ahead of him, he could see her glorious purple hair. He caught up to her and grabbed her hand.

“Hey.” Pixie snatched it away. He hoped it was because she hadn’t realized it was him.

“It’s me, Pix. Come here.” He led her toward a quiet corner.

“What—”

Dred cupped her face and kissed her. Kissed her the way he should have when she’d looked at him in his room and how she’d deserved before she stepped out of the limo. He ignored the camera flash that went off to his left, put away any thoughts of being a father, and tried to show her exactly how much she was coming to mean to him. When she responded, when her lips finally moved against his, he felt it in his very soul.

“I’m sorry, Pix,” he murmured against her lips.

“I don’t know what I did wrong, Dred.”

“Wrong? You didn’t do anything wrong at all. Have you been worrying about that all this time? Shit. I’m an asshole. I’m sorry. I got a call before we left. I don’t know what I am going to do about it.”

“Can I help at all?”

He couldn’t tell her what it was about. Not yet. “Just don’t give up on me Pixie.”

Petal was addicted to drugs.

The words played in his mind, over and over. In the forty-eight hours since Pixie had left, Dred had been caught up in a whirlwind involving lawyers and social workers. The only constant was his anger and his absolute hatred of narcotics. Not only had he got a woman pregnant, she had been an addict.
What the fuck had he been thinking?

The subway pulled out of Dufferin, he’d be off at the next stop. Lansdowne. His daughter was living in a crappy shared house south of Bloor Street. Train tracks and strip clubs. So familiar.

He didn’t know where he himself had been born. Didn’t have a birth certificate. Wasn’t even certain that Theodred Zander was his real name. His first memories were of a Christmas spent in Hamilton, miserable because he didn’t have a winter coat, and of his mom taking her “vitamins”
as she called them through the broken end of a glass bottle.

School had been a joke. He’d lived in so many places. Burlington, Imola, Brampton. The school boards had lost track of him, and his mom usually moved them on before any services could be informed.

Lansdowne approached. Dred stood and picked up the bag filled with gifts, ready to exit.

Leaving the station, he headed toward the address he’d been given. One bitterly cold February day, when he’d been around nine, his mom had bought him a tattered copy of
One Fish, Two Fish
from the local Goodwill. He was too old for Dr. Seuss, but desperate to show his appreciation for her unsolicited gift he thanked her profusely. She’d finally thought of him. He’d seen it as positive start, until she told him to take it into the bathroom to read while she “met her friend.” Punctuated by the groans of her sleazy encounters, he’d read it so many times he could still repeat all the words by heart.

Dred reached the uninspiring three-story building. Bed sheets were hung as curtains in the downstairs window. The frame was rotten and condensation ran down the inside of the glass. The garden was overgrown and garbage bags were piled up in corners.

Awkward didn’t even begin to describe how he felt standing at the door of his child’s mother while not one hundred percent sure what she looked like. He’d spoken briefly to Amanda, Petal’s mom, the previous evening. She’d sounded stoned, but the social worker had assured him she was under strict supervision. Thanks to the wonderful nurse who spotted Petal’s symptoms quickly, social services had been involved before Petal had even left the hospital.

There were four apartments in the building, and Dred pressed the buzzer for apartment three. Moments the later the door opened.

Amanda stood in front of him. Tall, blonde, pretty, huge rack. The very type he’d usually go for. Now, in the cold light of day, he could see the skin caked in makeup and the chapped and split lips.

“Dred,” she sighed with a big smile. “How are you?”

Something was off. She was too bright, too cheery given the awkwardness he felt.

“Hey, Amanda. Where’s Petal?”

“She’s in my room. Come on in.”

Amanda led him upstairs, the sound of a baby crying getting louder and louder. A guy with long hair wandered out of a room on the second floor. “Hey, are you . . . you look like that singer from Preload?”

“No, dude. You got me confused. I get that a lot.”

They stopped on the third floor and Amanda pushed the door open. She hadn’t locked it when she’d come downstairs to let him in. The room was compact. There was a small washroom in the corner. The door was wide open and he could see a toilet and sink. No shower. Outside the toilet was a small plastic tub that he assumed was a baby bath.

An unmade double bed sat in one corner; posters of Preload, Avenged Sevenfold, and others adorned the wall. On the floor, by the rusted radiator, was a tiny bassinet, the source of the crying. The social worker had warned him about the screaming. A side effect of neonatal abstinence syndrome. He wondered briefly what the other tenants thought about the new arrival. He needed to get them out of this dump and into a better home immediately.

Dred dropped the bag and walked over to see his little girl. His heart tripped. For a moment he thought about running. Running far away from her, from the responsibility, and from the chance it was very likely his chest was about to split wide open.

A little red face screamed angrily at him, a contrast from the knitted pink hat she wore and the cream blanket she was wrapped up in. “So you’re Petal?” he asked, offering her his pinkie finger. Petal gripped it tightly, her little fist shaking furiously as the cries continued. He reached under her and gently collected her, blanket and all. The little hat on her head fell forward over her eyes, angering her more. Without missing a beat he fixed it.

In his arms, she started to settle, the shrill screaming turned to hiccupping sobs. Brown eyes flecked with gold that matched his own widened to look at him.

Dred started to hum to her, and the crying stopped. This was his child. His child. A piece of his heart, a part of his soul.
What the fuck did he know about kids?
He wanted her to have everything he didn’t. Wanted her to have opportunities he’d never been given. She deserved better than this shitty apartment, she deserved better than a life on the road with him. She deserved a family that would love her and cherish her. But the idea of her not being with him burned through him like an inferno, leaving him in ashes.

Petal pulled his little finger to her mouth and sucked on it gently. She had the tiniest nails on her fingers and little tufts of dark brown hair poked out from under the pink hat. Despite her blonde mom, Petal was all him, and the thought of it made him feel like a giant.

Amanda sidled up next to him and rested her head on his shoulder. “We created a miracle, Theo.”

He hated
Theo
. His mom had called him Theo. His first social worker had called him Theo right before she dropped him off at the foster home where he was beaten up nightly by two older boys.

But Amanda was right about one thing, Petal
was
a miracle. And he could do the right thing.

“We need to talk about what’s best for her,” Dred said as he moved away from Amanda. She was in his space and didn’t belong there. He regretted the decision to come to her house. The social worker had offered to set up a private meeting, but he’d been so desperate to see Petal he’d been unable to wait. With a sudden pang of longing to take Petal home with him, he sat down in the only chair in the apartment. Petal fought sleep, but slowly and surely, her eyes drooped closed.

“What do you mean?” Amanda asked.

“I’m not sure you or I are the right people to take care of her.” He said the words, but his heart dropped in his chest, a solid fall that stopped it beating as it shattered into a million pieces. And like Humpty fucking Dumpty, it couldn’t be put back together again. Now he’d held her, he couldn’t imagine her in anybody’s arms but his own.

Amanda grabbed a cigarette and lighter from the table and walked to the window. She lifted it open and lit the cigarette like his mom used to.

“You want me to give her up?” she asked, exhaling smoke as she spoke.

“I don’t know what the right thing here is, but I want her to have a better childhood than I had. Better than this.” He looked around the room. “Don’t you?”

Amanda laughed. “Of course I do.” The crackle of burning tobacco broke the silence as she took another draw on the cigarette.

“I’m not sure why it’s funny.”

“I’m going to keep Petal, and she
is
going to have better than this. Why do you think I picked you?”

What the fuck is going on?
“Not sure I follow.”

“You’re a wealthy guy, you can afford us. And I wanted that so badly it was worth making sure it happened.”

“What do you mean, ‘making sure it happened’?”

“You need me to draw you a diagram, Theo?”

He stood with Petal in his arms. “It seems I need one. What the fuck, Amanda?”

“When you went to the washroom, I put the pin of my brooch through the condom you put on the side table. Juvenile, maybe. But the end is the same. I’m not giving up your daughter. And if you want me to look after her, then you’d better open that check book of yours.”

* * *

Pixie watched the needles go in and out of her arm. Under Trent’s control, they pierced the skin enough to leave the beautiful purple behind, but never dragged or pulled. Trent and Cujo had tattooed every one of the flowers on her arm. The reasons behind each of them were all different, but the meaning the same. Life is beautiful, with care it blooms. So the purple orchid on her arm this time was twofold. She’d survive her stepdad’s return, and it was time to let her relationship with Dred bloom.

She wasn’t sure exactly what the call he’d received on Monday was about, but they’d texted the previous afternoon, Dred having a gig in New York that evening. Long-distance relationships weren’t easy, but she wasn’t the needy kind, and he had responsibilities to the band, which, from their living arrangements, went way deeper than just being coworkers.

Pixie leaned back and sighed. She was comfortable back in Second Circle, and more importantly, warm. The winter coat hung in her closet, the boots lingered in her hallway. When she’d left for Toronto, she’d thought Miami’s spring to be cooler than normal, but now it felt positively tropical.

“Want to talk about why you’re getting this?” Trent asked. He stopped the needles for a moment. It was after closing, just the two of them in the studio.

“If I said no, would you leave me alone?” She smiled at him, and he grinned back, the two dimples Harper always mooned over showing.

“Probably not.”

There was no value in regurgitating what happened. Trent had seen her at her worst and was thankfully still there for her. No way did she want him to know the full story. Why would he want to hear about her humiliation of being stripped over and over? Would he even understand why she’d felt the need to protect herself by killing someone? She wasn’t so confused about the past that she thought of herself as a murderer, but she was sure a court would call it manslaughter. What would the wonderful man in front of her think of her then?

“Pix?”

He wasn’t going to let it go, but she’d expected as much when she sat down for the ink. “I saw someone from before.” “Before” had become the synonym for everything that happened from the day she was born until they’d found her.

Trent finished the last detail of the shading. He put his tattoo equipment down—
never call it a gun unless you wanted to get him pissed—
and wiped down her arm.

“You okay?”

Not really.
“Of course,” she lied. Pixie tilted her chin toward the new tattoo. “I have my shield in place.” Her ink was her armor, the equivalent of Wonder Woman’s Bracelets of Submission. Every day, she stood before the mirror in the bathroom and recounted the story behind each blossom, a mental pattern to start the day on a positive note.

Trent rubbed the ointment on her arm and wrapped it for her. “There you go. You know what to do with it.”

“Thanks, Trent. Perfect as always.”

Trent stood and started to unplug his equipment. “You know we’re here for you, right? If you need us.”

Shuffling to the end of the chair, she pressed down on the tape he’d stuck on her skin. Part of her considered telling him, but to what end? Until she understood Arnie’s motivation, there was no point sharing the parts of her she wished would just disappear.

They cleaned up the station together, and Trent dropped her off at her condo before heading over to Frankie’s to watch Harper. She’d started training to fight back against her abusive ex, but it turned out she was great at it. Her first amateur fight was in July, and Trent was as terrified as he was proud of his fiancée.

Pixie waited until Trent’s Plymouth disappeared from view and wandered toward the condo. It was a beautiful evening. A little cooler now the sun had gone down, but nothing she couldn’t handle after freezing her butt off in Canada. She’d missed the salty air. A guitar-playing busker was further down the street. The Cuban music sounded familiar, like a song by Eliades Ochoa maybe, but she couldn’t be sure.

“You kept me waiting to see you again. Where did you go?” Arnie slipped out of the shadows by her building. She should have anticipated seeing him, should have considered that he would approach her while nobody was watching.
Damn it.
Why hadn’t she just run straight inside when Trent dropped her off?

Summoning confidence, or at least its mask, Pixie stood her ground. “I don’t owe you an explanation for anything. Now if you’ll excuse me.” Raising her head, she walked past him.

“We aren’t finished here,” he said, grabbing hold of her arm and wrenching it. “You thought you’d get to decide when I am done with you?”

She shrugged out of his hold, but Arnie grabbed her wrist, squeezed it real tight. Tight enough for the skin to burn as she tried to pull free. But he did it all with a smile. “Really, you thought it was going to be that easy?”

Pixie shook, her breathing spiralled out of control. She needed to get into the condo. Fast. Men like him thrived on making women feel small. With a sharp tug, she attempted to yank her wrist free, but his hold was too tight. Arnie leaned in to her neck, the hiss of his inhale as he sniffed her skin sent a chill down her spine.

He slid a hand into her purse, and withdrew her wallet before she could stop him. Her life was in there. All of her details, her cards.

“What do you think you are doing?” she whispered, watching as he took the fifty dollars she’d withdrawn that afternoon. Slowly he fastened it, and dropped it back into her bag.

“Proving the point.” He folded the bank note into a small rectangle, held it between two fingers, and saluted her with it, a sickening grin on his face. “We’re square when I say so, S-J,” he said. “And right now, when I see how you’ve grown, I am most definitely not done.”

* * *

Razzmatazz in Barcelona had no idea what was coming if the sound check they’d wrapped up earlier was anything to go by. They hadn’t made it big in Spain, so the opportunity to play alongside one of Spain’s biggest metal acts was too good to turn down, even if the long-haul flight and time away from recording were a pain in the ass.