Vanilla

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Author Song List (#litres_trial_promo)

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prologue (#ulink_bbcb89f1-2f86-5a28-b5ed-dfe3c38642db)

The hum and the sting.

The artist bent over my wrist, tracing the outline of the simple design with the needle, the gun. Filling in the lines with ebony and shadows. My skin soaked up the ink in a way that made the girl murmur appreciatively.

“This is going to look great,” she told me. “Super fucking cool.”

It hurt. Of course it did. Tattoos always do—it’s not like they’re licked on by baby unicorns with tongues made of kittens for fuck’s sake. I had two others, a small Jewish star on my right hip and a somewhat-but-not-entirely regretted tramp stamp of a flaming sun on my lower back. This one on my wrist burned worse than the others had. Ink always hurts, but it’s a clean sort of pain. An on-purpose ache that lingers when the tattoo is finished and healing, and sometimes even long after, like your skin forever wants to remember how it felt to be so marked.

“What do you think?” She sat back and wiped my skin again of any excess color.

I didn’t need a mirror to see the inside of my left wrist. I’d picked that place because I would always be able to see it, whether I wanted to or not. The design there, no bigger than a fifty-cent piece, was simple. Black and gray. Stylized lines and curves that nevertheless clearly made a picture. The skin around the edges of the design was still a little raised and red the first time I saw it. Still stinging. Looking at it would always sting.

“Why a rabbit?” she asked with a tilt of her head. “I don’t usually ask, to be honest. I mean, it’s personal, yeah?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“And far be it from me to judge,” she continued. “I mean if you’d wanted a butterfly or a fairy or a flower, I wouldn’t even ask. But a rabbit’s cool. What’s the significance?”

“It’s so I don’t forget,” I told her.

She grinned and didn’t ask me what I needed to remember. “Fair enough. You’re satisfied, then?”

Satisfaction wasn’t exactly what I’d been going for. Pain and permanence, yes. An eternal reminder. But since I’d been given those things, and the design we’d worked up together was exactly as she’d drawn it, I had to nod.

“Yes,” I told her. “It’s perfect.”

1 (#ulink_2528b913-c099-50dd-aad2-b10a9be6db0d)

There’s something so lovely in the curve of a man’s spine when he is on his knees, head bowed, hands behind his back. The back of his neck, vulnerable and exposed. The splay of his toes pressed to the hotel carpet that rubbed at his knees and would scrub them briefly red. I would leave my own marks on him, careful to be sure they’d fade as fast as the rug burns. I couldn’t leave anything permanent on him. We’d agreed on that from the first.

I didn’t want to hurt him much anyway. That had never been my game. A little sting, here or there. The slap of leather on his bare skin. The press of my teeth or scrape of my fingernails—those were things to make him shudder and moan. I would always rather get what I wanted by promising pleasure instead of pain. That was what worked for us.