“Hayden!” Lisa raced over and forced her way between us. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Hayden fucked Tenley,” Chris repeated, like Lisa hadn’t heard him the first time he’d yelled it across the studio.

“Say it one more time and I’m going to break your face.”

Chris pointed an accusatory finger at me. “You broke the rule!”

I smacked his hand away, anger flaring.

“Touch me again and I’ll put you in the ground,” Chris growled.

“You want some? Let’s go.” I tried to get around Lisa, but she wasn’t having it.

“In the back,” Lisa ordered. When I took a step toward Chris, she shoved against my chest. “Now.”

“Better do what she says.” Chris shooed me away.

“Shut it, Chris.” Lisa pushed me in the direction of the office.

I was in for one hell of a tear down. I shouldn’t have gotten in Chris’s face, but he outted me before I was ready and now I had to deal with Lisa’s wrath. I’d wanted to tell her on my own terms and find a way to spin it to avoid her anger.

She ushered me into the office and shut the door. “You’re a jerk for making me feel bad. I knew something was going on the second I saw you this morning.”

“I wasn’t ready to talk about it.”

“Well I hope you’re ready now. What were you thinking?”

“That it would feel good, and I was right,” I said too quietly for her to hear.

“What was that?” She crossed the room to sit on the edge of her desk.

“I was going to tell you.”

“Oh? When? Before or after you started on her tattoo?”

“Before, probably. At least I fixed things with Tenley.”

“By having sex with her?”

“That happened after.” I paced around the office, my anxiety spiking.

“I’m not seeing how that fixes anything. I thought you were going to talk to her.”

“I did. I said what you told me to. Well, not exactly,” I amended, “but I told her about the rule.”

“And then you went ahead and broke it? She’s your client. You’re going to put a huge tattoo on her that will take months to complete,” Lisa said, her annoyance shifting to concern.

I rifled through the unopened mail, arranging the envelopes by size to keep from looking directly at her. “I haven’t started it yet, so she’s not technically my client.”

“Really?” She used the opportunity to barricade me behind the desk so I couldn’t get away. “Because if memory serves me correctly, you put a cupcake tattoo on her a few days ago, which makes her your client.”

“I don’t get what the big deal is.” That was untrue. The issue was pretty damn straightforward. “Tenley found a loophole.”

“A loophole?”

“Yeah. It wasn’t even my idea. I was checking her new ink, and she asked for clarification on the rule. So I explained it again. Tenley pointed out that I hadn’t started the official tattoo, because the little cupcake doesn’t count for shit. She had on these kitty . . . I just couldn’t . . .” I scrubbed my face with my palm, knowing the more excuses I spewed, the deeper my hole got. I met Lisa’s disapproving glare with an imploring one of my own. “She said it was okay to want someone, and I want her. And not just for sex because that’s not what it’s about with Tenley, but I wanted that, too, and so did she, so I stayed the night and we had sex again—”

“You stayed at Tenley’s?” Lisa asked, her surprise genuine.

“Uh-huh. And I was all set for Round Three this morning, but she had a meeting with her advisor and almost ended up being late, so I drove her to school instead.” My chest felt tight, so I rubbed it.

“I don’t even know what to do with that information. Three times? Is she okay?”

“It was only twice, and why wouldn’t she be okay?”

“Hayden, remember who put that piercing in your special place?” She pointed at herself.

Like I could forget that experience.

“I’m far too well aware of what kind of damage you could do with that thing,” she added.

“I’m not that big.” It should have been weird to talk about, but it wasn’t. Probably since she’d stuck a needle through my junk.

She gave me a patronizing look. “Yes. You are. And I don’t get the impression Tenley’s the kind of girl who has a plethora of experience in that area.”

I frowned at the implication. “I was careful with her.” In hindsight, she’d mentioned I was a lot to handle. Maybe I hadn’t been careful enough. I dropped into the chair and waited for Lisa to lose it on me. She didn’t. She either felt sorry for me or thought I was the stupidest person alive, or maybe a bit of both.

“It’s not like any of it matters now anyway. I told her we can’t have sex again until the back piece is finished, so there really isn’t a problem.”

“You told her what?”

When I said it aloud, it didn’t sound quite as logical as it did when I heard it in my head. “I told her—”

She put a hand up to stop me. “Oh, I heard you. I can’t believe you’re serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be serious?”

She shook her head and took a deep breath. “Look at the rule you’ve created. Remember why you created it in the first place and tell me if you think it still applies where Tenley is concerned.”

“This isn’t anything like the situation with Sienna,” I snapped, irked by the reminder. If Chris hadn’t started fucking Sienna when I’d taken a pause, the damn rule wouldn’t even exist.

“No, it’s not, thank God. This is about more than that, and you know it. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with Tenley alone in the near future, and she’ll be partially unclothed.”

“I’m aware.”

“And she’s going to be vulnerable.”

“I won’t take advantage of her.”

“I’m not saying you would. But come on, Hayden, you know as well as I do how heightened emotions can be after a session. The process is intimate, even more so when you’re into the person you’re inking.”

“So?” I rubbed at my lip, which was tender from Tenley nipping at it last night.

“Would you be able to deny her when she’s emotionally fragile?”

I didn’t want to admit she already was. The postcoital buzz had worn off, replaced by a nagging worry. Lisa had a valid point, and I hadn’t even told her about the scars or Tenley’s near breakdown over her advisor. Spending hours with her alone in a private room, putting art on her skin, would be consuming. I would want to take care of her in whatever capacity she needed me, well beyond what would fall within the boundaries of what was professional. Keeping the two sides of our relationship separate would be difficult at best.

“I don’t want anyone else to put that design on her.”

“I’m not saying anyone else should.” Lisa sat on the armrest, looking at me with a practiced patience I didn’t have or understand. Despite all the stupid things I did, Lisa always forgave me. “You’re missing the point. Everything doesn’t have to be black-and-white, Hayden.”

I didn’t work well in shades. I wanted to be able to go back to last night and do things over so I didn’t have to contend with this shit. “Being with her takes away that empty feeling, you know?”

“I get that, Hayden, but you can’t go back to the way things were before you had sex with Tenley. You need to be careful with her. She’s broken.”

“Worse than me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? That tattoo she wants is so dark.” She settled a hand on my shoulder.

“She has a lot of scars.” I touched the bleeding heart on my forearm. It covered the claw marks Mischief left behind the night my parents died.

“Physical or emotional?” Lisa asked. She was always so perceptive.

“Physical. There are some on her back; they’re pretty bad.” I knew all about scars. They served as a visual reminder of physical pain, but like tattoos, scars could also hold a whole world of emotional strife.

“How did she get them?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t want whatever happened to her to be too big for me to handle. “Maybe I can fix her. Jamie fixed you, right? So maybe I can do that for Tenley.”

Lisa’s smile was sad. “It’s not that simple, Hayden. We’re not machines. We don’t have replacement parts. I love Jamie, he’s my world and he always will be, but he didn’t fix me. He gave me a reason to fix myself.”

“Do you think I’m too broken to be fixed?” The question evoked more fear than I wanted to admit.

“No. I don’t think you’re too broken.”

She put her arm around me and rested her cheek on top of my head. I wanted to hate how close I felt to her. I couldn’t. She was one of the few people who got me. “What about Tenley?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Hayden, only time will tell, I guess.”

“I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

“I know. Maybe now you don’t have to be.”

* * *

Chris didn’t talk to me for the rest of the morning. Not that I expected anything different, considering the tension between us lately. I was sure he thought I’d betrayed him in some way by breaking the rule, even if the situations were vastly different. I would have felt bad if I wasn’t so preoccupied with Tenley. It might have been easier if sex with her was about getting off and nothing else. But it wasn’t.

At three thirty I finished with my client. I checked my phone, but Tenley hadn’t called. When I’d tried to reach her earlier to see how things were going, I’d gotten her voice mail. I hadn’t bothered with a message.

I arrived at Northwestern shortly before four and parked in a lot as close to her building as I could get, which turned out to be pretty damn far away. The curious glances as I crossed campus suggested tattoos and piercings were a rarity at top-ranked colleges.