Our Favorite Days (My Favorite Mistake #3) by Chelsea M. Cameron

want something like this. I really like how the watercolor looks,” she said. I hadn’t been allowed to see hers either.
    “Wow,” I breathed. It was beautiful. A peacock feather, but as if someone had done it with watercolors, the colors bleeding into one another and dripping a little. It was perfect. Rush asked her where she wanted it and she lifted up her shirt.
    “Right here,” she said, pointing to an area right on her ribs. “I want it to go like this.” She took the picture and positioned it so that the feather was lying vertically on her side, as if it had been placed there.
    “And do you want this size?” Rush asked. The design was about nine or ten inches long and several inches wide. Not huge, but not small either.
    “Yup,” she said, putting her shirt back down. Rush smiled at her and shook his head.
    “That’s gonna hurt like a bitch for your first one. You sure you wanna do this?” Taylor just gave him a look. I had been on the receiving end of that look many times. She might be small, but that look was terrifying.
    He rubbed his chin and looked at her.
    “Okay, we can do that.”
    It took a while to even get to the tattooing part. We had to fill out paperwork and he had to trace the designs and then transfer them to our skin.
    Taylor said she wanted to go first for some insane reason, but I talked her out of it. I wanted to give her one last chance to back out before it was too late.
    I was getting the words tattooed on my forearm, where I could see them all the time. Taylor balked at that, but then caved in, muttering under her breath.
    “This would be pretty easy to cover up. Uh, if the need ever arose,” Rush said, looking from me to Taylor and back. I put my arm up on the table for the transfer.
    Taylor grumpily took another seat, which happened to be a rolling chair. She scooted over to me and held out her hand. I moved the arm that Rush wasn’t going to be tattooing toward her and she twisted our fingers together.
    “More than the stars,” she said with a smile. Finally.
    “More than the stars,” I said under the buzz of the tattoo gun.
     

     
    O kay, so everyone says that they’re scared of tattoos because of needles, but a tattoo needle looks nothing like an actual needle. More like one of those applicators they use for airbrush makeup. I only knew about that because Renee went to a wedding last summer and had gotten it done before she went.
    Hunter’s tattoo took a little over an hour. Mine was going to take a whole lot longer because it required more color and detail.
    “You ready?” Rush asked after he’d positioned me on the table. My shirt was hiked up and I had one of my hands behind my head. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but I was going to suck it up. I was doing this.
    “Yup,” I said. Hunter moved into my line of vision, on the rolling chair, and squeezed my foot since he couldn’t really hold my hand.
    “You can do this, Missy. No big deal.” He winked and then gave me a panty-melting smile. I didn’t even feel the first touch of the tattoo gun. It was a buzz against my skin and then a quick dash of pain.
    “Oh. That’s not so bad,” I said, looking at Rush.
    “We haven’t even started, baby girl. Let me know if you need a break.” I nodded as carefully as I could because I didn’t want to move and mess him up.
    So, it wasn’t the worst pain I’d ever had, but after a while it became annoying. Plus, my arm started to ache from holding it in a weird position.
    “You wanna get up and stretch?” Rush asked. I said I did and Hunter helped me off the table after Rush wiped me down.
    “Doing okay?” Hunter asked as I gingerly rolled my shoulders and turned my head. This was a marathon and not a sprint.
    “We probably have about another hour and a half to go,” Rush said, looking at the design. It was a little weird showing everyone in the shop my belly, but I’d had to do it when I’d gotten my belly ring. Still, that had taken a lot