Her hair was bright purple, and she had big fluorescent-pink gauges in her ears.
Samantha had to wonder what it was like. To not worry at all about standing out like a sore thumb when you walked down the street.
Like a sore thumb or like a brightly colored bird?
She intentionally shifted the thought from the original negative phrasing.
Because of course in her world, standing out was a negative, so she applied a negative term to it.
But you sort of want to stand out. In some ways. You just want everyone to be happy with you also, so…
She was the author of many of her own problems. She was beginning to be aware of that. Sure, there were contributing factors. But she’d left everything as it was for so long, unexamined, unthought about, undealt with, and that was on her.
“Samantha Parker,” she told the receptionist.
“Right,” she said. “You’re with Justine. I see that you sent some information in here, so you just need to sign the medical waivers.”
Logan sat next to her while she did.
“I’m sort of surprised you don’t have any tattoos,” she said as she tapped the paper with the tip of her pen.
He lifted a brow. “Who says I don’t?” She whipped her head to the side and looked at him, her eyes roaming over his body without her permission, and her heart started to beat a little bit faster as she took in…all the everything.
Broad shoulders, muscles that she could see through his T-shirt, hard-looking thighs…
She’d seen him shirtless before. Now she was thinking about that.
“Well. You don’t have any that I… That can be…”
“Many people have seen them,” he said, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
“Oh. Many people have seen. You didn’t even bother to tell me about them.”
“Privileged information. Usually for drunk girls in bars.”
“Wow.”
Now she wanted to know about the tattoos. Desperately. He really did look like the kind of man who would have them. But like a full sleeve, something very visible. They weren’t. What was that about? Why hadn’t he mentioned it when she had started talking about the tattoo?
“You keep a lot to yourself too,” she said.
“I never said I didn’t.”
“You were all yelling at me about honesty,” she said, scribbling her pen violently against the paper as she signed off on the fact that if she got hepatitis or died of tetanus, the shop wasn’t liable.
“No. I said that I wanted you to be honest about what happened between us. It wasn’t a demand of wholesale honesty. Or spilling of one’s guts.”
“Right. Well. I think that’s made-up. A made-up double standard.”
“Okay,” he said, a shrug in his voice.
“Why aren’t you bothered by that?”
“I never said that I had a burning need to be fair.”
“But people should want to be fair.”
“Why?” She could see that he was amused. She could see it in the way the lines by his eyes scrunched up just a little bit, at the same time the grooves by his mouth deepened. He was holding back a smile.
