Free Loud is How I Love You by Mercy Brown Page A

down on his lap as I squirm.
    Oh my God, oh shit oh shit oh shit
, I think.
Is it going to hurt? Will I like it? What the hell will it mean if I do? What is he going to think . . .
I guess I’m willing to find out, because I’m not trying to get away or anything. I’m too busy laughing at how ridiculous this is and being more turned on than I know how to handle.
    Travis reaches across me into his desk drawer and I wonder if he’s going to pull out a ruler and smack me with that. I cringe a little at the thought, but then I see he’s holding a Sharpie permanent marker.
The
Sharpie, in fact. The thick one that he uses to tag our band name on things.
    “What the hell are you doing with that?”
    He pulls the cap off with his teeth and then I feel the tip of it, cold and damp with ink, on my left ass cheek. It tickles so I’m writhing and giggling and I have no idea what the hell he’s doing back there.
    “Hold still,” he says. “You’re messing it up!”
    “Messing what up?”
    “My art.”
    “You’re drawing . . . art? On my ass?”
    “God, your ass is pretty much a work of art as it is. I’m just, you know, embellishing.”
    I shake my head and try to be still but it tickles and holy God am I turned on. I feel slick between my thighs as he drags the marker across my skin. I have goose bumps all over my back, all down the back of my legs. I complain that he needs to hurry up because I really would like to get back to the sex part, but he shushes me. When he’s done, I feel the warm air of Travis’s breath as he’s trying to get the ink to dry.
    “Do I at least get to see it?” I ask.
    “Oh yes,” he says. “Most definitely. Damn, I wish I had a photo of this.”
    “Don’t you dare!”
    “Emmy, come on,” he says. “I would never do that. Unless you wanted me to, of course. Then I’d oblige.”
    “I don’t!”
    “Fine, fine, let me let it sear into my memory for the ages then, because this might be my life’s masterpiece right here.”
    Then he rolls me off of his lap, which is kind of too bad because I really like it there. I pull my underwear back up and he maneuvers me back over to the mirror by my shoulders, turns me around, and tugs my panties back down so they’re just below my ass, and when I see what his Sharpie masterpiece is? I go fire-engine red all over.
    Because that asshole wrote his name, in enormous, fancy letters, right across my ass!
    “Oh, no you didn’t,” I say, blushing so hard I cover my face with my hands.
    “Oh, hell yes I did,” he says, that cocky son of a bitch. “So now, if anybody else asks you if there’s anything between us, you can tell them I’m your tattoo artist and you’re my canvas. Or maybe you can just show them.”
    Then he smacks me right on the ass.
    “Jesus Christ, Travis,” I say, and I am so mad and so fucking turned on right now I can’t even handle it.
    “Hey,” he says. “You started it.”
    “I just fired a shot. You went nuclear!”
    “I did not go nuclear,” he argues. “You gave me a hickey on my neck for God and the entire human race to see. Your ass is our secret. That is, unless you’re planning to show your ass to anyone else.”
    “Well I’m not now!”
    “Damn right you’re not.”
    When he takes a step back like that and smiles, I want to smack him.
    But not nearly as much as I want to fuck him.

Chapter Five
    If Travis is going to tattoo his name on my ass in Sharpie, he’s obligated to satisfy all my sexual needs until it wears off. I inform him of this and he nods thoughtfully, like he’s thinking it over. He’s taking it under consideration. I tell him he’d better be prepared to fuck me. And fuck me very, very well.
    “You’d better impress me,” I say.
    “It’ll be hard to live up to the Michael Bolton Fan Club president,” he says. “But I’ll do what I can.”
    “Shut up. How do you know that’s the last guy I had sex with? You don’t know that.”
    “
I’m
the last guy you had