Tainted Love Read Online Free

middle of doing this very tattoo when two of Junior's gangbanger friends had burst through the door of the guesthouse to threaten her and beatup Jonathan. After that incident, it was amazing that he even wanted to be with her. But she wasn't about to admit it.
    “Hey, if you get out of line with me, I'll kick your ass myself,” she said.
    “Tough girl.” He smiled up at her.
    “Don't try me. I'm the one with the deadly weapons here.” She put on her rubber gloves, filled her cups with red, black, and blue ink, and scrutinized the design she'd started on Jonathan's arm more than two months before. She was famous in the barrio for her freehand designs. “Hold still. In case you forgot, this is going to hurt.”
    The needle bit into his flesh.
    “Ouch. Damn!”
    “Don't be such a baby,” she teased, carefully adding blue ink to the Ferris wheel's spikes. When she stopped to take a break, she realized that she could see the actual Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier out in the distance. It was bathed in yellow light, not more than a half mile from Jonathan's building.
    “How's it going?” he asked. “ 'Cause my arm is killing me.”
    “Ten minutes more.” She went back to work, crisscrossing lines in red, then black.
    It didn't take ten minutes. It took twenty. Finally, though, she was done, and dabbed at the bleeding with bandages and an astringent to cut the blood flow to a bare minimum.
    “Okay. That's it.” She put down her equipment and stretched, knowing she wasn't done. She still had to wrap his wound, and repeat the instructions about aftercare. Bacitracin, not Neosporin.
    He spun around. “Can I see it?”
    “Uh-huh. But it'll look a lot better in a few days. And I stillhave to wrap it.” She reached for a small hand mirror that she carried with the rest of her equipment and held it a few feet away from his arm. “Can you see?”
    “It's …”
    “You like it?”
    “It's art,” he declared. “Art I'll wear forever. It's beautiful, Esme.”
    She knew that she shouldn't let his words have such an effect on her, but she couldn't help it. It wasn't that she needed a guy's approval to make her feel okay. It was more that he was so sincere. She'd given tattoos to many members of Junior's old gang, Los Locos. They'd all paid her for her work, they'd all been appreciative, but none of them had ever called a tattoo of hers “art.”
    “Sit back,” she told him. “There's more to do. You want a white bandage or cellophane?”
    “Cellophane?”
    “So your rich friends at the country club can see your Picasso.”
    His eyes held hers. “Definitely cellophane.”
    “You might want to wear long sleeves when you go for that film thing.”
    “Short,” he insisted.
    The fierceness of his faith in her touched her deeply. She got out her cellophane bandaging and neatly wrapped his upper arm with an airtight barrier.
    “So who else is in this new movie?” she asked.
    “I think I read something in the
Hollywood Reporter
about Jessica Biel or Mischa Barton as the love interest.”
    Esme kept her face impassive as she wrapped his bicep.Those were two very hot, very rich, very white actresses. She wondered if he'd invite her to come visit him on the set. She wondered how she'd feel if she had to watch him do love scenes with Mischa Barton. Most of all, she wondered when she'd be confident enough in her relationship with him to stop all this stupid wondering.

Lydia Chandler
    Lydia swerved into the driveway of the small house on Twenty-fourth Street in Santa Monica, clicked off KSCR—the closest thing Los Angeles had to an alt station—and turned the key to the green Triumph Spitfire to the Off position. The engine shut down with the peculiar
whiz-whiz-whir
sound it had developed in the last few days, yet another reason for her to return it to the guy who'd loaned it to her.
    It was a shame. Returning the Spitfire would leave her carfree, which in Los Angeles was a fate perhaps worse than death. Certainly