Tattoos: A Novel Read Online Free

she wouldn’t have noticed. Gran was in the mode, meaning she was too deep in her reading to be aware of much else. I glanced at my watch and realized that I was almost out of time. I needed to wash the stink of smoke and cheap beer off my body and head over to the hospital in less than an hour.
    That’s when Gran turned over my most despised card in the tarot deck, the Tower. I was quite sure that even if someone didn’t know the cards meaning it wouldn’t be difficult to know that it wasn’t a good one to get. A picture of a burning stone tower with people falling to the ground was on the cards face. Just like the picture depicted I took it to mean that a person’s whole world was going to be turned upside down, and of course disaster would follow. I might have been a little melodramatic in my explanation but that’s what it meant to me. I remembered the last time I’d had the misfortune to get that card in a reading, and it had been just before my life had gone to hell. I shivered involuntarily and shook my head.
    “See, I knew this was a bad idea, I hate that card…” I said, touching the cardboard rectangle with the tip of my finger. I gave it a little shove toward Gran. She shook her head.
    “No Jackson, it’s not like before, this is different, this is the end of something and the beginning of a…” She paused and flipped over the last few cards.  
    “It’s about a relationship, a girl and…”  
    “Well that’s crap since there’s no girl, and even if there was one, the Tower isn’t exactly the kind of card I want to have next to a girl,” I said, cutting off Gran.  
    For some reason just the mention of a relationship rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn’t like I didn’t hook up with girls. No matter how sucky a band was, just being in one was like a chick magnet. I knew from personal experience that if I wanted a new girl every night I didn’t need to try very hard. But the whole thing was, I didn’t care about hooking up with someone new every night.
    I couldn’t deny that once, before life had dealt me a shitty hand, one that had almost killed me, I’d bought into all that ego driven bull crap. I’d used girls, letting go of them as quickly as I’d picked them up. But that person, the guy who’d took, took and took some more had died a while back.
    “No, this relationship is different, not love…well not exactly…” Gran said, locking on my face. Her clear blue eyes that were almost the color of a stormy sea, exactly like mine, seemed to bore into me. Even though I loved her more than the world and knew that she’d never hurt me, the intensity of her stare was unsettling.
    “Fine,” I said hoping to deflect her gaze. Suddenly she gave her head a quick shake, as if breaking her trance and she was back to my sweet Gran. I was grateful for the rapid change.
    “I gotta go Gran,” I said getting to my feet. I turned to walk away, but before I did I spun back to face her.
    “So there’s nothing about…” I drew in a deep inhalation. “About you know…” I felt stupid for even asking the question since tarot cards couldn’t really predict the future. Sure Gran had gotten a few things right in the past but it wasn’t exactly science. In my opinion you lived your life according to what made sense, not a reading from a psychic. But that didn’t mean I didn’t like it when the cards seemed to foretell good fortune. I was human after all. A part of me knew that Gran was aware of things about me that even I had no idea about.
    She shook her head and her smile was warm.  
    “No, nothing about that,” she said simply. Her words had me releasing a breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding. I leaned over and gave her a peck on her wrinkled cheek. The smell of her face cream, Ponds, one she’d used from the time she was a teenager, surrounded her. And it was funny that no matter how far from home I was, or what was going on in my life, the scent of that cream always