A Mark on the Skin
By S. Faith, © 2007
Words: 1,975
Rating: T / PG-13 (?)
Summary: You want a what? WHERE?
Disclaimer: Not my Barbies. But it is my Dream House.
Notes: Not really improv fic, but this was prompted by the word "tattoo". Also inspired in part by the recent viewing of What A Girl Wants (and no, I am not a teenaged girl, either ;) ).
The problem with a profession like Mark's was that he was hardly able to leave work at the office like most normal nine-to-five drones. There were many nights where he would come to her flat for dinner and promise to take her out for drinks afterwards after he finished a tiny bit of work… only to find that it was one in the morning and he was still at it. Oftentimes she would just head for bed without a word, and he would follow shortly after, in full penitent mode. While he always managed to make up for it in some way—in the best possible way, actually—Bridget had grown to hate the phrase "a tiny bit of work" because it meant an evening of boring telly and no conversation, or of reading magazines and complete silence if he really needed to concentrate.
When he showed up to her flat with his attaché and pulled his super-slim new laptop out of it, she knew what was in store for the evening. She knew she had to cure him of this horrible new habit and quickly. They hadn't even had dinner yet.
Fine. If he was going to start working even before they ate dinner on a Friday night, she was going to make him regret it.
"What do you want to eat? I'll buy," he said, his face aglow with the slightly blue-greenish tinge of the LCD screen.
"We haven't had curry takeaway in a while."
"Sounds fantastic. Do they deliver? I don't really want to have to go pick anything up," he said amidst the tappity-tap of his typing.
Why did you even ask me? she thought grumpily. "How about pizza then?"
"Great."
After a beat of silence, she said, "I'll call then, shall I?" He did not answer. Grrr.
She phoned in the standard pizza order then sat on the sofa beside him. More tapping, more silence.
"Is it all right if I put on a movie?"
No reply. She had learned to interpret that as permission, so she stood and reached for the rental disc she had intended on watching with Jude and Shaz on Sunday afternoon, a silly piece of fluff about an American girl who discovers her father is a British politician, with the added bonus that the father was played by none other than Mr Darcy himself (and, she snickered, his fiancée played by a certain Miss Bingley). She thought she might just be able to bear the burden of watching it twice.
As it turned out, the movie was much better than she was expecting it to be, very sweet and romantic, as the father (Mr Darcy) had been unwillingly separated from the woman he loved—the girl's mother—seventeen years previous. However, Mark's focus on his work became increasingly annoying, especially considering how eerily similar the character of the father was to Mark himself (though she could never imagine Mark riding a motorcycle, not even in his youth). She continually tried to attract his attention from his work, like when she recognised her own building used as an exterior shot in one of the scenes, but his concentration was not to be torn from the laptop.
When the pizza arrived, she paused the DVD at just the moment when that character happened to be on the screen, sitting at the desk in his very lawyerly office surrounded by books. Very eerie indeed. She put his two slices of pizza on a plate and handed it to him; only then did the spell seem to be broken.
"What's this you've put on?" he asked as he took a bite of pizza, as if he'd only noticed the film for the first time. Which he probably had, she thought with some annoyance.
She told him. She raised the remote, clicked play and action began again.
"Why are you watching this? I thought they made these for teenaged girls."
Grrrrrr. He was lucky she was chewing a mouthful of food and didn't want to be impolite.
He watched and began to chuckle as he realised exactly who it was that was dramatically lit as he looked through a scrapbook belonging to his long lost daughter. "Ah, I see the attraction now."
"It's a sweet story," she said, feeling suddenly defensive. What did it take to get a man to watch a romantic comedy, anyhow? It wasn't as if Mark wasn't a romantic man himself, despite his acting like a prat that night. "And besides, that father character reminds me of you."
He snorted in disbelief, then returned his attention to his computer screen.
She was temped to ask exactly what prompted the scoffing, but evilly decided to approach him from a different angle when her eyes lit upon the screen again.
"Oooh, that's a cute tattoo," she said loudly. It disappeared from the screen as the camera cut away from the sleeping teenager to her adoring father.
His eyes flew up, the alarm evident on his face.
The scene then cut back to a detail of a tattoo of a crescent moon with a star on her shoulder. "Look, look! Isn't that adorable?"
He looked at her as if she'd gone mad.
She continued: "I would love something like that on my shoulder. Or ooh, on my back, just over my bottom, so that when I wear my little skirt—"
"A what? WHERE?"
He had his fingers on the edge of the monitor's screen, slightly white from the pressure, as he slowly lowered the lid. Heh, she thought.
"A tattoo. Right back here. I've always wanted to and that's an adorable little sketch."
"Bridget," he said, clearing his throat as the laptop clicked shut, "you do realise that's widely regarded as a Muslim symbol."
She pursed her lips, fighting off a smile. "It's a cutesy cartoon drawing. I'm hardly likely to cause the fundamentalists to call for my untimely demise." She got very thoughtful for a moment. "Then again… you have a point. Far too small for the lower back. I should maybe think bigger and a little more tribal…" His mouth hung agape. She hopped up from her seat, made a beeline for her desk and grabbed her own notebook computer.
Mark seemed to snap to his senses. "Seriously, Bridget. A tattoo? You must be kidding. Put the computer down, come over here and finish your pizza."
"You started it with the computer," she retorted. "And why should you think I'm kidding? I even have a few thoughts in mind." She set the computer down on the sofa cushion, hiked her shirt up to just under her breasts, then turned around, looked over her shoulder, and framed the small of her back with the palms of her hands facing him. "Nice symmetrical knotwork dragons right here…" She smiled and waggled her eyebrows at him. "That'd be really sexy, especially with my black miniskirt…"
Somewhere into her little speech he seemed to become completely aware of the fact that she was taking the piss out of him, even as the idea became a little more appealing. He looked thoughtful. "I suppose you might have a point. Tattoos are an excellent way to express your individuality."
"Do you think?" she asked, playing along.
He set his own computer to the side. "Mmm. Yes. I have a thought though. Perhaps before you do this indelibly, you should draw a little something there to see how you like it." He summoned her closer, drawing out a black India ink pen from the attaché resting at his feet. "Come here."
She raised a brow. "You want to draw on me?"
"I hardly think you're in a position to draw on yourself there."
"Can you draw?"
"Passably well."
She smirked and backed up towards him, then sat beside him on the sofa facing away from him. The movie played on. "Dragons. Celtic knots or maybe thorny tribal style… Oooh." The pen touched her lower back and she twitched a little. "That felt weird."
"Imaging how a needle would feel," he said, placing his left hand on her waist to keep her from wiggling. She could feel the tip of the pen moving over her skin and it raised gooseflesh. "I've heard it hurts quite a lot, especially over areas that don't have much padding."
"Then I won't feel a thing if they do my bottom," she said, laughing lightly, grabbing her pizza and taking another bite.
He drew for quite a while before he stopped.
"Are you finished?" she asked, craning behind herself.
"Mm-hmm," he said. "But don't look yet."
She smirked, turning to face him again.
As they munched on dinner, he fell deep into thought again as she began watching the movie. "Something else you might want to consider," he began tantalizingly after several minutes.
"What's that?" she asked, mouth full of pizza, poking an errant strand of cheese up between her lips.
"The whole area would be extremely painful until it heals, which may put a strain on… some activities." He had a most serious expression on his face. "It would be like a giant brush-burned scrape."
Her chewing slowed and then stopped as the meaning of his words coalesced in her brain. It would in fact be impossibly painful on her back to be pressed under him under what were usually extremely enjoyable circumstances. "Well. There are ways around that, I suppose. Alternate… positions."
"True. But there are times when I might be tempted… you know." He mimed a grasping motion. "To hold on to you."
"Hm." That was a definite down side.
"And sending shooting pains through the skin of your backside is kind of a mood-killer," he added.
The thought made her involuntarily shudder.
She quickly got absorbed back into the movie and eating her dinner. She realised he had slipped his arm about her shoulders and got sucked into watching the movie with her. Admittedly there was not much of a plot to follow—the denouement was tear-jerkingly happy if a bit predictable—and at the very end she turned her head to see a small smile on his face, a distinct gloss to his eyes.
"I never would have guessed you were a teenaged girl," she teased.
He turned his eyes to look down at her. "You know, if my doing work in the evening bothers you, you could just say so," he said with mock sternness. "Sometimes I just get too focused on getting the job finished…"
"I certainly do admire your dedication at times, and that was much more fun than just saying so, but yes. No more working in the evenings," she replied playfully, snuggling into him.
He kissed the top of her head, tightening his embrace, letting out a long breath. "It is nice just to sit here with you," he said, "but I'm surprised you're not doing a balancing act on the loo sink trying to look at your backside."
She gasped—she had completely forgotten about his masterpiece on her backside. She hopped from the sofa and dashed for the mirror.
Bridget got up on her tiptoes, craning her neck around to try to see the small of her back. It looked like a swirl of writing, almost. When she felt a tap on her shoulder she turned to find Mark holding a hand mirror out to her. Taking it, she used it to look at her reflection in the big mirror while up on her toes and when she caught sight of what he'd put on her back, she laughed and laughed and could not stop.
She glanced up through eyes flooded with mirthful tears to see a huge grin on his face. "Well," he said matter-of-factly. "It's true."
Encased in a pair of flourished lines that came to a curving point, printed in an almost calligraphic script, were the words:
Perfect… just as it is.
The end.