Read Tats Too for Free Online Page A

a little uncomfortable to me.
    She shrugged one shoulder. “Size of a large egg.”
    My first thought was ouch. “Didn’t that kinda hurt?”
    “Honey, for ten million, I’d stick a basketball up there and smile while I was doing it.”
    “Ouch.” My second thought was…sure, you can stick it up in there, but how the hell would you get it out? I’d heard of women that can shoot Ping Pong balls out of there, but I’d never actually seen it.
    Vivian read my mind and laughed. “I tied a string around it, silly.”
    Okay, there was a visual I wasn’t going to shake for a while.
    “Where’s the diamond now?”I wondered out loud, because honestly it’d been far too long since I’d had the energy to check her hiding place and she could be sitting on it right now just like a hen on a nest for all I knew.
    “Safe. It’s hidden.”
    “Not another grave,” I said wearily. The last time she hid the half a million dollars, I’d had to dig up a dead body and almost killed a security guard. I didn’t think I could go through all that again.
    “Nope. Just another casket,” she said.
    “What is it with you and dead bodies?” Then a thought hit me and made my stomach churn. “Please, God, tell me you didn’t stick the diamond up inside some woman’s dead vagina.”
    Vivian hee-hawed like that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “No,” she wheezed. “It’s not. But only because I didn’t think of it.”
    “Where exactly is this casket with the diamond in it?”
    She answered, “Feinberg Funeral Home. The same place that buried Tanya and the half million. I hid it in the lining of a casket that was for sale and on display. I snuck away during Tanya’s viewing and hid it.”
    “They’ve probably sold the casket by now,” I said, alarmed. I said this alarmed because I will absolutely not dig up another dead Tanya. Ten million be damned. That’s how much I hated dead bodies.
    “They’ve sold it all right,” Vivian said. “To me. I have it on layaway. It’s in their storage room all safe and sound. I go in every month and give them fifty bucks to keep it for me.”
    “Layaway? You can buy caskets on layaway?”
    Vivian grinned. “You can if you’re me.” What she meant by this was—you can if you have big tits and a short skirt. And she has plenty of both.
    I watched Georgia smear pancakes and syrup in her hair and all over her face. All I could think was that I didn’t want ten million dollars. I mean, I didn’t not want it either, but all I really wanted was a nice quiet life with the woman I loved and our daughter. We’d worked out a kind of middle-class existence and that was more than fine with me. How did Vivian keep getting me all tangled up in…shit. Maybe the question should be why did I keep letting her?
    I looked back across the table at the woman who was the love of my life and maybe for the first time since I met her, I let myself imagine a life without her.
    “Give me one good reason not to just walk away from you right now. Never see you again,” I said hollowly.
    “Ten million?”
    “Nope,” I answered.
    “My tits?” she said, cupping them up high to show me in case I actually hadn’t seen them before.
    “Not good enough.”
    “Because you love me?” she said hopefully with her bottom lip all pooched out and twitching like she was going to burst into tears.
    I knew Vivian was playing me with that whole misty-eyed, lip-pooching thing she had going on. But I also knew that she loved me. And she knew that I knew that. I also knew that I loved her no matter what. And in the next five seconds, I saw a series of scrapbook photos slideshow in front of me: Vivian and I mopping the ceiling; me giving birth with her right beside me; Vivian’s tears when she thought I was dying in her arms, her holding me while I cried and told her about how I’d been raped by my stepfather and then sent to prison for shooting him. Vivian’s been there through the worst times of my