Lacquered Tattoo

CASS

Almost eight billion people on the planet, what are the chances that I'd find my way to not one but two men? This isn't "meet cute", definitely not a sheer coincidence now that I know the truth. Is it destiny, then, that I happen to be in the right place at the right time?

Soon, I'll be mercilessly taken, I'm certain of it. And I cannot avoid the impending doom that is bound to consume me. I'd been naive, clueless, and ignorant. Now that I knew better and I'm ready to fight, it's too late. I already have one foot buried in the grave.

There is no place to go that I won't be discovered because I was promised that even in death, we'll be together. The moment they crawled their dirty way up inside my heart, I knew then that they got me, and that I now have both of them permanently tattooed in my life.

MONROE

There's no place left in my body for another ink. Face the only thing bare, I am covered with sin from head to toe. Angry marks glorifying scar after scar accumulated from evil excursions. Art that covers the devil's handiwork.

And she? Just another sin waiting to take permanent residence on my skin. Too pure and Innocent, she has no place in my world, nor in my heart. But I'm a bastard and I can't let her go. If I wouldn't allow myself to have her, I sure as f**k wouldn't allow anyone else to even breathe the same air she does.

As hard as I deny it, I'm afraid she has already crept up on me, has burrowed her little self deeper than any of my tattoos were under my skin. And damn me if that didn't make me f*cking happy.

PHILIP

I have it all. Face, body, fame, a steady career. A hot girlfriend whom I was a few weeks away into asking to be my wife. After a life of traveling, it was time to settle down and there was no better way to do so than in my hometown. I just bought a cabin in the woods I couldn't wait to transform into my own home.

Life was good.

Until she came. She stirred feelings deep inside me I didn't know I had. She snuck her way into me, unwelcome, until I had no choice but confront her nagging presence and admit that I had fallen quite deeper than I would have expected.

Now, she is everything and I would do f*cking anything to make her mine. I'd even sacrifice my life to get her out of the dark pit she fell into, go to the ends of the world; I'd kill for her, too. Only one thing, though, I could never share her, that's one thing I wouldn't do.