Knockout by Tracey Ward Page A

chocolate chip.”
    “Everyone likes chocolate chip.”
    “Everyone but you. You think they’re too sweet. Here, have a peanut butter crisscross.”
    He stood on the opposite side of the island from me and bit down into a cookie. His eyes went wide.
    “What is that?” he asked.
    “A cookie. You like it don’t you? You’re welcome, although you’ll forget you like it by tomorrow and think chocolate chip is the only cookie on the planet.” I bit into a cookie as well, talking around the delicious dissolving in my mouth. “You have a terrible food memory.”
    “Food memory isn’t a real thing and that’s not what I’m talking about.” He came around the island, his eyes intent on me. Not on my face, but on my chest. I suddenly realized I was only wearing a workout halter top. My pseudo tattoo was barely covered at all. “Did you get a tattoo?”
    Before I could answer his fingers were gently pushing aside the material of my shirt. He exposed the top of my right breast to a dangerous degree but I don’t think he realized it. I on the other hand, was breathlessly, heart-stoppingly aware of it. And of his fingers lightly running over my skin.
    “It’s just a drawing,” I said quietly, watching his face. “It was practice for the one I want to get.”
    “I didn’t know you wanted one.”
    His voice was so deep. He was close. Warm and tall and so close.
    I nodded slightly. “I’m surprised you don’t have any.”
    “I’ve never had the money lying around to get one. Every extra penny has always been spent on boxing.”
    He was talking but I don’t know that he was paying attention to what he was saying. His fingers were moving over the lines on my skin, tracing the entire image. I wouldn’t need the ink after this. His fingers were burning me, leaving feint scars in their wake.
    His eyes finally found mine though his hand didn’t leave me. “Why a compass?”
    I swallowed hard. “So I remember to trust myself. That no one knows me better than me.”
    “So you remember to follow your own path.”
    “Yeah.”
    Kellen grinned as he dropped his hand and took a step back. “You’re an old soul, Jenna. You’re too together for your age. You’ve got too much figured out already.”
    I chuckled shakily, feeling off balance. “Tell that to my mom.”
    “I’m guessing they don’t know about this,” he said, pointing the compass.
    “No. Or about college.”
    His face fell. “You’re not thinking about skipping out on college, are you?”
    “No, I’m going. But they don’t know where I’m going to go or what I’m going to study. Mom thinks I’m going to be a business major.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Art. I want to study art.”
    I moved out of the kitchen to the adjacent dining room where I grabbed my sketchpad. When I brought it back to the island and set it down beside him, my hands were trembling. Sam knew. So did Bryce, my boss, but this was different. This was Kellen. This was like telling family and I was so afraid but I was also rushing. I felt like I couldn’t stop myself. Like it was going to burst out of me whether I wanted it to or not.
    I flipped my pad open to the page Bryce and I had worked on, the one where he had shown me different shading techniques and how to adjust my drawings to become better tattoos.
    “This is what I want to do,” I said breathily. I felt like I had run a marathon, not to the dining room and back. I couldn’t catch my breath. “I got a job at a tattoo parlor in Bakersfield. I’m going to work there on weekends this year then hopefully he’ll give me an apprenticeship while I go to college. Then I’ll get certified and I’ll do it on my own. Maybe I’ll work there or somewhere else. Someday I want my own shop, but for now this is what I have to do.”
    “This is what you want to do.”
    I grinned. It felt wild, crazy. “Same thing.”
    Kellen smiled at me before looking down at my sketchpad. He flipped through it the way Bryce