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Sam was half-asleep already. If G'd let him, he'd be all the way asleep in a minute or two. G loved to tease him about the fact that Sam was the reason for the stereotype. Guys have sex, then pass out.
G on the other hand usually ended up wide-awake for at least a good half-hour afterward.
Sam had learned to just let G burn off his excess energy while he dozed. It was usually to his advantage.
Like tonight. G was laying half on top of Sam, while Sam rested on his stomach. G was tracing each of Sam's tattoos with his fingertip, almost like they were made of Braille and G was trying to memorize them.
He'd already gone over all the lines of Sam's SEAL tattoo – the eagle with the trident, pistol and anchor. He'd traced the neat cursive letters on Sam's calf that had his mother's name and the date of her death, almost eight years ago now. He'd been over the orange and red phoenix on his right hip. Now he was going over the four-leaf clover on Sam's left shoulder.
This one was small. A life-size shamrock just under the ridge of Sam's shoulderblade. The shading was amazing – Sam's dark skin turning the brighter green ink an olive color, the darker green and black shading, including the shadow behind it made it seem lifelike. Around each leaf, in print so small, G had never been able to read it until he and Sam had gotten this close, were the words, 'hope', 'faith', 'love' and 'luck'.
"What's with the shamrock?" G asked as he shifted to switch from running over the ink with his fingers to tracing it with the tip of his tongue. The others made sense in one way or another. Or G had gotten around to asking. But this was the last of the seven. The only one he couldn't deduce, or hadn't been told the meaning of.
Sam didn't shift any more than it took to get his face out of the pillow so he could talk. "When I was a kid my mom used to take me to these concerts in the park – jazz, symphonies, rock, whatever was going on that week. I was usually bored, so she'd tell me to look through the grass for four-leaf clovers. When I found one she'd press it and we kept them in a photo album. Album got destroyed when our neighbor's crack factory blew up and took our apartment with it when I was seventeen."
G traced the leaves again. "This was the first one?"
Sam nodded against the pillow. "Yep. Got it redone to touch up the color about a year ago. Some damn crackhead wasn't going to take away ten years of summers at the park with my mom."
G leaned down and kissed the tattoo reverently. He didn't know what to say. He didn't have the kind of memories Sam was afraid of losing.
When the silence grew heavy, Sam rolled over, shifting G so that he now rested on Sam's chest, face to face. "You ready to go to sleep yet?"
G let his head thunk on Sam's shoulder. "I suppose."
Sam reached over, floundering around until his hand happened to hit the switch on the bedside table. With the room dark, he shifted until he had G settled comfortably against him and he pulled the sheet up. Sometimes it was a bit annoying to need to wear long sleeves even in the LA summers to keep any identifying marks hidden, but nights like this, when G was so focused on him, on the ink, made it all worth it.