Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
No request, no suggestion, no careful hedging tone of a man who's testing the water. A command, from a man whose hands shook in a corridor three days ago and whose voice cracked on the word "afraid" and who cried into my hair while I called him a gargoyle, and who is now standing in my treatment room doorway telling me to lie down with the full returned authority of someone who has decided what's happening next and the decision is final.
I should have argued. I should have protested excuse me, this is MY treatment room, I give the orders here, I'm the licensed professional and you're the man who admitted to lurking on a mezzanine like an enormous sad gargoyle, you don't get to come in here and—-
Except his voice when he spoke my name did something to my spine that disabled the arguing function, and I lay down.
Face-down. On my own table. The leather warm from the heated pad underneath, smelling like cedarwood because I used it on my last client six hours ago and the scent hasn't faded, and oh chops, the cedarwood, the oil I put at the back of the shelf with the label turned away for two weeks, and now I'm lying face-down in a room that reeks of it with his hands finding the hem of my tunic and pushing it up, gathering the fabric at my shoulders, and his palms are on my bare skin and I am trying to remember how breathing works and I am failing spectacularly.
He knows what he's doing.
That's the terrifying part. The intimacy doesn't scare me. The after-hours spa doesn't scare me. The fact that I'm lying face-down on a massage table while a man who told me he loved me three days ago in a corridor while crying puts his hands on me. The terrifying part is that his hands know anatomy. Eleven years of military training, field medicine, whatever classified chapter of his life produced those scars on his knuckles. His hands carry all of it. He finds the tension in my trapezius without searching. His thumb traces the border of the muscle, follows the grain, applies pressure that isn't tentative and isn't aggressive but exact, and my body responds to it before my mind can intervene, how my body responded to eucalyptus on my first day, a surrender that happens below the level of choice.
My shoulders drop. Involuntary. Complete.
"You're holding here," he notes, his thumb on the ridge between my neck and my right shoulder. "This side is worse."
"I carry my bag on that shoulder."
"Stop."
"It's the only shoulder I have."
"Use the other one." His thumb digs in. Past gentle, short of painful. Right. Exactly, infuriatingly right, like Madame Gilles correcting my grip during training, the authority of someone who knows what the body needs better than the body does, and I want to inform him that I have two years of professional certification and six months of supervised practice and he has NO BUSINESS being this good at this, this is RUDE, this is an act of aggression against my professional identity—-
I make a sound into the face cradle.
It's involuntary and mortifying and I hope the leather absorbed it but based on how his hands pause for half a second I'm guessing it did not. I'm guessing the entire Mediterranean heard it. I'm guessing fish are looking at each other right now going what was that.
"Good?" he asks, and there's something in his voice, something warm and low and cracked at the edges, and oh no, he LIKED the sound, he liked it and he's going to try to make me do it again and I have no defences left, none, I used them all up in the corridor three days ago when I called him a gargoyle and cried into his shirt.
"Don't fish for compliments," I warn him, and my voice comes out breathy and ruined and not at all like a warning.
His chest moves. The vibration without the sound. I can feel it through his hands, the almost-laugh I've been chasing since the gallery, and I want to be indignant about the fact that he's laughing at me while I'm face-down and defenceless on a table but my face is burning against the cradle and his hands are moving again and indignation requires a functioning brain and mine is in another country.
HE WORKS MY SHOULDERS. My upper back. His hands are enormous and scarred and warm and they map me the way mine mapped him in this room weeks ago, except he doesn't have the clinical distance I trained for. What he has is something else. Intention. The same fierce attention he gives the antiques in the gallery, the same touch-once-and-mean-it quality, except he's touching more than once. He's touching again and again, his palms returning to the places where my muscles release, memorising them, and every time he comes back to a spot that made me respond his fingers press deeper and my body arches toward him and I can't stop it and I've stopped trying.