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)
I've been touched by professionals. I traded sessions with classmates in Nice for two years. I know what competent hands feel like.
These aren't competent hands. These are hands that are claiming me. Inch by inch. And I'm letting them because I've spent weeks touching this man's body and learning his secrets through his skin and now he's doing it BACK, he's reading ME, and the reversal is so intimate it makes my eyes sting because this is what I do to other people. This is what my hands do to strangers on tables and I never understood what it felt like from the other side, the total vulnerability of being known through touch, and now I understand and it's terrifying and I don't want him to stop.
His knuckles graze the curve of my lower back. The skin there is thinner, more sensitive, and when his scarred fingers trace the ridge of my hip my whole body tightens and a sound comes out of me that I will be reliving with mortification at three AM for approximately the rest of my natural life and possibly into the afterlife.
His hands pause. One second. Waiting.
"Still good?" he asks.
"Yes." My voice is ruined and it's been ten minutes and I used to be a professional with dignity and composure and now I'm a puddle on my own treatment table making sounds that would get me banned from polite society.
His hands resume. Lower. Along the muscles of my lower back, where the tension lives that I never let anyone work because the position is too exposed and the vulnerability is too close. His thumbs press into the small of my back and I arch into his touch and this time I don't even try to muffle the sound because what's the point? What is the POINT of pretending I have any composure left? I don't. It's gone. It walked out with my brain and they're both in another time zone.
"Turn over," he says.
My brain reconnects for three seconds. Long enough to register: he's asking me to turn over. Face up. Eyes open. On a table in a dark room with his hands on me and my tunic bunched at my shoulders and I've never done anything like this with anyone, ever, the total sum of my romantic experience prior to this man is two bad kisses from boys who tasted like spearmint gum and didn't know where to put their hands, and my heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth and my ears and the soles of my bare feet against the warm leather.
I turn over.
The ceiling is dim amber. His face is above me. Close. His eyes in this light aren't iron but brown with warmth threaded through, the colour I saw on the private deck the first time he kissed me in daylight, and they're burning, and the expression on his face wipes out every thought I've ever had, every planner entry, every filed sensation, every colour-coded category. The look of a man who decided the moment he gave that order and has been holding himself back with both hands ever since, and the restraint is costing him. I can see it costing him. The tension in his jaw. The tremor in his fingers against my ribcage. The fact that he's breathing harder than he was thirty seconds ago.
"Hi," I whisper, because I don't know what else to say when the man I love is standing over me in a dark room with his hands on my bare waist and I can't feel my legs. What IS the correct greeting for this situation? What would Madame Gilles suggest? When the client positions you on the table and you lose motor function, Étoile, the appropriate response is—-
Actually Madame Gilles would not have suggestions for this situation. This situation is not in the curriculum.
"Hi," he replies, and his voice is low and rough and his mouth does the lopsided thing and I'm going to die, I'm actually going to die on this table, cause of death: lopsided smile administered at close range while shirtless, no known cure.
His hand moves from my waist to my ribcage. Palm spread, fingers wide. I can feel every finger individually, each one a separate point of heat, and his thumb traces the lower edge of my ribs, the same path he traced through my uniform weeks ago in this very room except there's no uniform now. Just skin. His scarred hand on my bare skin. The roughness of his palm, the ridge of the scar on his index finger, the heat of him soaking into me, and I gasp, actually gasp, out loud, because I've imagined this, I've lain in my bunk at three AM with my palm pressed to the vibrating wall and imagined his hands on me without fabric between us, and the reality is so much more than the imagining that my eyes fill.