Chapter 59 - Still Waters R18

Chapter 59: Chapter 59 - Still Waters R18

"Back and shoulders," Jesse said into the face cradle, keeping his voice low and muffled.

"You got it."

Angie poured warm oil into her palms, rubbed them together and laid her hands flat on either side of his spine.

For the first few minutes, she worked the way she always did. She used long, slow strokes from the base of his back up to his shoulders to warm the muscle before going deeper. She’d been doing this two afternoons a week for almost three years, ever since Annabelle started full-day school. Percy thought it was a hobby. To Angie, it was the only part of the week that belonged entirely to her.

She’d had hundreds of bodies on this table. Most were knotted-up office workers with tight necks and bad posture. This one was different.

Under her palms, his back was long and lean, the muscle running in clean, flat bands from his waist to his broad shoulders. She’d expected someone that tall and slim to feel bony, but he was hard and smooth everywhere, like a swimmer. When she dug the heel of her hand into the ridge of muscle beside his shoulder blade, he let out a low, contented breath that she felt through her fingertips.

Angie pressed her lips together and concentrated on her work.

She’d been raw for three days. Since Wednesday night she’d felt as if her skin were a size too small. She’d scrubbed the lipstick off her face in the bathroom mirror and lain awake next to Percy’s snoring, replaying a kiss she’d made someone promise to forget. It probably wasn’t a good idea to be thinking about that with her hands all over a stranger’s back.

She worked down his arms and then his calves, and the forty-five-minute mark came and went.

"Okay," she said, lifting the edge of the sheet and holding it up between them like a screen. "I’m going to have you turn over onto your back."

He rolled over. She lowered the sheet across his hips, tucked it in at the sides and looked down at his face.

Her hands froze on the fabric.

She knew that jaw and the pale blue-gray color of those eyes. She’d seen them in the dim light of a Porsche three nights ago, inches from her own.

But the eyes were looking straight up at her, both of them, level and steady. The crooked bump that had always sat in the middle of his nose was gone, leaving a clean, straight line. The face was the same, and somehow it wasn’t. It was sharper and better balanced, and so handsome that her breath caught before she could stop it.

"Jesse?"

He smiled up at her. "Hi, Angie."

That voice settled it. Angie stepped back from the table so fast she bumped into the oil cart, and the bottles rattled.

"Oh my God," she whispered. "What are you... why are you..."

"I wanted a massage," Jesse said simply. "I’ve walked past this place a hundred times. I didn’t know you worked here."

"It’s a side thing. Two afternoons a week." She pressed a hand against her chest. Her face was burning. "I can get one of the other girls to finish your session. Maya’s free, I think, I’ll just go and—"

"I don’t want Maya." Jesse kept his voice easy. "You’re good at this. Keep going."

Angie stared at him.

Every sensible part of her said to walk out the door. Instead, she found herself stepping back to the table and reaching for the oil.

"Your face," she said, mostly to fill the silence. "Your eyes. Your nose. You look..."

"Different?"

"Yes."

"Eye exercises, believe it or not," he said. "Years of them. And a bone-setter in Flushing who does things to your nose you don’t want to know about. It finally came together."

She didn’t quite believe him, but she didn’t argue either. She poured oil into her hands and started on his shoulders and the top of his chest, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on her own hands.

They didn’t stay there.

The front of him was even worse than the back. Under the soft light of the salt lamp, his chest was smooth and defined, and his stomach was flat and ridged with muscle. He had the kind of body that made her want to keep touching after the massage was supposed to be over. She’d spent a decade married to a man built like a refrigerator, who hadn’t seen the inside of a gym since the academy.

She swallowed and moved down to his legs.

She worked his calves, then his knees, then the long muscle at the front of his thigh. She kept her strokes firm and professional and her breathing steady. When she reached his upper thigh and pressed her thumbs into the muscle near his hip, she noticed the sheet.

It wasn’t lying flat anymore.

Angie told herself not to look, and then she looked anyway.

Her hands were slick with oil. As she slid them up toward his hip, the edge of the sheet shifted, her fingers slipped a few inches too far, and the side of her hand brushed against something hot and heavy and very, very hard.

She snatched her hand back as if she’d been burned.

"Oh my God. I’m so sorry." Her voice came out high and strangled. "That was an accident. I swear, I didn’t mean to—"

"It’s okay," Jesse said.

She knew she should look away, but she couldn’t. Her eyes were locked on the shape beneath the thin white sheet, and her mind was still stuck on what her hand had just touched.

He was huge.

She’d felt it for less than a second, and that had been enough. It was thick and long and so much bigger than anything she’d ever touched in her life that her brain kept turning it over and over, trying to make sense of it. Heat flooded through her, low in her belly and between her thighs, so sudden and strong that she pressed her knees together beneath her scrubs.

She’d gone wet just looking at him. She was standing in her workplace in a dim room with a client on her table, a married woman with a daughter, and she was soaked.

"Angie."

She dragged her eyes up to his face. He was watching her calmly, with a faint, knowing curve at the corner of his mouth.

"You can touch it," he said quietly. "If you want to."

The room seemed to shrink around them. The flute music drifted from the speaker in the corner. Somewhere down the hall, a door opened and closed, and the receptionist laughed at something.

"I can’t," Angie whispered. "This is my job. I could get fired. I’m married, Jesse. I have..."

She didn’t finish.

Jesse reached out slowly and laid his hand over hers where it rested on the edge of the table. His palm was warm, and his thumb traced one slow line across her knuckles.

A jolt shot up her arm and burst through her whole body. It was like a current running straight into her chest and down to the place between her thighs that was already aching. Her lips parted. A tiny sound escaped her before she could stop it.

He took his hand away.

"Your call," he said.

Angie stood there for what felt like a very long time.

Then she turned, crossed the small room to the door and turned the lock. It clicked loud in the quiet.

When she came back to the table, she didn’t look at his face. She took the edge of the sheet in her fingers and drew it slowly aside.

Her breath left her in a soft, shaky rush.

Seeing him was worse than touching him. He was even bigger than she’d imagined, thick and heavy and flushed, lying against his stomach like it belonged on a much bigger man. She stared at him with her lips parted, and for a moment she simply forgot how to move.

Then she poured more warm oil into her palm and took him in her hand.

He was so thick that her fingers didn’t meet around him. She stroked him once, slowly, from root to tip, the oil gleaming in the lamplight, and felt him pulse against her palm. She did it again, a little firmer, and then again, settling into a slow, steady rhythm, the way she’d been trained to work any other muscle. She was watching her own hand move as if it belonged to someone else.

On the table, Jesse let his head sink back against the cushion, folded his hands behind his neck and grinned up at the ceiling.

’I have got your wife now, Percy Bonham.’