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)
My hands have opinions about that. My hands always have opinions. And what they're telling me right now is that his muscles aren't just tense, they're braced. Locked into position. As if his body decided years ago to stop relaxing between impacts and just stay ready for the next one, and the sheer exhaustion of holding that kind of tension for that long makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with his forearms.
Well. Mostly nothing to do with his forearms.
And then there are the scars.
I didn't see them when he came in, because I wasn't looking at him directly (see above: talking to floor, wall, door handle), but now my fingers are finding them through the oil, reading them the way Madame Gilles taught me to read tissue, and what they're telling me is a story I wasn't prepared for.
The longest one runs from his left shoulder blade to the base of his ribs. Thin, raised, surgically straight, and my thumbs trace its full length before I've consciously registered what it is. A knife, maybe. Something with a very sharp edge wielded with very precise intention. There's a second one, shorter, curving along the top of his right shoulder, and when my fingers cross it I feel the difference in texture: smoother than the surrounding skin, slightly cooler, the tissue underneath dense and unyielding.
Burns on his lower back. Two of them, circular, each the size of a coin. Old. The skin puckered and taut.
My training covered this. Scar tissue, trauma history, the protocol for working on bodies that have been hurt: don't ask, don't react, don't change your pressure in a way that signals you've noticed. Treat the body as a body.
I treat the body as a body.
The body is making it very, very difficult.
Because underneath the discipline of his breathing and the braced muscle, there's something else, something my hands recognise before my brain catches up. I've felt it before in elderly clients who live alone, in athletes who treat their bodies as machines rather than homes. The way a touch-starved body responds to contact. A reluctant yielding, as if the muscles want to soften but have forgotten how, and they're furious at themselves for wanting to.
His body is doing that. Under my palms, right now, his body is fighting a war between the part that wants to let go and the part that doesn't remember how, and my hands are caught in the middle of it, and I should not, should NOT find that as affecting as I do, because he's a client and I'm a professional and this is a massage table and not a... a feelings delivery system.
Note to self: "feelings delivery system" is not a real thing. Stop inventing terminology for your own emotional breakdown. Focus.
I lighten my pressure over the burn scars. Switch to the pads of my fingers, small circular motions to warm the tissue without pulling. Scar work. Madame Gilles's specialty. The touch that says I know this was done to you and I'm not going to do anything else.
He makes no sound.
But his hands, which have been resting beside his head, palms down, fingers straight and disciplined, curl. Just slightly. The fingers drawing inward. A fist that doesn't quite close.
And that almost-fist undoes me more than the scars did, more than his breathing and his heat and the map of old violence on his skin, because the scars are history, they happened to him and healed and he carries them, but the fist is happening now, in real time, in my room, because of what my hands are doing. Because I touched a part of him that hurt, and I was gentle with it, and he couldn't keep his body from responding, and oh chops, oh chops, I need to move on right now or I'm going to do something catastrophically unprofessional like press my palm flat against the scar and just hold it there until his fist unclenches, and that is NOT in the treatment plan, that is the opposite of the treatment plan, the treatment plan does not include cradling the burn scars of a billionaire who owns your workplace—-
I move on.
I WORK HIS BACK, HIS shoulders, his neck, his arms. Ninety minutes. Somewhere around the forty-minute mark I stop counting and start just listening, the way Madame Gilles taught me, and that's worse because listening means feeling and feeling means I notice things I absolutely shouldn't be noticing, like the way the muscles along his spine release a fraction when I slow down, or the way his body tracks my hands even when I lift them between strokes, this tiny micro-tension running through him, an awareness, like his skin is asking where did you go.
I should not be noticing that.
I should definitely, definitely not be cataloguing that under "Things That Make Star's Heart Do Backflips" in my mental filing system, and yet here I am, filing away, because apparently my filing system has gone rogue and is now accepting entries it was never authorised to store.