Massage

I’d spent years giving massages to strangers, but none had ever made me tremble like that on the table, waiting for him to beg first.

I came out of the bathroom with my bikini half unfastened and he was there, drying his hair. We froze. What happened next still makes me smile.

What started as a paid massage in a small-town hotel turned into something my friend and I swore we’d never tell a soul.

I never saw her face. Only her brown back breathing hard while my hands went lower than a massage therapist should ever dare.

She asked me to come up as a guinea pig for a new oil. Her husband was asleep in the next room, and I knew that wouldn’t end with a massage.

I hadn’t thought about my own body in ten years. It only took that masseur digging his fingers into my back for something I thought impossible to start waking up.

It was nine-thirty in the morning, an almost-corrected Excel sheet, and suddenly his boyfriend’s naked body was brushing his neck. Working was going to be impossible.

When that man put his hands on my back, I knew it was no longer about the fever or the exhaustion from the trip, but about something I had been avoiding for years.

It took me three months of patience to get to Mariana’s sofa, slowly take off her sneakers, and find out whether she really minded that I couldn’t stop looking at her feet.

The door opened and I understood that tonight I wasn’t deciding anything. She waited tied to the headboard; he, standing in the dim light, only looked at me and nodded.

Three years barefoot, two rings on her toes, and the certainty that at day’s end he will kneel to lick every footprint she left behind.

She fell asleep in front of the TV, and I knew I shouldn’t get close. But her bare feet on the sofa were an invitation I’d been waiting for months to accept.

I had never paid attention to anyone’s feet until that hot afternoon when she stretched one toward me and asked, with a smile, if I dared to touch it.

She put her feet on my legs, ordered me to unbuckle the straps of her sandals, and with a smile that was anything but innocent, told me that would be the price of her silence.

I offered to check her ankle as a doctor. She crossed her leg, brought her foot to my face, and I knew, in that instant, who was really in charge.

No one dared move, until she lifted the bottle of oil toward the strangers and, without saying a word, invited them into the game.

When we got back to the room, we couldn’t wait any longer. Then there was a knock: the gift I’d prepared for her had just arrived, and you knew nothing.

The paper robe barely covered me. When his hot hands slid down my back, I knew that session wasn’t going to end the way I’d imagined.

It was two in the morning, we were alone on the 25th floor, and her back was stiff. What started as a favor ended up becoming something else.

Tomás gave me a massage, but he didn’t tell me he’d learn to do it alongside the masseuse. What happened in that room went beyond anything we had fantasized about.