Massage

I went into the clinic with my back wrecked from work. I left with hard nipples, overwhelming desire, and an address saved in my phone.

When Diego came out of the shower with his towel barely tied, Lucía knew that week was going to be very hard to endure in silence.

“Welcome to my beach,” his voice said behind me. I was completely naked on the towel, and he was the last person I expected to see there.

I accepted the massage out of curiosity and because of the heat of his hands. What I didn’t imagine was how much I’d be willing to pay before his alarm went off.

We booked the hotel to rest, but what I had in my backpack had other plans for that cold, rainy night.

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 sleeping in the next room, and I knew that massage would end very differently.

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 9:30 a.m., a half-corrected Excel sheet, and suddenly his naked boyfriend’s body was brushing the back of 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 three months of patience to reach Mariana’s sofa, slowly remove her shoes, and discover whether she really minded that I couldn’t stop staring 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 thighs, ordered me to untie her sandal straps, and with an innocent smile 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.