“We won’t have to as long as you can stay quiet.” I put my hand over her mouth and she started to writhe. She loved it when I held her down or made her stay quiet, but since there was no chance Miss Alice wouldn’t hear us, I needed to stop.
I had plans to play out her truck stop fantasies the next day to make it up to her, but still couldn’t seem to pull my hands away.
When I stopped moving, she wiggled against me.
“Go to sleep,” I said, sliding my hand down into her panties, but stopping short of her clit.
Her voice was husky when she said, “Pretty sure Miss Alice counts finger banging as hanky-panky.”
I nuzzled her neck. “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of finger banging you in Miss Alice’s house. My hand was just cold.”
“Mine too,” she said reaching around behind her to slide it into my shorts without actually grabbing the goods.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, wondering something I’d thought about a lot in the months we’d been together. How could she do stuff like this with strangers? I wasn’t judging her, I just couldn’t imagine doing it on command the way she did. “Does what you do for your job feel the same as this?”
“No,” she said without hesitation. “Not at all.”
So when I was a client, was she pretending to be more into me than she was?
“But it did with me, right? Or was that all in my head the first time?”
Why was I asking her this when I might not want to hear the answer?
“It wasn’t in your head, Zane. I’ll admit that things are more comfortable or intimate with some clients than others…but I’ve never had the kind of connection with a client that I do with you.”
Something inside of me unwound and I relaxed against her.
She said, “People act like all sex is the same, but it’s like a lot of things. It can be intimate and mean something or it can just be fun or it can be an exchange between strangers.” She reached an arm up and rubbed the back of my neck. “I can give you a massage and it’s intimate. It’s done with love.” I almost jerked when she said that word, but it had just slipped out, so I didn’t press her on it. “But for a professional massage therapist, it’s just part of their job. I can cook you a meal and have it be personal and intimate and meaningful, but the meals I cook at work are just food. They couldn’t be less personal.”
“It’s just hard to think about sex like that. I can’t imagine what you’d get out of it being impersonal…”
“Not everyone can separate the two as cleanly as I can, and that’s part of why I’m so good at my job. Sex can be about love and connection. It can be about pleasure. It can also just be a clinical act to let someone else fill a need. All the other things people ascribe to it are their baggage to carry, not mine.”
We lay there in silence for a while, but she seemed so tense I wondered if she was still thinking about what happened earlier in the day with her dad.
“If Miss Alice isn’t your mom, can I ask why you have a bedroom in her house? It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”
She trailed her fingertips idly on my lower stomach, making it hard to focus.
“My parents fought a lot when I was little and Miss Alice’s house was my safe haven when it scared me. She started as my babysitter, but didn’t say anything when I’d show up when she wasn’t supposed to be watching me. My dad used to drink a lot before he found Jesus. Things settled between my parents a little after he stopped drinking, but he seemed to like me even less. I was a teenager and you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what I was like.”
She nudged her ass back into me playfully before she kept going. “The more he tried to convert me to the ways of the Good Lord, the more I rebelled against his puritanical shaming bullshit. My brother…Matt…didn’t understand why I had to rub it in my dad’s face all the time, but no one was calling him a whore even though he was doing the same stuff as me. We were only a year apart, so we went to the same parties and had the same friends. He wasn’t that much older than me, but he was so fucking protective. It was like I had a shield at school. People could say whatever they wanted about me, but my big brother always had my back and it shut most of them up.” She took a deep breath. “He…died in a car accident when I was a junior in high school.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, holding her tighter.
“Thanks,” she said heavily.
The quiet country night was broken by tires skidding on the gravel outside and a car door slamming.
A drunken male voice cried out, “Get out here, whore. I’m taking you to church.”
Maia launched out of bed, but I caught her around the waist before she could go out there.
“Let me go talk to him,” I said.
“Fuck that. You said yourself you almost punched him earlier. I’m not having you miss ACL because your ass is sitting in jail.”
I pushed her gently but firmly until she was sitting on the bed. “And I’m not having you deal with that. I won’t get in a fight,” I promised.
