Oh chops. The planner isn't working. The planner hasn't been working since the corridor.
Let me back up.
FOUR DAYS. I'VE KNOWNabout this appointment for four days, and I spent every single one of them swinging betweenthis is fine, he's a client, you touch people's backs for a living, you are a professional with a certificateandhis EYES, his eyes, the way he SMELLED, the scar on his HAND, the way the corridor got three degrees hotter when he—-
I even practised my greeting in the mirror this morning, like some kind of unhinged person standing in a shared cabin at 5 AM rehearsing at her own reflection.
Hi, Mr. Almazov, welcome to your session.
Hi, Mr. Almazov, please make yourself comfortable.
Hi, Mr. Almazov, I am a normal professional human being and not a girl who almost planted her face in your chest on Tuesday and has been thinking about the way you smell ever since. On a completely unrelated note, do you use a specific soap or is that just... you? Never mind. Lie down.
The mirror practice didn't help. Obviously. Because when I came through the treatment room door and he was already there, already standing by the table, already taking up all the oxygen in the room with those rolled sleeves and those forearms and that mouth that hasn't smiled since possibly birth, my entire prepared speech evaporated and what came out instead was "Good evening, Mr. Almazov" aimed at the floor, followed by "Please lie face-down when you're ready" directed at the wall, followed by "I'll step out while you get settled" delivered to the door handle.
Very professional. Very composed. The twenty-year-old equivalent of hiding behind the furniture, but at least my voice came out normal, which frankly deserves some kind of award considering that my heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth and my face was the colour of a tomato and my hands, my beautiful professional trained-by-Madame-Gilles hands, were trembling.
Highlight this, self: trembling is NOT on the list of approved professional hand activities. Trembling is, in fact, the opposite of what hands should do when they're about to perform a ninety-minute deep tissue massage on a client who happens to own the ship you work on and also happens to have forearms that should come with a warning label.
Action item: develop immunity to forearms.
Deadline: immediately.
Status: FAILED.
SO HERE WE ARE. FOURminutes in. My hands on his back. The cedarwood filling the room like a warm, traitorous fog, and his skin burning through my palms, and I'm trying very hard to be clinical about the topography of his muscle tissue and not think about the fact that I'm touching the most overwhelming man I've ever encountered and he's shirtless and he's six inches away and I can hear him breathing.
My thumbs find the ridge of his right scapula and press along the border of the muscle, following the grain. He doesn't flinch. Most new clients flinch when I go deep this early, they tense up or inhale sharply or do that full-body clench that meanstoo much, back off.He just breathes. Even and trained, like a man who learned a long time ago to absorb pain without reacting.
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'rebraced.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 itvery, verydifficult.
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 muscleswant 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 saysI 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.
