Page 38 of Crave

The spa, named Lunae, was perched above Harcourt House in Knightsbridge. All white marble and aggressive hush, a space where time moved slowly and smelt faintly of citrus while amassing crippling debt. We were given adjoining treatment rooms, the silk robes whispering self-importance when we moved, and tea poured into porcelain thin enough to shatter under a thought.

Raquel greeted us with her professional smile. She knew our surname and the size of our portfolio, and as such offered me Alejandro.

“Darling, you’re grey.” Mother examined my face as if it were a flawed masterpiece, then shoved me off to my cubicle with the male masseuse who looked as though he moonlighted as the centre piece for a Magic Mike tribute. “This is exactly what you need.”

Apparently, what I needed, was to be stripped bare, swaddled in white, and laid face-down beneath a row of warm lamps while a stranger kneaded eucalyptus oil into my back. I was supposed to melt. Let the grime of London slide away and civility smooth back into my bone structure. But as Alejandro’s hands worked expertly over my back, I couldn’t shake the memory of a different pair working a much lower, rougher part of me. Naked beneath the towel, separated from my mother by nothing but thin bamboo slats, I realised how profoundly dangerous it was to think at all.

“Too much tension along here.” Alejandro dug his thumbs deep beneath my neck.

I would have much preferred Raquel. Alejandro was all muscle, oil, and an accent sounding like a suffocating lullaby. But I nearly laughed. Tension was a polite word for the seismic damage I was trying to outrun.

“Recent breakup,” Mother supplied through the wall, utterly without mercy. The partition between our rooms was a polite fiction, slats of bamboo pretending at a privacy Mother never respected.

Alejandro’s hands froze on my lower back.

Then they drifted lower. Lower.

He wouldn’t—

“What do you think, Ale?” Mother called, bright and loud. “Isn’t he handsome?”

Alejandro responded with a quiet, carefully diplomatic, “Sí, Señora. Very.”

God.

“See, darling,” Mother chirped, smug and scented with bergamot. “You’ll have Ollie replaced in no time. Plus, Tristan’s a law student,” she prattled on, utterly oblivious to Alejandro’s hands getting dangerously close to my buttocks. “London’s most eligible bachelor. Even if he does hunch when he’s endlessly reading.”

I heard Alejandro’s silent smile, and felt his thumbs trace the top of my tailbone. A definite push.

“I do not hunch,” I ground out through clenched teeth.

Alejandro’s laugh was low, a deep rumble vibrating right through my spine. I suddenly wondered if he ran his own sideline. Clients stacked up, looking for that specific ‘happy ending.’ And just like that, the sterile spa was contaminated by the memory of the last two nights. Of me, providing that service to a man rougher than diesel, dirtier than the alley.

Jesus Christ.

“You fold like a question mark.” Mother hummed, enjoying her own torture session. “Lower, Raquel. I’ve been bent over the Chelsea border all week.”

I closed my eyes and saw a wet alley. The silver flare of a lighter cupped between hands. A jaw shadowed with stubble. I didn’t even know his name. And as I lay there, letting smooth hands slide over me, I wondered what it was. Even created a list as long as my arm of what might suit him.

“Breathe…” Alejandro’s accent hung on the word.

I hadn’t realised I’d been holding my breath. But the scent lifted and fell with me: eucalyptus, hot towels, faint lemon polish from the parquet. Beneath it, my body found that other perfume. Diesel. Sweat. Cold stone. It was in my hair. Under my nails. No, under my skin. I had scrubbed it off in the shower and still it clung.

“Are you alright, darling?” Mother asked. “You’re quiet.”

“I’m enjoying a moment of peace,” I called back. “Isn’t that what we ordered?”

“Turn the lamps up,” Mother said. “He needs heat.”

Heat. As if that would fix whatever had broken open in me.

Alejandro worked his way down my spine with steady, practised hands. A rhythm of someone who’d learnt how to touch without meaning it. I knew the choreography here. Lie still. Say thank you when it’s done. Pull the robe back on and pretend warmth equalled healing. Then slip into my uniform of cashmere and inheritance and let the world believe the ritual had made me whole.

“Perhaps you should reconsider your father’s offer?” Mother called from the next room. Her voice was light and honeyed, discussing my life plans as if they were simple holiday options, not the slow, calculated demolition of my independence.

I would have closed my eyes, but they were already shut. I didn't reply, though. I knew the script. She would keep talking, applying soft pressure with silk gloves. Despite that I was her favourite son, because unlike Marcus, who had long since grown out of her orbit by embracing Father’s rigid expectations, I was the one who still indulged her with mornings like this, she knew Father would ultimately blame her if I fell into anything outside his grand design.

“It’s such a wonderful opportunity for you. Why exactly do you need this Master’s degree? Now that you and Oliver have... parted ways, there’s no reason at all to stay where you are. You could simply come home.”