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“Better?” he asks.

“That depends,” I manage. “Are we grading on a curve?”

His hand drifts lower, the movements turning less careful, the pressure shifting into something firmer, his focus changing from technique to pure impulse. “You tell me.”

My body betrays me in real time, my vocal cords apparently deciding to freelance without permission.

I stiffen, half-convinced I’ve crossed some invisible line with my unintentionally sexual noises.

“You’re still so tense,” he murmurs.

“I’m a tense person.”

“Understatement.” He pauses just long enough for me to wonder what he’s thinking.

“Take off the sweatshirt,” he suggests, so simply. “You’ll feel it more.”

I freeze. “That’s forward, Professor Grayson.” I say it like a joke, but my pulse swishes loudly in my ears. “I’m not wearing anything underneath.”

“Noted.” He releases his own broken exhale, and I appreciate the implications of that.

This entire scenario should feel awkward. It doesn’t.

With Theo, I’m not sure it ever could.

The way he is, it feels procedural—boundaries respected, variables contained. Safe.

“You’ve gone quiet,” he says.

“I’m trying to, yes.”

“Don’t,” he insists. “I like hearing what I do to you.”

My mind blanks.

It doesn’t sound like him—or maybe it does, the version I’ve always suspected lived under all that restraint.

His hands still for a fraction of a second, the only hint he realizes what he just said.

I try to process the words still hanging between us. “Did you mean to say that out loud?”

He gives a short, incredulous laugh that sounds more like surrender than humor. “Freudian slip.”

His hands move to my hips. “Is this okay?”

I nod my head because it is. But it’s a jump from where we were even yesterday, and a bit disorienting.

He starts there, working the sore muscles along my outer thighs. He doesn’t cross any lines, just applies enough pressure to make me breathe through it, wondering if he will. Wondering if I want him to.

There’s something about it—the focus, the weight of his attention, the way he works in silence, seemingly cataloging my every reaction.

The ache dulls under the press of his thumbs.

Then he pauses. “You have a tattoo.”

I glance down, heart galloping at the way he’s hovering over me. How intimate it looks.

How intimate it feels, the way he’s taking in the dips and contours of my body.