Pucked Off (Pucked 5)

He follows the directions, army-crawling down the table. His feet hang way off the end now. I rearrange the sheet once he’s lying on his back and work on tucking it in around his legs. “Let me know if your feet get cold, and I can put a heating pad on your legs.”

“I’m good right now, but thanks.”

I fold down the sheet so I have access to his shoulders. They’re massive, like every other part of him—well, the parts I’ve seen so far. Then I pull up my rolling chair so I can get comfortable while I work.

Lance’s eyes are on me as I squirt more oil into my palm and rub my hands together. “Ready?” I ask.

“Yeah.” He gives a curt nod, and I use my thumbs to adjust the angle of his head, making sure it’s lined up straight with his spine before I assess the worst areas of tension, which seem to be everywhere based on the way his muscles lock up.

His eyebrow looks a lot better today than it did the last time I worked on him, and the bruises around his eye have faded a little, yellow and green replacing the edges of black and blue. The matching split in his lip has scabbed over. His lips part as he exhales slowly.

I put pressure on his shoulders, kneading a little before I start in on the muscles that need the most work. Everything is knotted and tight in there. It’s amazing he can even turn his head.

When his shoulders don’t feel like they’re full of stones any more—just rubber balls—I move on to his neck.

Turning Lance’s head to the side, I glide my thumb along the side of his neck. The muscles there are tight, as expected, and the ones I’ve just loosened in his shoulders bunch at the contact. I settle a gentle palm on the side of his neck. I can feel his pulse, strong and rapid beneath my hand.

“Just relax for me, okay.”

“Sorry.” The tightness in his shoulders eases a little.

“That’s better.” I follow the muscle with my thumb again, find the knot, and start working it out. “Do you grind your teeth in your sleep?”

“I don’t know.” His teeth click together, and his tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip. “Probably.”

“I can massage your face, if you’d like.”

His eyes flip open, and he tilts his head up until I’m met with pale green. “My face?”

“Have you had a lot of headaches recently?”

He frowns. “I guess.”

“You’re carrying a lot of tension in your neck and shoulders. That can cause headaches. There are some small muscles in your face that might contribute to that. If you don’t like the way it feels, you can tell me, and I’ll stop.”

“Yeah. Okay. That sounds good.”

He closes his eyes, and I shift his head so it’s straight again, then start by smoothing my thumbs across his forehead, erasing the lines of tension with gentle but firm pressure. I work my way down his face, over the bridge of his nose. He has so many freckles. They’re everywhere.

With his eyes closed like this, he looks almost sweet. Like the boy who pulled my ponytail in the hallway in grade school. Like the one who kissed me in a closet more than a decade ago.

I wonder if that boy is still in there, hiding. I don’t want to believe the man I met a year ago is who Lance really is—the man who was too wasted to remember having met me, more than once.

The rumors seem to conflict with the person on my table, I’m beginning to wonder if the hard exterior is Lance’s wall, and beneath it is a man with secrets and insecurities, like his admitted aversion to touch.

I try to focus on the names of the muscles as I move my fingertips over them, but I can’t stay in the present. I’m pulled into the past, back to a time when innocence disappeared one new experience at a time, and the night I fell in love with a moment I can’t ever get back, even though the person responsible for creating it is right here with me.

My sister had disappeared fifteen minutes ago, and I couldn’t find her anywhere. She’d given me two options tonight: stay home by myself or come with her to the party. My thirteenth birthday was the next week, and she’d said this would be like an early birthday party, but better. Sometimes I wanted to be exciting like her, so I’d said I’d come.

I held a red cup of purple Kool-Aid that burned my throat every time I took a sip. I walked into a low-lit room where a group of teenagers were playing a game. The lights were off; there was just the glow of the TV in the corner. Music videos flickered on the screen. Women with hardly any clothes on were dancing to a song I didn’t like all that much. My mom never allowed me to watch that, but sometimes my older sister, Cinny, would let me when she had to babysit me.