“Five minutes,” he offered. “I’m getting sympathy pangs. The sandwich can wait five minutes, surely?”
Sympathy pangs? “Can’t have that,” she managed, and dropped down into her kitchen chair, her head bent forward. “Thank you.”
She heard his step behind her. Heard his light breathing. Then her own breath hitched as his fingertips ran lightly over her shoulders, pausing to press gently on the muscle pads at either side of her neck.
Her work T-shirt lay between his skin and hers, but that thin fabric might not have been there at all. She sucked in a breath. “Oh.” She shivered at his touch. “Ooh.”
He chuckled, low in his chest. “I haven’t truly begun yet.”
Then, lightly, he began to knead the muscles that had stiffened to rocks and gravel and glass shards behind that shoulder blade. But under his expert touch, the rocks crumbled to fine sand, the gravel polished smooth, and the glass melted into silk.
She had once treated herself to a massage on the suggestion of a doctor after she’d fallen on a steep trail zigzagging up a cliff in Nepal. The massage had sometimes been painful, then blissful. She’d not so much walked as floated out of that clinic, and had slept sixteen hours straight.
This was very like that massage. Nikos’s strong, smooth stroke with his thumbs, and the gentle circles he made with his fingers until the knots flattened to ribbon, and the ache receded—all of it left her increasingly, acutely, aware of a different sort of ache deep in her core.
“You’re really good at this,” she murmured, grateful, but also to distract herself from that new ache.
“You are a very good patient,” he replied. “But some of these knots are old.”
The comment was lightly spoken, not quite a question, but for some reason she felt impelled to answer. “I don’t notice. That is, I notice, but I figured aches are a part of being over fifty.”
“You have never had such work done before?”
“Oh, yes. Once. After a fall. But . . .”
“But?” he asked, gently, his fingers working down along her spine. There was nothing suggestive in it—she sat on her chair, head bent forward, and he had not so much as slid a finger beneath the neck of her T-shirt, but that ache was beginning to pulse with need.
“But . . . well, my partner—my husband—he hated this kind of thing. He was the kind of ticklish that hurts but you laugh anyway . . .” Did that sound like she was complaining about Robert? He would have been the first to suggest they find the money if she’d wanted to indulge herself with massages, but that was the essence of the problem. To him, such things would have been an indulgence, and she always felt she was letting him down if she spent money on herself. It was all right when they did things together.
When he suggested them.
She hast
ened to say, “He lived in his head, you might say. Very intensely in his head.”
“He sounds like an interesting man.” One last slow knead, then he lifted his hand. “Try stretching a little. See if that’s any better.”
She already knew it was better. The knot had long since unraveled, her focus zeroing in on the touch of his hands, even through the fabric of her tee. She was giddy, as if her head floated a little above a body whose veins ran with pure sunlight.
Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this whirlpool of sheer sensation, and so she fought against the tide lest she get pulled all the way in. “I feel great,” she said. “Thank you!” and stood up from her chair so firmly she sensed him stepping back. “Speaking of that, let me show you something.”
Why was she doing this, she thought wildly as she led him into the living room, where she’d left her laptop. He followed politely. She could feel him a few steps behind her. She sat on the couch while her trembling fingers punched the keyboard.
The screen came to life, and there was Robert, at his most famous interview with a national talk show host. How did he suddenly look so young? He hunched forward in his chair as he’d done when he was really involved, talking with enthusiasm. She looked at his familiar face, the snub nose, the crinkled eyes, bright when he was enthused, as he was then, and the horrible haircut that even the studio people hadn’t been able to tame. Not that he’d given them much of a chance. Wasting time had always given him the fidgets.
“I don’t see you,” Nikos commented.
“I didn’t want to be interviewed,” she said. “That one was really his project, from beginning to end. I knew nothing about dams at the time, or corrupt government contracts. While he climbed mountains with surveyors and the like, I ended up spending most of that gig in the villages that would have been flooded if that project hadn’t been halted. It was a terrible summer weather-wise, lots of poor village kids sick, and the volunteers from Doctors Without Borders needed extra hands.”
She paused, her throat tight; in her most secret heart, that had been the happiest summer of her life. How she had loved each day spent holding babies and teaching small children, their eager faces blossoming at a kind word! “Though nothing I did changed the world in important ways, each healed child was a triumph. So was seeing a gap-toothed seven-year-old who had one garment to her name grasp the idea of multiplication. . .”
She realized she was choking up, and tried for a more casual tone. “I happen to like kids, so I ended up spending most of the summer teaching in the village school . . . well, anyway, you can see he’s wearing his one good shirt, which he bought when his dad got remarried in 1972—look at that awful seventies collar—and that haircut cost six dollars. He was a geek’s geek—I don’t know if you know that word—”
“I do.” Nikos smiled.
“He just didn’t care about . . . things. Body things, thing things. He lived in his mind, all the time. And when he started talking, he was just like that.”
On the television, the camera panned the audience, all rapt, listening, as Robert described being chased by two jeeps full of paramilitary guys trying to run him off the road above the construction site.