Forever Right Now

“Darlene,” I said, my chin sinking to my chest. “You’re really good at this.”

“Thank you.”

Her small hands were stronger than I expected, and she slid them down over my shoulders, to press into my solar plexus. Stiff knots loosened, and as the relief flooded me, the dormant physical needs I’d been denying myself began to wake up under her hands. Blood flowed and as muscles loosened, my own hands clenched to keep from reaching up to touch her.

The air between us felt thick and charged, and I knew Darlene felt it too. Her hands stilled. I felt her stiffen behind me.

“Darlene,” I said, my voice gruff and thick.

“I should go,” she said, her own voice hardly more than a whisper. She gave my shoulders a final, stiff little pat, and moved to the door.

I moved sluggishly, like an animal coming out of warm hibernation into cold, harsh light, to open the door for her, but she was already there.

“You should get some sleep,” she said. “I have to be up super early for the spa, then rehearsal. Thank you for listening to my news. You’re a good neighbor, Sawyer. Good night.”

And then the tornado that was her, swept out of my place just as fast as she’d swept in, and I was alone.

Darlene

I practically ran upstairs to my studio, and shut the door hard, as if I could barricade my feelings and aching want on the other side.

I’d massaged male clients—handsome ones, even— at Serenity, and it was nothing to me. Part of the job. I’d never felt like this.

I leaned with my back to the door and looked down at my hands. They were warm and I could still feel Sawyer’s hard muscle under them; the impossible softness of his hair; the warmth of his skin through his undershirt. I’d wanted to pull that shirt off of him, touch his skin with mine, and then…

“No, no, no, you do this every time,” I hissed.

I let physical attraction pull me under and the next thing I knew, I wouldn’t be working on me; I’d be losing myself in the touch of a man, the pleasure, the attention that came from feeling wanted.

And with Sawyer, it felt a hundred times more dangerous, because he wasn’t like any other guy I usually associated with. He was a law student with a real career ahead of him, and a little girl.

I shut my eyes. This is bad. So bad.

Except it didn’t feel bad.

“It will, if he finds out where you go three nights a week,” I said aloud, and my words were like a cold bucket of water, dousing the pleasant warmth and washing away the memory of his skin under my hands.

Tears stung my eyes but I blinked them away.

For the next two weeks, my days became a sameness of work at the spa, NA meetings, and rehearsal. The dance troupe paired me up with a guy named Ryan Denning who, I could only guess, made the cut because he looked ridiculously hot in guy’s dance shorts and no shirt. Hot, but a total klutz; I spent most of every rehearsal sidestepping his crushing feet, and subtly correcting for his bad positions and holds.

“Sorry about that,” Ryan said one day, after he mistimed his cue and we smacked heads on a close turn. “Paula’s my cousin, so here I am. I’m not a professional, that’s for sure.”

You’ve got that right.

I rubbed my head where a lump was forming and forced a smile. “No problem. The show must go on, right?”

Ryan wasn’t the only one. The whole troupe was barely professional—I felt like I’d joined an after-school club in high school doing black-box theatre. Greg, the director, was overly pompous about his ‘vision’, and aside from flyers on lampposts, there was no marketing of any kind.

But I showed up to every rehearsal and gave it my all, even though the other dancers—especially the other three women—hardly spoke to me. The lead, Anne-Marie, wouldn’t even look my way, unless giving me the stink-eye counted. When rehearsal was over they hustled out to drinks without me.

“Darlene,” I once heard her whisper. “Sounds like a truck-stop waitress.”

I fled the tiny theater with their tittering laughter chasing me.

Saturday morning, and I woke up with the dawn. My work schedule had drilled it into me and now I couldn’t sleep in. An uncommon heat wave made my third-floor studio feel stifling. I lay on my loveseat in my underwear and watched the sun fill the sky with white, gauzy light as it rose. A mug of coffee cooled on the table beside me as I wondered just what in the hell was supposed to come next.

I hadn’t missed a single NA meeting. Granted, I wasn’t talking as much or as deeply as Max wanted me too. But talking felt like giving a eulogy, over and over again, for someone who had died a long time ago. I didn’t want to resurrect that addict-self. That girl was gone and I wanted her to stay gone.