The Falling (Brightest Stars, #1)(34)

“Can I come in?” I touched the heavy curtain.

“Yeah.”

He was facedown on the massage table, his head in the cradle, the white sheet resting right at his waistline. He was shirtless. Of course he was, he was here for a treatment.

“Do you remember what you liked and didn’t like last time?” I asked, out of habit, the way I started every appointment.

“Everything was fine.”

I ran my hand down his bare back. Rising goose bumps appeared in the wake of my fingertips. I shivered. I needed to turn the music up and forget that the client on the table was Kael, or I wouldn’t make it through the hour.

“Okay . . . so I’ll apply the same pressure and see where we go from there?”

He nodded.

I ran my fingertips up his back again, just like I did with every other client. My fingers were shaking, and I was almost afraid to touch him because it didn’t feel right to want to touch a client. Maybe this was a mistake. Should I see if Elodie would switch with me? I knew that realistically that wouldn’t work, and I also sort of hated the idea of her touching him. What the hell was going on with me? I was fine before he came here. We’d spent the whole morning together and I was totally fine.

I grabbed a towel and tried my best to go through the motions. The warm towel glided easily across the bottoms of his feet. He was wearing his sweats on the table again, the gray fabric peeking out of the bottom of the white sheet. I almost pushed them up a little so I could rub his ankles more thoroughly, but something told me not to. He was wearing the pants for a reason, and though I could admit to myself that I really wanted to know what that reason was, I knew that he would tell me if he wanted me to know.

I pressed my thumb into the pad of flesh right under the line of his toes and he groaned. I eased up and his tense body relaxed again. He rolled his ankle to get rid of the feeling. It was a sore spot for a lot of people.

“Sorry. It usually releases tension. It’s a pressure point.”

I walked back around to the top of the table where his head was and reached for my oils.

“No peppermint, right?” I asked him.

“No, thanks. I hate the smell.”

Okay, then.

“I can use one without a scent. Will that work?”

His head nodded in the cradle.

I rubbed the warm oil between my hands and started at the base of his neck. The cords of his muscles were thick around his neckline and down his shoulders. In a way, he looked like someone built to fight, to protect, but sometimes he seemed so boyish, silly, even, someone who should be kept out of harm’s way.

A giggle broke out in the hallway, and I heard Mali shushing the laugh over my music.

“Elodie,” I told him. He stayed quiet as I moved my hands across his soft skin. His shoulders held a little less tension than they had yesterday. Holy shit, it had been only a day since he came in for Elodie! One day. One night at my dad’s house, one middle-of-the-night talk, one grocery-shopping trip, and suddenly I’m acting like I have some sort of crush on him.

I continued to talk to Kael about Elodie, reminding myself of our tiny little connection that all stemmed from bad timing and a petite French woman.

“I met her in training for my therapist’s license. She had just gotten here from France after researching programs for military spouses.” I remember how thick her beautiful accent used to sound to me. “She was very determined and taking the first day of work so seriously. I was drawn to her almost immediately. She’s smart and charming. I couldn’t believe she married a soldier,” I explained.

His shoulders danced with slight amusement.

“No offense.” I paused, relieved that he found it funny. “Phillip’s as nice as I think he is, yeah?” I asked Kael, while we were on the subject. He stayed quiet for a few seconds.

“He’s a good guy.”

“Promise? Because he brought her here from another country with no family and no friends here. I worry about her.”

“He’s a good guy,” he said again.

I needed to stop grilling him and just do my job. He didn’t come here to talk to me. He came here to get a treatment for his aching body.

I moved down his back and up his arms, settling into my normal groove. I did the same thing in most treatments, medium pressure, using a little more oil than most other therapists did. The song playing was an older Beyoncé song that I loved as a teen, and I let the music fill the quiet air until about twenty minutes later, when I asked him to roll onto his back.

He closed his eyes when he turned over and I took the liberty of studying his face as I placed a warm towel over his eyes. His sharp jawline, the light stubble under his chin. He took a deep breath when I tucked my hands under his back and raked them up his skin, pressing and stretching the muscles in his back.

The moment I moved away from his shoulders, his hand reached up and yanked the towel off.

“I can’t have that on my eyes,” he said, his voice cracking.

I grabbed the towel from the floor and he sat up.

“Sorry—” he began.

I shook my head, lifting my hands up. “It’s okay. I should have asked . . .”

He was recently back from a deployment, and I wondered if his reaction was related to that, or if he simply didn’t like his eyes being covered. Maybe the towel was too hot? The list of things Kael didn’t like was building. The smell of peppermint, his lower body being massaged, towels covering his eyes . . .