“It’s okay.” The husky quality of his voice sent my imagination spinning with fantasies of his hands elsewhere. “What’s with all those?” He pointed to my bookshelf where twenty notebooks were stacked.
“I write sometimes.” I’d jot down story ideas and poems or just sentences and descriptions. I’d been doing it since college, when I thought my writing career would go a little differently.
“Really? What do you write?” His thumbs moved across my shoulders and against my neck with a steady, even pressure.
“Oh, just this and that.” My face flushed, and it had nothing to do with the massage, because this was getting dangerously close to me having to lie more than I already had about my job. “Thank you,” I said as I pulled away, my creaking body protesting. “You’re good at that.” I faced him, backing into the corner on my couch. With a wry smile, I joked, “Foot rub next, right?”
He shrugged and pulled my leg toward him without waiting for me to answer.
“Wes! I was kidding!”
He pulled off my sneaker, revealing my clean white sock, my foot firmly in his hand. “I don’t mind.”
I held up my palms. “I’m not going to fight you. Have you always wanted to do this?”
“Be a masseur?” he said with a cheeky grin and a wink. He rolled his thumb over my arch. It felt amazing. I’d leave him a five-star review on Yelp. “I’ll admit. It’s not what I set out to do.”
“What did you want to be when you were a kid?”
He was looking at my socked foot, so I had a moment to admire his broad shoulders in his T-shirt. His jaw, covered in stubble, was just enough to scratch if it was against my skin. God, was I a sucker for a stubbled jaw. Stop it.
“I wanted to be a teacher,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I liked school.” He wrapped his warm hand around my entire foot and squeezed with a slow, steady pressure.
I laughed, remembering how excited teachers had been to see me on their rosters after having my sister. How bamboozled they must have felt once the year began. “English and writing classes were okay, but everything else was just filler.”
“Home for me was . . . chaotic, and school was always kind of predictable,” he said, looking back to my foot. “I liked that.”
He switched to my other foot, and I watched him peel my shoe off, like he was undressing me. Guess I’m glad the only working out I did in them was getting up off the floor.
My breath caught. “What changed? Or are you also an undercover preschool teacher?”
He cocked an eyebrow and met my gaze. “Undercover preschool teacher?”
“Like, you sneak in under the radar past the ogling parents and then sneak out unseen.”
He laughed, the wonderfully deep sound that sent small bolts through me.
“Thirsty parents would be all over you.”
“You think so, huh?”
“For sure. You’d be a TILF.”
“TILF?”
“Like MILF, but a teacher instead of a mom.” I was rewarded with another of his laughs.
“I didn’t know you had a dirty side.”
“This whole thing could be a great book idea.” Or maybe just a fantasy, because I’d want him, too, especially if he kept touching me in that achingly slow and deliberate way. I wondered if Wes did other things like he gave massages, because he was firm without being aggressive, knew just where to stroke, and just kept going.
“Well, I guess we’ll never know.” He returned to running his thumb along my arch. “I started playing football in middle school and ended up getting a scholarship based on that. Then . . . life.” He didn’t elaborate, but a visible flash of sadness crossed his face. Maybe it wasn’t sadness so much as longing. It made me want to write something about passion and career paths and where the two sometimes diverged.
“You should be out celebrating your birthday tonight with friends. Unless . . . I promise I’m okay, Wes. I talked to someone, and you don’t have to worry about me hurting myself again.”
He looked sheepish and set my foot down after one last undulating squeeze. “I wasn’t worried.” He glanced around my apartment and scratched his jaw. “I just wanted to see you. Maybe hang out. I was thinking we’re kind of friends, right?”
“We are,” I said. Something about this sturdy, solid man looking unsure made my stomach flutter. It was okay to hang out with friends. It wasn’t completely okay to hang out with sources, but he wasn’t exactly a source. I searched his face. “So, we do this here,” I said motioning vaguely around us. “And then we do the coaching on the app. It will be kind of strange, but we won’t talk about your job.” I bit my cheek, because then I wouldn’t talk about my job, either.