Susan Mallery - Until We Touch

Like the cat, Taryn had mellowed when she’d found security in her personal life, i.e., when she’d fallen in love with Angel. The sharp edges that kept the world at bay had softened a little. Larissa supposed it wasn’t a surprise. Everyone was different when he or she fell in love. Or so she’d observed. It wasn’t as if she’d ever felt the emotion herself.

Someday, she promised herself wistfully. If she was lucky.

“Larissa’s going to report on the golf tournament,” Kenny said.

She drew herself back to the meeting and glanced at her notes. “The charity event is a fund-raiser. Raoul Moreno’s foundation runs it and you three are on the schedule to play.” She went through a few more details.

“Think what we could have done with the Stallions if we’d had Moreno,” Sam mused.

Larissa looked at Taryn and rolled her eyes. Taryn nodded in agreement. They went down this same path every time they talked about the tournament. The humor of the comment was that Jack had been the Stallions quarterback while Kenny and Sam had been with the team and they’d done just fine. Including a Super Bowl win. But they liked to joke that if they’d had Raoul Moreno, a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, everything would have been better.

Kenny leaned back in his chair and sighed. “That would have been great.”

“You don’t deserve as good as you got,” Jack told him. “You’re lucky I was willing to play with you at all.”

He kept talking, but Larissa wasn’t listening. Her part of the staff meeting was over. She had a massage in twenty minutes and there was prep work to do.

She collected her notes and stood. Taryn looked at her.

“Run while you can,” her friend murmured.

Larissa grinned and did just that.

After dropping off her notes in her office, she walked toward the locker rooms. Her space was between the two, down a short hallway. Once inside, she clicked on the lights and turned up the thermostat.

When she wasn’t working, the room adjusted to the ambient temperature of the building, but when she was with a client, she liked the air to be warm. Less comfortable for her but better for the massage.

Her ritual was always the same and she found that soothing. First she warmed up the room; then she turned on the music. Jack was up first today, so she chose his MP3 file and pushed the start button. She started the countertop machine that heated the thermal packs. When she took them out for use, they would be about 160 degrees.

She cleaned the massage table when she was done for the day so that when she began her work, she only had to put the heating pad in place, cover it with a thick padding, then tuck in the linens on top. She did that next, securing the sheet.

For Jack, she used moist heat on his shoulder. That was where he hurt all the time. He had a lot of general aches and pains, but his shoulder was where she concentrated her work. Kenny had injuries all over. He’d been hit the most and there wasn’t a part of him that didn’t cause him pain every now and then. Sam, as the kicker, had the fewest injuries.

Larissa found it interesting to work on them. They were athletes, yet so different from each other. Especially Taryn. She was smaller. Muscled, but compared with the guys, she was puny. Her massages were always later in the day. If all three guys needed Larissa in one morning, her hands, arms and shoulders were tired for hours. By contrast, massaging Taryn was practically a vacation. There weren’t any thick ropes of muscles to manipulate. No scarred cartilage to break down, no stiffness to ease.

Larissa crossed to her cabinet and pulled out the bottle of oil she used on Jack. Everything was personalized. That was the advantage of only having four massage clients, she thought. And the point of them having her on staff. She knew what they liked. She and Taryn talked about girl stuff. Sam never spoke at all. Kenny was friendly enough. He would mention a book he was reading or a movie he’d seen.

But with Jack it was ninety minutes of hanging out. They discussed everything from current events to restaurant reviews to the various causes he was supporting through her.

She glanced at the big clock on the wall and saw it was nearly time. She turned down the lights, then checked the temperature of the heating pad on the table.

Perfect, she thought, feeling the warmth through the soft sheet. She folded the top sheet back, and then pulled open a drawer and picked up her brush. She smoothed her long hair, then pulled it back into a ponytail. She pushed the drawer shut as Jack walked into her massage room.

“Hey,” he said by way of greeting.

“Hey, yourself.”

Jack wore a white terry-cloth robe, as he always did, along with shower shoes. Everyone came to her like that. She politely turned her back so he could hang the robe on the hook and slip onto the table.

In a spa setting, she would step out of the room. After all, during a massage, her clients were naked. But the first time she’d tried that with the guys here, they’d told her not to bother. As Kenny had put it, “None of us have anything you haven’t seen before.” There was also the fact that she was frequently called into the sauna to rub aching muscles and they were all naked there. It was weird, but she’d gotten used to it.

During her massage training there had been plenty of instruction on how to handle the awkward “you’re naked and I’m touching you” part of what she did. There were specific laws and codes of ethics that had to be followed. Not that her guys ever pushed the boundaries. They weren’t like that.

None of them wanted to be covered at all when they were facedown. Larissa had fought that battle and lost the first year. When they turned over, she draped a towel across the, ah, private areas. Taryn didn’t even want to bother with that. As for the natural male reaction to a woman touching his body...Kenny sometimes got an erection, but he laughed about it. His humor made her completely comfortable with the situation. Sam rarely got hard. The man had a will of iron. And Jack, well, he seemed to fall in the Sam camp.

Now she waited until she heard Jack slide onto the massage table.

“Why do you always put out that stupid sheet?” he asked.

“Because it’s my job.”

She turned and saw the top sheet had been kicked to the floor, just like always. The regularity of the event made her smile.

She picked up the sheet and tossed it in her dirty linens bin, then collected the moist heat pack. She worked quickly to slide it into its cover, then wrapped the ribbed warmth around Jack’s right shoulder. There it would loosen the muscles and scarring while she worked on the rest of his back.

She began the massage by touching his upper arms, then moving across his back. She felt for any new tension, any areas of tenderness. Her touch was sure as she lightly kneaded familiar muscles. She worked her way down to the small of his back before retracing her steps.

“Taryn’s keeping a stash of bridal magazines in her office,” she said conversationally. “But when I asked her if she and Angel had set a date, she wouldn’t say. I think she’s weirded out about what to do.”

As she spoke, she dug into his left shoulder. While it was nowhere near as beat-up as the right, he’d suffered plenty of hits on that side.

“Taryn can’t figure out if she wants a big wedding or to run off,” Jack said, his voice slightly muffled.

“I know. A couple of days ago she announced she’s having a big wedding. Yesterday she said they were going to elope. I hope she decides on having a wedding. She would totally rock a great designer dress. It would be like theater.”

“You’d have to dress up, too,” he pointed out.

Not her favorite thing. “I could manage for a day. Would you give her away?”