In the Mood for Love

I Still Remember-2

“Please, get comfortable on the table while I wash my hands.” Amy turns away from me to give me the privacy I need to settle on the table. I climb on and lie down on my belly while covering my backside with the towel. My face finds the hole at the head of the table and I try to at least pretend I’m relaxed.

My field of vision is limited to a basket of flowers on the floor below me. I can only rely on sound now.

“I prefer not to talk during a session as I feel it hinders relaxation.” Amy’s words float above my head. I’m fully aware of the nakedness of my skin and I wonder how she sees it. I wonder how this makes her feel. Her footsteps approach. She has taken off her shoes and she’s barefoot. She adjusts the towel briefly and the air that flows underneath is enough to instigate a mad pitter-patter in my chest.

Her hands are so close, almost as close as I dreamed they would be when we were teenagers.

All my memories of Amy seem to be bathed in the warm colours of summer. We’d ridden our bikes to a record store a few miles away, a CD-sized plastic bag dangling from both of our handlebars. When we arrived at our spot by the pond in her backyard, she tore the wrapper off the case. The album cover was orange, on it the title August & Everything After seemingly scribbled in handwriting. We’d only heard ‘Mr. Jones’ and ‘Round Here’ on the radio and had no idea this record would become the soundtrack to our friendship, the notes rousing nostalgia from my soul forever after.

Amy pried the in-lay from the case and unearthed a pen from her bag. Without explanation, she wrote something on the back of the booklet and handed it to me.

It read: ‘Amy + Eli Forever’.

She grabbed my copy from my hands and repeated the process, marking both our CDs with what looked like a couple’s inscription.

Maybe I should have said something then.

Amy starts the massage by lightly running her fingertips over my entire body. The motion is quick and over in a flash, but my skin breaks out in goosebumps nonetheless. I need to use all my energy to hold back a sigh. The next thing I feel is the drizzle of warm oil on my back and shoulders. She rubs it on my skin before applying any pressure. I melt into the table the way the lotion does on my skin.

Gradually, her fingers dig deeper into my flesh. Her thumbs press into the muscles surrounding my neck and I think I must be in heaven.

I love a good massage and I treat myself to one as much as I can, but this is something entirely different. I can feel my n*****s poke into the soft towel covering the table already and my breath does not come with the relaxed huff-and-puff that I know from massages administered by Raj.

When we were teens, Amy and I spent the majority of our time together, but our relationship wasn’t a tactile one. Neither one of us were big on hugs and impulsive displays of affection. We expressed our friendship by always being there and nodding our heads to the drum beat of the Counting Crows. God knows what would have happened if Amy were a hugger.

Amy’s fingers wander along my spine and seem to dent my skin permanently. The difference between being touched intimately by someone you care for as opposed to someone whose hands you’ve simply come to admire is striking. Every touch of her hands on my skin—and I seem to count a hundred per second, but my brain lost processing power a while ago—releases a current of energy in my flesh. I know it’s s****l and the pureness of my first bouts of teenage lust bubbles to the surface. Nothing happened between Amy and me then, and I have no reason to assume it will now, but I am Eli again. Beneath Amy’s hands, there’s no sign of the national TV news anchor. There is only the memory of those very first seeds of longing, innocent but oh so present. Then and now.

She stretches her body over mine to reach the small of my back, an area dubbed by Raj as ‘my problem zone’. I sit in a chair most of the day. That’s how glamorous my life is.

It’s as if Amy can sense it—years of experience must have done that to her fingers—and she pushes deeper to undo the knots in my muscles. And I simply can’t help but wonder what those fingers must feel like inside. What it would do to me if they slipped. I shut down the thought as quickly as I can, because I can’t go there. Although it seems like the perfect place for it, this is no time for thoughts like that. The towel beneath me feels fairly absorbent, but I fear I may slide off in a puddle of my own wetness if I go down that route.

Her fingers knead the flesh of my back and shoulders. Up and down they roam for minutes on end and—despite myself and the feverish thoughts crashing through my brain—I’m about to reach that state of zen-like calm, of shutting off the world and just returning to myself. But then it happens. Her finger brushes against the side of my breast, which protrudes a bit as I lay on my belly.

Amy doesn’t apologise, she simply continues, but it feels as if my life has just changed considerably. As if the world has shifted and new possibilities have been born. This happens all the time during massage therapy, of course. The number of times Raj has accidentally brushed his fingers along my breast equals the number of times I haven’t cared an iota about it. But the furtive skating of Amy’s finger along my skin there feels more like a promise. An opening. Maybe a declaration.

Both of her pinkies glide along on either side now, and I never before realised how sensitive my skin is there. Maybe this is just the way she does her job. Or maybe she has a few buried emotions rising to the surface as well.

Every time her fingers dip a little too low, a flash of heat tumbles through my bones, all the way from my spine to my toes. Goosebumps have made way for hot flashes and then—oh no—an involuntary moan escapes me. I snap my mouth shut as soon as it happens, but it’s too late. I’ve given myself away. I lay there dying a little bit, my face pressed into a hole, my eyes fixed on Amy’s toes. Her nails are painted a deep red and—I may be losing my mind by now—it’s the most beautiful colour I’ve ever seen.

But Amy is a true professional and she pretends nothing happened. She must have heard though, her ears are not that far removed from my over-enthusiastic mouth and the volume of the music is high enough to make a point, but low enough to easily fade into the background when not given any attention.

She moves her field of action more to the middle of my back again, with long kneading motions of her hands. She covers a lot of ground and drags the heel of her hand all the way down to the curve of my ass, her fingers slipping briefly underneath the edge of the towel. This expansive movement also causes her belly to sweep against the top of my head every time she stretches forward, which does not help with the hot flashes I seem to be experiencing at regular intervals now. So much so, in fact, that I can’t distinguish the flashes anymore from the fire that has started simmering beneath my skin. How long can I hold off the inevitable explosion?

I never officially told Amy I’m a lesbian. She probably read about it in a gossip magazine when it went public a few years ago. Maybe this is her revenge. But we were sixteen back then, and while the knowledge of something being different was always very present within me, I hardly had a clue myself. Twenty years ago the word lesbian was not one you heard often. I knew I had a mad crush on Amy and sometimes I simply believed that it was completely normal but just not outspoken, while other times the sheer strength of my feelings for her obliterated any notion of it being different. All I knew was that I loved her and that, in the end, she could never love me the same way.

After a last soft caress of my back, Amy pads to the middle of the table. Without saying a word, she removes the towel. At first, I think she’s just adjusting it—that touching me underneath it has made it slip—but she doesn’t put it back. That’s something Raj never does.

The conditioned air of the room breezes across the skin of my buttocks and a new onslaught of lust rips through me. If this is revenge, or a test, I don’t stand a chance. But I don’t move and let Amy carry on wordlessly. Adam Duritz launches into ‘Anna Begins’ and I still know the lyrics by heart so I try to focus on those instead. They’re complicated and quick so that works for about thirty seconds, until Amy drizzles oil on the back of my thighs and then, all the way up the burning cheeks of my bum.

Whatever happened to a simple neck massage, I wonder, when her fingers hit my skin. They’re soft and warm and I melt again. But this time, after the brushing of her fingers against my breasts and the exposing of my butt, I melt differently, as if the wetness of my centre has spread throughout my body and has liquified every bone beneath my skin.

When her fingers dip a little too low the first time, I have no doubt she knows exactly what she’s doing. She still applies pressure to the muscles in my thighs, but it’s as if I can sense her focus shifting. She doesn’t pay nearly as much attention to the outside of my legs as to the inside, but every time she’s on the verge of touching me really inappropriately, she pulls back.

I can hear her inhale and exhale quickly over the music and I try to determine if this is the breath of a woman performing a massage or foreplay.

Then, just when I think I’m about to dissolve in a puddle of my own wetness, her hands move to my calves. Every single one of the cells between my belly button and my knees throbs wildly. A sensation I could probably cope with if this was a stranger venturing into the territory of a massage with a happy ending, but this is Amy Waters, the girl I wrote bad poetry for in high school. The girl who once told me that the two lone freckles on the left of my nose were the cutest thing she ever saw, after which I spent at least two sleepless nights thinking up ways to grow more.

Amy’s nails trail along my ankles, but they don’t stay there very long. Up they come again, and the closer they get to the massive erogenous zone every inch of skin within an arm’s length distance of my bum has become, the more moisture I can feel trickle out of me. Can she see? The room is dimly lit and my face—with cheeks as flushed as a blazing fire—is safely hidden in the hole of the table, but is my excitement visible to her at all?

The answer comes in the shape of her finger tracking the line where my butt becomes thigh. I know enough about massages to realise this is not standard procedure in respected establishments. When her bold finger meets the wetness spreading from between my legs, it doesn’t waver. Instead, it dives lower and lingers there, barely moving. Instinctively, I find myself spreading wider. I didn’t mean to, but if I try to close my legs now it could be perceived as disapproval and I don’t want this to stop.