Chapter 9 #3
“That’s better,” Shawn said approvingly. “Nice deep breaths, and you’ll feel great.”
I felt proud of myself. If I couldn’t enjoy my massage, at least I could do it correctly.
Shawn was running her hands down my leg, pulling the hairs so that at least they were all going in the right direction.
Things were improving. Then she began focusing on my upper leg, kneading the muscles of my thigh and—yipes!
—making her way up under the sheet onto my butt.
She kept to the fleshy areas toward the outside, but I still reflexively clenched my whole body back up.
This time, she seemed to take the hint, unhanding my rump and moving over to my other leg instead.
I had been trying to regain a sense of perspective, but this had reactivated my panic responses.
I tried to remind myself that she had stopped, that she had gone elsewhere and I could let go of some of this tension, but it wasn’t working.
Unbidden, a picture sprang into my mind, of Cole’s handsome, strong, still purely hypothetical hands doing what Shawn had just done, rubbing firmly into Ricky’s perfect, glorious butt, both of them loving every second of it.
I felt my jealousy and rage bubbling back up.
And then the ultimate betrayal. Without warning, without any prompting from Cole, at precisely the wrong moment in my horrible vision, Ricky—the real Ricky, on the table next to me—moaned.
It was a sound of pure pleasure, probably totally reflexive, and I had no idea what Cole was actually doing to him.
And my brain could no longer conjure up any ideas of what could have prompted it; everything in me had turned to white, a pure hot white blind rage.
My prone body on the table felt momentarily frozen, and then I began to shift my arms, trying to lift myself up onto my elbows, with each movement totally unsure of what my next step would be.
Shawn tried to steady my legs, which were twitching as I rose. “Do you need something? Is there—”
She was interrupted, and my movement arrested, by an abrupt commotion in the corridor outside our room.
There was a bang, a torrent of frenzied footfalls, a hand banging on the walls as someone ran down the hall, banging on our door, a voice crying out.
I yelped in confusion, losing track of my anger but not sure what this fresh source of overstimulation augured.
Shawn and Cole rushed to the door, dashing out into the hallway. “Bianca,” we heard them call out, following the person who had banged on our door as she ran by. “Bianca, what’s wrong?”
The hubbub moved down the hall. I finished lifting my torso, swinging my legs around to sit up on the table, getting tangled in the sheet as I rose. Ricky sat up, too, and I regarded his blurry form, still confused, his transgression of a moment before forgotten.
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Should I peek out down the hall?”
I nodded, and we both hopped down from our tables, holding our sheets wrapped around our torsos.
I stumbled a little on my sheet as I tried to work my feet out the bottom and make solid contact with the floor.
We huddled in the doorway, poking our heads out into the hallway, looking first in the direction everyone had gone, then in the direction from which Bianca had come.
This was a fruitless exercise on my part. “I can’t see anything without my glasses. Do you see anything?”
“No,” Ricky said. “Maybe they all went out to the lobby.”
As we looked in that direction again, a mass of blurry bodies rounded the corner, coming toward us in a hurry. A voice came from the mass, directed at us. I recognized Letitia’s reedy pitch. “Back in your room, please, for a minute. Sorry, we’ll be right with you.”
We shrank back from the doorway as they hustled past. I turned, groping along the top of the credenza near the door, trying to find my glasses.
By the time I found them, Ricky had crossed the room and grabbed our robes from where we had hung them on the wall, handing me mine.
We traded our sheets for the robes and sat down together on my massage table.
“Well,” Ricky said, swinging his feet, “were you enjoying your massage?”
I was too off balance to lie. “No. But it sounded like you were.”
“Yeah, mine was going good. I was almost asleep, actually.”
“Cole, huh.” I was starting to remember things, but feeling more dejected about it than angry by now.
“He was doing a pretty good job,” Ricky agreed companionably.
“Was he …?”
“Was he what?”
Ugh, don’t make me say it. “Hot,” I choked out wretchedly. “Was he hot?”
Ricky laughed. “I didn’t notice. Honestly, Oliver!”
I blushed and studied my toes.
A movement at the door brought my eyes back up, and Shawn entered slowly, holding her left arm with her right hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly, a tearful tremble in her voice. “We’re going to have to cut our time short. We’ve had an emergency, and we have to close down for the day.”
“What happened? What was the emergency?” Ricky wanted to know.
Shawn looked over her shoulder, out the door and down the hall, as if checking to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard, then turned back and said in a low voice, “I guess you’ll find out anyway, since you’re all staying at the inn.
… Bianca was giving her a massage, and she had to step out for a minute, and when she came back, she was …
dead!” Shawn had been straining to hold back tears, and at this final word, she broke down.
Ricky was confused. “Bianca’s dead?”
It had been hard to follow, for sure, but I had managed not to get lost in Shawn’s word salad. “No,” I said, “not Bianca. Cecilia Rose. Mrs. Rose is dead.”