His Curvy Temptation
Andrea
“Bad news. Deepti quit. We are so screwed.”
“Good morning to you, too!” I say to Tricia, walking to the back room of The Angel Spa.
I find my locker and unload my heavy backpack into it along with my well-worn flannel hoodie. Wednesdays are hard; I’m juggling a full time job as a massage therapist along with grad school, and on Wednesdays I have four hours of classes before I even begin my shift at the spa.
By the end of the day, I’m usually exhausted, with sore feet and tired eyes.
“No two weeks notice,” Tricia continues, having followed me to the back room to continue her venting session. “No warning. Not even a phone call. She texted me. Can you believe that?”
“I sure can,” I say as I change into my uniform: a pair of crisp white scrubs and plain black shoes.
“Did she tell you she was going to quit?” Tricia presses, narrowing her eyes.
I think for a moment. Did Deepti, my flighty friend of nearly five years, tell me that she was going to quit her job without notice?
No.
But did I see it coming?
Absolutely, yes.
How did I see it coming? Because a few weeks ago, Deepti met a man. And when Deepti meets a new man, she becomes impulsive and unpredictable. She dyes her hair, quits her jobs, moves into their apartments, takes up new hobbies that she was never interested in before…
It’s unhealthy, and it always makes me worried for her. And after five years of watching this cycle, I’ve learned Deepti’s patterns and habits.
Still, I’m irritated that Deepti quit The Angel Spa in this way. I was her internal referral, and she was only here for a few months. This is not going to look good for me.
“She didn’t tell me anything,” I say to Tricia. “I’m as surprised as you are.”
Tricia scrunches her nose, the thing that she always does when she’s annoyed. I know that she, who is technically my boss at the spa, means to look intimidating when she does this. But no matter how angry she is, the nose scrunch always reminds me of one of those fluffy bunnies at the petting zoo.
I look away from her quickly, hoping that she can’t tell that I’m nearly laughing right now.
“Well, like I said,” she continues. “We’re fucked. With Leah on her honeymoon, Deepti and you were our only massage therapists. And Deepti has a travel appointment today with a client we can’t afford to lose. So I guess this means…”
I groan.
“Tricia please no,” I say. “I just came from classes. And if you haven’t noticed, it’s about to rain like hell!”
I glance outside at the cloudy sky, which seems to be growing darker right before my eyes, in sharp contrast to the bright and sterile white interior of the spa.
“It’s the only way to make it work,” Tricia sighs. “I’m not happy about it either, obviously.”
I open the scheduling binder on the desk nearby and flip through it.
“I’m booked solid today anyway,” I announce with satisfaction. “We have to cancel.”
“We can’t cancel.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I told you, we cannot afford to lose this client. He brings in new business regularly and aside from that, he’s high profile. We don’t piss off our high profile clients.”
“If he can’t understand that we’re short-staffed and it’s outside of our control then that’s not my problem,” I snap.
I turn back to Tricia, expecting to still see that frustrated nose scrunch on her face. Instead she’s sitting on the bench by the lockers, looking totally deflated.
“Trish, I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m just…I’m really tired. Midterms are coming and I’ve been burning the candle at both ends a lot lately. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”
“I know,” she nods. “And I get it. I don’t want to go to travel clients either, there’s a reason we no longer accept travel appointments anymore. But this guy is a legacy client, he’s been with us for a long time, and if we lose him we’re in trouble with management.”
“I thought you were management,” I point out.
“You know what I mean,” Tricia says, rolling her eyes and pointing a finger upwards towards the ceiling. “ Management management. The big dogs.”
I nod. She means the owner of The Angel Spa, who thankfully doesn’t drop in very often.
But when he does, he’s a complete asshole to all of the staff and nitpicks over the tiniest imperfections.
The most stressful days ever are ones where Nick decides to pop in for an unannounced visit — “just to check in.”
“I just got this promotion, too,” Tricia continues. “You know how hard I had to work for this promotion. And now, my first month, we’re going to lose a high profile client that Nick personally knows by name.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault, though!” I exclaim.
“You think Nick would care about that?”
“No,” I sigh. “He wouldn’t care. He never cares about the details.”
“Exactly.”
I feel a pang of guilt in my stomach. It’s my fault that Deepti was even hired here. And in hindsight, it was incredibly dumb of me to recommend my unreliable friend for a job at The Angel.
I guess I thought that Deepti would be more respectful here, seeing as I pulled strings for her to get her the job.
This is my problem, though. I’m always giving people more chances than they deserve. And I have a hard time saying no to people, especially to my friends.
“I’ll do the travel appointment,” I sigh. “Cancel my appointments.”
“Thank you,” Tricia says, looking up at me. “Really. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I owe you a drink.”
“Since it’s my fault we’re in this mess, maybe I’m the one who owes you the drink,” I reply, sitting on the bench beside her and draping my arm around her.
“And we’ll get through this. Hell, every massage therapist in Manhattan would like to work for The Angel.
We’ll have Deepti’s replacement soon enough. ”
Tricia nods.
“You’re doing a great job, you know,” I continue, because I know she needs to hear those words. “You earned this promotion and you’re doing great.”
She smiles weakly at me but I can tell she doesn’t believe what I’m saying.
“Besides,” I continue with a shrug. “And if Nick has a problem with you, he has a problem with me and the rest of the staff too. He knows that if he ever fired you, we’d all go on strike. And then he really would be screwed.”
She slumps forward, leaning her forehead on my shoulder.
“You’re the best, Andy.”
By the time I get off the subway, it’s pouring rain. The office building where the appointment takes place is still a couple of blocks away from my stop, and I jog between awnings for shelter along the sidewalk, lugging Angel Spa’s folding massage table along with me.
The heavy weight of it bangs against my leg as I walk fast, promising that tomorrow I’ll probably have a large bruise on my thigh.
This is why we don’t do travel appointments anymore. Last year, we finally phased them out entirely…except for a very small number of “high profile” clients who agreed to pay a premium fee for the convenience.
A premium fee that does not make its way into the massage therapist’s paycheck due to the way that The Angel Spa pays us.
So even though this appointment is much more work for me, and even though we charge the client much more than we would charge them for a standard in-spa appointment, I will get paid the same lousy hourly rate as always.
By the time I get in the door of the office building, I’m soaking wet from head to toe and my arm feels numb from awkwardly carrying the heavy table. My hair sticks to the sides of my face in stringy dark brown pieces and I am almost positive that my mascara is running.
I know that I look terrible.
The horrified look on the receptionist’s face confirms this.
“Oh my goodness,” she says, standing to her feet. “Let me get you a towel!”
“Thank you,” I gasp, leaning the folding table against the wall.
Her heels click against the floor as she crosses the room, handing me a fluffy warm towel that she produced from seemingly nowhere. I pat my face dry first, swiping it beneath my eyes to clean up my makeup, and then wring my dripping wet hair out as best as I can.
“It’s really coming down out there,” the receptionist murmurs. “Unbelievable, after the drought we had.”
I grunt in reply, now patting my clothes to try to mop up some of the water on my scrubs.
It’s useless at some point though, because I am thoroughly saturated.
The top half of my shirt in particular is so wet that the white fabric clings to my skin, slightly transparent and revealing my white bra underneath.
My humiliation complete, I hand the towel back to the receptionist with a thank you.
“Elevator’s over there, and you’ll need a code to be able to take it to the seventeenth floor,” she says, writing a code down on a sticky note and handing it to me.
“Thanks,” I say, picking up the travel table. “And thanks again for the towel. You’re a lifesaver.”
She smiles.
With my hair out of my face, I can finally look around and take in my surroundings.
The lobby is luxurious, outfitted with sleek black marble tile and deep green wallpaper.
The elevator doors are bronze and they open with a ding to welcome me inside, the interior mirrored and just as opulent as the reception area behind me.
I find the keypad to the elevator and enter the code with shaky fingers, still shivering slightly from the cold rain. The elevator doors close with another ding and I ascend, going directly to the seventeenth floor without any stops in between.
When the elevator doors open again, I’m let out into an equally luxurious room. Same matching black tile from the reception area below, but now with charcoal gray walls that give the space a foreboding aura — more like a villain’s lair or the Bat-cave than the office of a stuffy businessman.
Great floor to ceiling windows line the wall opposite of the elevator, and in front of the windows sits a massive wooden desk with a black leather chair behind it.