Chapter 6
Trace
Maisie
Oz’s hands sink into me like warm water finding every crack in dry earth.
His palms flatten against the seized muscle on either side of my spine.
The boundaries of where he ends and I begin get confused immediately. The warmth moves through my skin, seeping into my knotted muscles as he finds the shape of the spasm the way you’d trace the outline of something in the dark.
Learning it.
Mapping its edges, then filling it with heat so precise my locked muscles have no choice but to surrender.
The first knot releases.
I make a sound into my folded arms that I’ll be taking to my grave.
“There,” Oz says, low and steady behind me. “That one’s been there for at least six weeks.”
“Longer,” I manage, and my voice is somebody else’s.
His hands spread wider.
Except hands is already the wrong word.
He’s pouring himself across my shoulders in a slow, deliberate wave. Substance and warmth and weight distributing itself across the whole disaster zone of my upper back with an intelligence that makes every massage I’ve ever paid for look like someone guessing at a combination lock.
He already has the code.
The second knot goes.
The third.
Each one releases with a sick, sweet ache that blooms outward and dissolves into something disturbingly close to pleasure. My fingers curl against the table. I press my forehead harder into my arms. The breath comes out ragged.
I feel him adjust his pressure in real time to match the rhythm of my exhale.
Something about how attentive he is…
It sends a chill through my body.
I’m a grown woman with a production schedule and a spine that was trying to murder me thirty seconds ago.
The appropriate response to therapeutic back relief is gratitude, maybe a Yelp review.
Absolutely not the slow liquid heat pooling low between my legs and making my thighs tense against the stool.
But my body has been running on fumes and caffeine and stubbornness for years.
The last person who touched me with any kind of intention was Kyle, and every time he did, it felt like an obligation.
This is different.
Oz’s warmth is everywhere now.
Every place he touches lights up with a sensitivity I forgot I was capable of.
He moves down my spine.
The spasm that dropped me to my knees is a memory now, replaced by a loose, liquid warmth that keeps spreading past the zones that could reasonably be called therapeutic. His form traces the curve of my ribs, and I feel myself arch into it before I can decide whether I meant to.
“Your breathing changed,” Oz says.
“I’m aware.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
He’s already going still against my back, that warm weight holding perfectly motionless while he waits for me to answer. I can feel the patience in it like a physical thing, decades of practice at being ready for someone to say no.
I say, “No, don’t stop.”
The stillness breaks like a held breath releasing.
He moves.
The warmth spreads down the sides of my ribs in slow waves, tracing paths that have nothing to do with any anatomy a licensed massage therapist would recognize.
He’s following something else now. The flush of my skin, maybe.
The shift in my pulse. The way my hips tilted a quarter inch toward the table when I said don’t stop.
His form thins where it touches me, spreading wider, individual currents within him moving at different speeds—some slow and deep against the muscle, others barely there, skating the surface of my skin through my shirt with a lightness that makes me shiver.
Pressure and whisper.
I grip the edge of the worktable and my knuckles go white.
“You’re holding your breath,” he says.
I let it out in a rush. “Habit.”
“You do that when something feels good. You brace against it.” His voice is resonant enough that I feel it in my teeth. “Like you’re waiting for it to cost you something.”
I want to argue.
I want to deploy the dry, deflecting voice that gets me through farmer’s markets and supplier negotiations.
That voice is offline.
Whatever Oz is doing along the curve of my waist has short-circuited the part of my brain responsible for self-preservation through humor. What’s left is just raw sensation.
He reaches the small of my back and pauses.
I understand he’s found something new.
His warmth pools in the dip of my lower spine and stays, deepening.
My hips rock forward before I can catch them.
The sound I make is quiet and completely unambiguous.
“Maisie, tell me what you want.”
“I don’t—” My fingers drag against the tabletop. “I don’t know how to say it.”
“Try.”
The word hangs there, gentle and immovable.
I press my face into my arms.
My shirt has ridden up where his warmth spread past the hem. Every nerve ending I own is awake and straining toward him, and he’s reading every single one.
Cataloging what makes me tense and what makes me melt.
Adjusting in real time with a precision that borders on obscene.
“Lower,” I say into my arms. “Go lower.”
He obeys.
Warm, liquid weight slides beneath the waistband of my leggings with a fluidity that no hand could replicate. Conforming to the shape of me as he finds it.
I gasp so hard the table shakes.
He’s warm and slick and impossibly thorough. Spreading across the swell of my hips, the curve of my ass. Tracing the crease where my thigh meets my body with an attention so focused I can feel it like a gaze.
“Oh, God.” My voice runs on a frequency below language. “Oh, that’s—”
“I know.” Soft. Almost reverent. “I can feel it.”
Of course he can. Every microshift, every clench, every degree of heat my body is throwing off. He’s reading me the way a seismograph reads the earth, and right now the earth is shaking.
His warmth slips between my thighs and I stop thinking in sentences.
He finds me with the same deliberate precision he used on my spine, and the comparison ends there. This is nothing like therapeutic relief. This is a warm, living intelligence pressing itself against the most sensitive part of my body and learning it in real time.
He spreads across me in a slick, pulsing wave that conforms to every fold and nerve ending between my legs.
I feel him discover what makes my breath hitch and immediately do more of it. Pressure building and releasing in a rhythm that runs just ahead of my own pulse, coaxing me forward.
“There,” I breathe when he finally reaches my clit. My hips are moving. I’m grinding against the table like an animal in heat and I can’t stop, I don’t want to stop. “Right there, don’t—”
He focuses.
The diffuse warmth narrows to a single point of concentrated, rolling pressure exactly where I need it. Then it widens again in a slow, devastating bloom that covers everything. Then it narrows again.
Pulse. Bloom.
My thighs are shaking.
The worktable is creaking under my grip.
Somewhere behind me a jar rattles against the shelf and I don’t care.
I care about the heat between my legs and the way it keeps building, tightening, winding toward something enormous.
He’s everywhere.
Inside my leggings, spread across my hips. A warm current tracing the cleft of my ass and another working my clit with a focused, rhythmic insistence that would be embarrassing if I had any pride left.
I sold my pride about thirty seconds ago for whatever this is.
“Maisie.” His voice vibrates through every point of contact. I feel my name in my spine, my stomach, the soles of my feet. “It’s okay to let go.”
I’m already there.
The edge of it rises up under me like a wave and I feel my whole body clench against him. He responds, pressure surging to meet the contraction, matching it, amplifying it, mixing with my wet arousal.
I come so hard my knees buckle.
The only thing holding me up is him and the table and my own white-knuckled grip on the edge.
My body convulses in rolling waves, each one met with a pulse of warmth that extends the peak. I’m shaking and gasping and the orgasm just keeps going, fed by his attention, sustained by the way he reads each aftershock and gives it exactly enough pressure to crest again.
I come twice.
Three times.
Or maybe once, for a very long time.
The boundaries blur.
By the end, I’ve collapsed forward on the table with my cheek pressed against the cool surface and my mouth open in a desperate gasp.
He gentles. The intensity recedes by degrees, his warmth spreading thin and soft across my skin like a blanket being drawn up. The pulsing slows, matching my breathing.
I can feel him against the length of my back, warm and heavy. Somewhere deep in his form something is beating in a slow rhythm that presses against my back.
A pulse.
His version of a heartbeat.
Or a purr.
Or something I have no word for because nothing in my life has prepared me for this.
I lie there.
My body is ringing like a struck bell and every muscle I own has gone liquid and I feel cracked open in a way that is both amazing and terrifying.
Against my back, his colors are doing something.
I can see the reflection in the glossy surface of the table: deep, saturated waves of teal bleeding into gold flashing in a violet so rich it looks almost black.
He’s lit up like a galaxy.
Whatever just happened to me happened to him too, in whatever way a slime experiences the first voluntary touch of his existence turning into this.
I close my eyes. My fingers unclench from the table edge one by one.
The first coherent thought I have is about the calendula—specifically, whether the jar actually fell, because dried calendula petals are eleven dollars a pound.
I lift my head and peer sideways.
The jar is tilted but intact.
I let out a shaky breath that breaks into something halfway between a laugh and a sob. My face is still pressed into my arms and I can’t seem to lift it.
“Oz.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to need you to not look at me for a second.”
His warmth shifts, a careful retreat. “I can face the door.”
“Thank you.”