Sweet Release (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance) (4 page)

Ella

“All done,” I announced.

Neema nodded, groggy, and stretched her arms, and then turned her neck to one side until it cracked. “There is magic in your hands, Ella,” she said in her thick accent. “In Nigeria, you would be tried for witchcraft.”

I laughed, uncertain if she was joking or not. “Good thing we’re not in Nigeria, then,” I said. “I can work all the magic I want here.”

She sat up, holding the sheet over her chest, and purred like a cat whose been laying in the sun. She smiled at me. “Thank you again.”

I accepted her thanks, and left quietly to let her dress.

While I washed my hands at the sink in the corner of the gym space, I snuck a peek at the ring. Michael was training with Jarome, doing something like kata, but more brutal; MMA combos and take downs I assumed. They weren’t much different than some of the stuff I’d worked on with my own instructor, Chelsea.

Mike ducked a right cross from Jarome, feinted forward for a tackle, and when Jarome brought his knee up Mike pulled to the left, hooked an arm around his opponent’s, and slipped his leg behind the only one Jarome had left on the ground. The both went down, and Mike went for a submission hold I couldn’t quite see clearly.

Jarome tapped, though, so it must have worked. The two men got up, and did it again. After a few repetitions, Neema opened the door to my massage room and came out, still stretching and sighing. She pressed a twenty into my hand, and kissed my cheek. “You’re a life saver,” she said. “See you in a couple of days?”

“I can put you on the books regular if you like,” I told her. “If we’re getting into a pattern.”

Neema nodded. “I’ll have Alice take care of it.”

“Great!” My first regular client. Go me.

I had the rest of the morning open. After I cleaned the table down and reset the room, I leaned against the doorway and watched Mike and Jarome for a while longer. Whatever he trained in before, it looked like it was mostly mid to long range stuff. He was good with his arms and legs, but seemed a little awkward when he got in close. There was some fancy hand and arm work going on there, too. Something Chinese, maybe? I’d almost taken Tai Chi during my tour of which ancient art of butt-kicking I wanted to commit myself to, and some of that looked vaguely familiar, but adapted into something harder and faster.

It was fascinating to watch, whatever it was he was doing, and started to rouse an itch in me that I’d been getting ever since I started working here. I’d started training because I wanted to defend myself; to never be helpless again. It had been necessity, at first, but later on I really enjoyed it. Now that I was focused on trying to hold down a career and develop a clientele, martial arts had fallen by the wayside.

Wonder what it would be like to train with Mike? He was twice my size, easily. Chelsea had run a class with mostly women; some of them were bigger than me, of course, but none of them had the mass he had. It would probably have been fun to show him a thing or two.

I realized I was smiling when he glanced at me and smiled back. Right before Jarome drove him hard into the floor of the ring. I winced on his behalf.

Jarome saluted me, and then helped Mike up. He said something to him; probably about not getting distracted. That gave me another, more private little smile. Had I distracted him? It sure looked like it.

It wasn’t the first time I’d watched him train. Over the last couple of days, now that I knew who he was, I’d seen him working with Jarome, and working with his own students. He seemed like a patient teacher. That was a good sign. If you could maintain some poise in an environment like this, you must be an even tempered guy, right? He also worked himself hard, and I wondered how long it would be until he got on my table.

I wondered, too, whether or not that was a good idea.

I didn’t wonder too hard, though.

And I didn’t have to wonder for very long, either. That afternoon, when I came back from lunch, I had both a cancellation, and a new client. Mike. I got a giddy little thrill that was wholly unprofessional, but kept it entirely hidden behind a professional mask so that Alice didn’t judge me for it. Still, she winked at me when I noted it had changed.

“You know,” I told her, lying through my teeth, “you do it enough and they’re just bodies.”

“Well I don’t know how you do it,” Alice said. “Not with something like that on your table.”

I just shrugged. It was a mystery. To her and to me.

When Mike finally came by, he was sweaty, and ragged, and his gym clothes were plastered to his body. He was moving stiffly. “Saw you had someone cancel,” he said. “Had to get in here. Jarome is a slave driver.”

“I do hear that,” I agreed. “Don’t worry; I got you.”

He looked down at himself. “I didn’t even think about it; I just finished up. I can shower off first, if you want.”

I waved a hand at him. “It’s okay. I clean the table afterward anyway and a little sweat doesn’t bother me.”

He nodded, frowning appreciatively. His world was probably soaked in sweat most of the time.

Plus, the scent of him was already in the room and honestly it wasn’t bad at all. On second thought, maybe he should shower.

But I couldn’t bring myself to order it. “Well, just undress, get under the top sheet and… I’ll be back in just a minute. I’ll, ah, knock before I come in.”

Mike dipped his head, and waited by the table until I closed the door. That was something. Most of the guys, even the ones that didn’t give me crap, at least started to take off their shirts before I left the room. Every little chance to show off, I guessed. I made a point of ignoring it when they did even though the fact was this place was chocked full of hot bodies.

When I came back in a few minutes later, Mike was obediently on the table, face down, and covered to his lower back under the sheet. I couldn’t help but notice the perfectly bubbled shape of his butt. So far I’d only seen him in gym shorts or pants and he certainly showed well in them; I bet he filled out a pair of jeans nicely, though.

I spread cream over his back and shoulders, and got to work. The sculpted lean muscle covering his body was insane. This man had to have spent years doing nothing but getting in shape. He had to have twenty pounds on anyone else I’d seen so far, and it was all hard, functional muscle. I got into it with my elbows just a few minutes after I started.

“Saw you training with Jarome,” I said while I worked.

When he spoke, it was with just a hint of strain. “Yeah. He’s great. Getting me caught up on the close quarters stuff. That is, throws, takedowns, that sort of thing.”

“Yeah,” I chuckled, “I know. You look like you’re more of a mid to long range fighter. Maybe kung fu?”

“Uh, actually yeah,” he said, surprised. “Did you train?”

“Not in that,” I said as I changed angles and set my stand to sink knuckles into his shoulder muscle, “but I did about five years of Krav Maga. I sort of studied around at first, though.”

“Holy shit,” he muttered. “Five years? Wow. You know, I kinda figured you for a bad ass when I first saw you.”

“Did you, now?” I wondered, smiling. “Well, I don’t know how ‘bad ass’ I am. I haven’t really been in a fight before. But, I guess that’s the thing you want, right?”

“Eh, well,” he laughed a little, “depends. I’m training for the ring, so…”

“Right,” I said. “I guess for you the point is getting into fights.”

“Sort of.” A pause. “So, if not to fight, what got you into it?”

Such a long story; and a mood killer. Not that there was a mood… But I still I paraphrased greatly. “I had a rough time, once, a few years ago, and decided I didn’t want a repeat. So I figured I needed a new path. Martial arts helped. A lot.”

“It does that,” Mike said, his tone distant. “I actually had kinda the same experience. Needed a new path, like you said. My teacher—my first real teacher, I mean—he changed my life. Gave me something I never had before.”

“Awesome kung fu skills?” I asked.

Mike laughed again. “Well, yeah. But also, sort of… I don’t know, an outlet? Focus. Like I had a purpose.”

I smiled at that. Purpose. Yes. It wasn’t really martial arts that had given me that, but it was part of the whole picture. If you wanted to change your life, you had to have a new purpose. Or any purpose, if you didn’t have one to begin with.

“So how’s that working out for you?” I asked.

“So far, so good,” he said. “What about you?”

“Well, I’m here—so it’s a step in the right direction, for sure.” I switched sides. “So, are you from around here?”

“I am. You?”

“No,” I said. “I moved out here just a few weeks ago and started looking for a job.”

“Really? What brought you to a place like this?” He sounded surprised, and probably not for nothing—this city had charm, but it was the tarnished, slightly used variety. The kind with low rent.

“Wanted a change of scenery.” His muscles just didn’t quit. I had to drop one of his arms off the side of the table to get any deeper into this shoulder. His fingers brushed my leg a little when I did, and he moved his elbow town to keep them out of the way. Cute.

“From what? Where you from?”

“Frampton Heights,” I said.

He snorted. “Really? You?”

“What, do I not look refined enough?”

“Not at all,” Mike said quickly, “just, you know… I figured everyone up there was all… housewives, or doctors, or… just a different kinda professional. No offense.”

“None taken,” I assured him. “You’re not wrong, anyway. I ah… well, I lived there for a little while and it got to be a little stifling.” The thing about being a former victim, is that you never again want to mention that you were a victim once before. Maybe it’s some version of PTSD, but there’s always this thought in the back of your head that if you let someone know that about you, they might try to make you a victim again.

Not me. Never again.

“Funny,” Mike said. “I kinda come from a similar place. Not similar to Frampton Heights, I mean but, you know… money, and status and claustrophobia. Like I had to be one thing, and if I was anything else no one really understood—like I was some ignorant guy who didn’t understand how the world worked when I just didn’t like the way it worked.”

Funny. You see guys like Mike and you just assume they’re hard, through and through. And maybe Mike was hard—he certainly felt it on the surface—but deep down we were more alike than I’d imagined.

We chatted a little more, inconsequential stuff, shop talk, what I was doing to his muscles and why; eventually, I was done with the back of his body, and asked him to roll over.

“Okay, boss,” he said, and flipped himself over while I suspended the sheet to keep him from pulling it off the table.

When I lowered the sheet onto him, it clung to his body, damp with sweat. I tried to ignore the mound of his groin. He wasn’t hard, or anything, but somehow that just made it all the more intriguing. It was still considerable, and hard to miss. Focus; eyes front.

I focused on his upper chest, and then his arms, and then there was still time on the clock so I worked his abs. He twitched when I touched him there, and he was washboard flat and toned; slick with sweat that hadn’t quite been wicked away entirely by the bottom sheet. I worked my way down into the lower abdominals, following lines of tension that really were there, but took me dangerously close to that sleeping monster.

When I’d gone as far as I reasonably could, I switched to his quads. The tendons of his inner thigh stood out, pulled taut by the bunched muscles around his knee. So I picked his knee up to get a bend in his leg. “Gonna stretch right through here,” I ran a finger down his inner thigh. “Tell me if I push you too far.”