27 Aug A Happy Ending

David Halloway had lived in the new city for less than three months, and already the novelty of relocation had worn away. His apartment was smaller than the one he’d left behind, the traffic worse, the food scene less impressive than the online blogs had promised. What gnawed at him most, though, was the simple truth that everything he’d used to rely on for stress relief was now inconveniently out of reach. The gym he’d gone to for years was two hundred miles back in his old town. His favorite barbershop, same story. Even his massage therapist, a woman named Charlotte who knew precisely how to unknot his perpetually stiff shoulders, was inaccessible.

It wasn’t indulgence. His job at the new firm demanded long hours at a desk, hunched over spreadsheets and conference calls. By the end of each week, his back ached and his neck burned with a tension that no amount of ibuprofen could quite erase. Charlotte had been his lifeline. Now, every time the soreness flared, he thought of her deft hands and her quiet professionalism, and cursed himself for not realizing how difficult it would be to replace something so small but so necessary.

He tried searching online. The first few results were predictable chains—clinical offices with bright photos of smiling staff and clean lobbies. But they were all booked out for weeks. He dug deeper, scrolling through lesser-known names, clicking on Yelp and Google reviews that varied from glowing praise to short, suspiciously vague entries. More than once, he stumbled on warnings about certain “Asian massage” parlors. The comments didn’t spell it out, but the implication was obvious: rub and tugs, sketchy storefronts with neon “Open” signs, places you slipped into if you were lonely enough, or desperate enough, to take the risk.

David told himself he wasn’t interested in that. He wasn’t looking for anything sordid, only relief for his battered back. But curiosity tugged at him whenever he scrolled past a name that sounded too generic or bland, as if trying to hide what it was. He found himself wondering how many men in the city had gone inside those dim rooms, what really happened there.

On a Thursday evening, after a day of relentless meetings, his neck flaring with heat, he refreshed the booking page for the tenth time. Every legitimate clinic was still full. Only one place showed availability—same day, with no wait. The listing was sparse: Lotus Touch Bodywork. They had no website, only a phone number and a handful of reviews, and half of those were one-sentence bursts of praise written in broken English. The others were five-star raves that read strangely alike, like they’d been copied and pasted with only a few words swapped out. It was, by every reasonable standard, a red flag.

He stared at the page for longer than he wanted to admit. He thought about Charlotte again, about her scheduling weeks out and never having a last-minute slot. He thought about his shoulders, already screaming. Then he thought about how his Friday was stacked wall-to-wall with deadlines. If he didn’t find relief tonight, he’d be miserable all weekend.

David told himself it was just a matter of curiosity. He didn’t have to go through with it. He could call, ask questions, and if it felt wrong, hang up. His finger hovered over the number before he finally tapped it.

A woman answered on the second ring. Her voice was flat and uninflected. “Lotus. You come?”

He hesitated, thrown off by the bluntness. “Do you… take walk-ins?”

“Yes. You come now. We open.”

That was it. No questions about his name, no forms to fill out online, no mention of what type of massage he wanted. Just immediate acceptance, as if they’d been waiting for him.

David ended the call, staring at his phone. Every instinct said it was a bad idea. But he was already standing, reaching for his jacket. Perhaps it was reckless, precisely the kind of thing Charlotte would scold him for. But he was tired of stiffness, of endless tension with no outlet.

He told himself he was only going because it was convenient and cheap, and that it would probably be fine. And because, on some level he didn’t want to admit, he wanted to see what was behind the neon signs everyone pretended not to notice.

* * * * * *

The drive across town took less than twenty minutes. David had expected a storefront tucked into some forgotten strip mall, but Lotus Touch Bodywork was stranger than that. The parlor sat wedged between a shuttered laundromat and an insurance office with tinted windows, its only marking a faded vinyl banner with the word Lotus peeling in the corners. The door was glass, the blinds drawn. A neon “Open” sign buzzed faintly in the corner, its red light flickering every few seconds.

He parked and sat behind the wheel longer than he needed to. From outside, the place looked abandoned, yet the faint glow from inside suggested otherwise. His pulse quickened, not from excitement but from the stubborn feeling that once he went in, he wouldn’t be able to excuse himself easily. He thought about turning around, claiming the tension wasn’t that bad, and telling himself he’d wait until a proper clinic could fit him in. But he found his hand on the door handle before the thought fully formed.

The lobby was small, musty, and dimly lit. Incense smoldered in a ceramic dish near the wall, filling the air with a sweet, smoky odor that clung to his nostrils. The walls were painted a muted beige, but the paint bubbled in spots, as though moisture had seeped behind it. A faded waterfall print hung crooked above a two-seat couch that looked older than the building itself.

There was no receptionist desk, only a low counter stacked with pamphlets advertising “full-body relaxation” and “healing touch.” No price list, licenses, or framed certificates were posted. He saw none of the things Charlotte’s office had always displayed.

From behind a curtain, a small, middle-aged woman appeared, her hair tied back in a tight bun streaked with gray. She wore a fitted blouse and dark pants, but her face was impossible to read. Her expression wasn’t exactly hostile, but it wasn’t welcoming either. It was simply blank, as though greeting a stranger was a rote task.

“You here for massage?” she asked.

“Yes,” David said, his voice catching slightly. “I called a few minutes ago.”

She nodded once, then gestured toward the curtain. “You wait. She come.”

That was all. No form to fill out, no clipboard, no questions about injuries or problem areas. She didn’t even ask his name. David hovered, uncertain if he should try to explain what he wanted—deep tissue, focus on shoulders, nothing inappropriate—but the woman had already turned her back, vanishing behind the curtain.

The couch groaned when he sat. He rubbed his palms against his thighs, glancing around the silent room. There was no background music, no soft trickle of water, just the faint buzz of the neon outside and the faint hiss of incense. He thought of Charlotte’s office again, with its sterile scent of eucalyptus and low classical music humming through hidden speakers, and of her tidy clipboard and standardized documents, filled with questions about stress levels and medical conditions. He thought about leaving.

Before the thought could settle, however, the curtain opened again. The woman returned, beckoning him with a tilt of her head. “You come,” she said.

He followed her down a narrow hallway. The carpet was worn, stained dark in places, and the overhead light buzzed with a weak yellow glow. She led him to a small room at the end, gestured inside, and left him there without another word.

The room was dimmer than the lobby, lit only by a red bulb in the corner lamp. The massage table was positioned in the center, covered by a single towel folded in half. There were no sheets or blankets, just the towel. A stool sat in the corner, and against the wall, a low shelf was cluttered with bottles of unidentifiable oils and unlabeled jars.

David shut the door behind him and hesitated. Normally, a therapist would explain how to lie down, what to keep on, and whether to drape with a blanket. Here, there was nothing. He tried to reason with himself—it was just a cultural difference, maybe, or informality. Some places did things differently.

He pulled off his shirt and folded it carefully, then removed his pants. For a moment, he stood in just his underwear, gooseflesh prickling across his skin from the chill in the room. He eyed the towel, unsure how to use it. Should he cover himself, or put it beneath him? After a moment of awkward deliberation, he lay down face-first on the table, slipped the towel over his backside, and adjusted his underwear so they stayed snugly in place.

The headrest’s donut hole smelled faintly of something sour, like sweat or iron. He shifted uncomfortably, already wishing he’d chosen differently. Still, he told himself, he was here now. All he needed was an hour. Just an hour, then relief, then he could forget how odd it felt to even be in this room.

He closed his eyes and waited.

* * * * * *

The door opened without a knock. A petite figure slipped inside, her hair pinned flat, her eyes lowered. She didn’t introduce herself or meet his gaze. She moved with the clipped efficiency of someone mechanically following instructions.

David started to push himself up, to ask about pressure and focus and whether there was a blanket he’d missed. Before he could speak, she reached for the towel and lifted it away as if it were an obstacle she had been told to remove. The cool air on his bare skin made him flinch.

“Is okay?” she asked with an unsettlingly level tone. It wasn’t quite a question, nor was it a statement.

He turned his head to glance back, but the headrest pressed his cheek, and the red lamp on the shelf made everything seem underdeveloped, the edges of objects soft and uncertain.

“Um… yeah,” he said, though he didn’t feel sure.

She tugged the waistband of his underwear downward, farther than he expected, stopping only when the elastic snagged on his hip bones. His protest rose and collapsed on itself; the words felt too fussy, and the room felt too quiet to fill with his awkwardness. He coughed instead, and the sound seemed to be absorbed by the walls.

Her hands were surprisingly warm. She started at his shoulders, palms flat, neither kneading nor stroking—more like brisk polishing, as if trying to scrub fingerprints from a surface. The motion was wrong for a massage; it was too fast and shallow, friction without depth. He braced for disappointment, already rehearsing how he would cut the session short.

Then her thumbs found the knob of tension at the base of his neck and pinned it with unerring precision. She leaned in, expertly applying slow and deliberate pressure through the spot, and something clicked along his spine. Heat unfurled down his back. For the first time in weeks, the angry band in his traps loosened.

“Good,” he whispered into the headrest, startled at the sudden, dramatic relief. He hadn’t meant to say anything at all.

“Is okay,” she repeated, in almost the same tone as before.

Her hands resumed the strange, alternating cadence: a few frantic rubs that generated heat but not progress, followed by a sudden, expert press exactly where he needed it. When she worked well, she worked extremely well, seeking angles he hadn’t known mattered, following the grain of muscle like a map only she could see. When she didn’t, she skimmed over him in jittery bursts that left his skin tingling and his nerves on edge.

David tried to reconcile the two patterns. Maybe she was new. Maybe she’d learned on the job from different people and picked up mismatched habits. He forced his breathing to settle and focused on the good: the way she traced the long ridge of his shoulder blade with a knuckle, how she dragged a palm across the knotty cables under his right scapula until they softened. He began to think he could get through the oddities.

The smell, though—he couldn’t explain the smell. The oils most clinics used were lightly herbal or citrusy. This room carried something heavier underneath the incense. It wasn’t sweat. It wasn’t the stale odor of a poorly cleaned headrest. It reminded him of the day he’d nicked his finger on a can lid and put the cut to his lips without thinking: a mineral tang that rode in the air whenever she leaned close. On one pass, her fingertips skimmed near his cheek, and the scent came with them, faint but distinct, like a whisper of rust.

He tried not to react. His brain supplied a dozen rational explanations—cheap oil, a radiator pipe somewhere behind the wall, a trick of incense blending with something metallic in the room. It’s fine. You’re overthinking. Let her finish the back. He listened instead to the faint scrape of her shoes on the floor as she circled the table, trying to picture her movements through the oval of the face cradle. All he could make out were the tips of dark shoes and the hem of fabric sliding past, sometimes smooth, sometimes catching as if the material had texture he couldn’t quite identify.

Her breathing drew closer to his ear as she leaned over him to reach the opposite shoulder, carrying the same mineral trace. He concentrated on the pressure instead, the relief flooding his right rhomboid as she pinned and held, pinned and held, an old ache unwinding in increments.

“Is okay?” she asked again, near his ear.

He swallowed. “The—uh—the pressure there is good.”

“Is okay,” she repeated.

Her hands slid lower, skimming the outer edges of his ribs. He felt the brief rake of nails through oil—longer than a typical therapist’s nails, and thicker too, almost as if buffed. They weren’t sharp, exactly, but substantial enough that when she dragged them along the grain of his lats, it made the nerves jump like sparks. He tensed and realized he hadn’t told her about the broken rib he’d cracked the winter before, which was still surprisingly tender. He started to lift his head to warn her, and she shifted, changing angle, pressing her palm heel into a spot that sent a clean wash of relief down his side. He let his head sink again. The warning felt unnecessary now, almost impolite.

He found himself waiting for the good sections, riding out the jittery rubbing because the precise work always came after. It became a rhythm inside the quiet: the buzz of the light, the faint hiss of incense, hands that alternated between uncertainty and knowledge. The room’s temperature was difficult to read—his skin prickled at the surface, while deeper layers loosened and warmed wherever she applied slow pressure. He wished he could see her face, not because he expected to read her expression—he suspected she didn’t have one—but because the facelessness of the work made him feel unmoored. In Charlotte’s studio, she would narrate: “I’m going down the right side now,” or “Tell me if this is too much.” Here, there was only the ritual of touch and the occasional Is okay?

He tried twice to ask for a blanket. The first time, the words tangled with a swallow, and by the second, he was distracted by a sudden, perfect release along his spine. It was as if she anticipated every moment he might speak and placed her thumb on the exact place to quiet him.

He shifted his attention to the small things he could control. He flexed his toes to remind himself he could get up if needed. He rehearsed a sentence in his head—Please keep me covered, please don’t go lower—but when she reached the sacrum and pressed deliberately along its edge, the sentence collapsed into sensation. He could feel the mapping of him in her hands, not erotic, per se, but intimate in a way that bypassed language.

The lower her work moved, the more the oddities multiplied. She did not sweep past glute attachments in the clinical, impersonal way he was used to, but hovered there, fingers splayed, as if taking measurements. The towel was long-gone, and the waistband of his underwear still rested lower than felt appropriate. Heat rose to his face, but shame was a weak motivator compared to the relief he finally felt.

He watched her shoes again through the face cradle. Once, the toes seemed to angle in an odd way, as though there were more joints than expected, and then corrected, heel tapping softly as she repositioned. He told himself the distortion came from the limited perspective of the donut hole, a trick of the eyes.

When she moved to the left side, her hand brushed the top of his head, the nails rasping his scalp. It wasn’t necessarily painful, just a coarse drag that left behind a sensation the skin could not categorize. It made him want to shake his head like a dog coming in from rain. He held still instead.

“Is okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, and instantly heard the doubt in it. He added, “Please watch the nails up there.”

She paused for a beat and then resumed, avoiding his head. The next passes were better and cleaner, the pressure steadier along the grooves of muscle that ran from neck to shoulder. He pictured her face again and got nothing. He pictured her hands: broad palms, heavy nail beds, the faint smell he could not name. He imagined her forearms: a very fine down of hair lying flat in one direction and bristling in another when she turned her wrist.

The red lamp hummed. His shoulders unwound another notch. He almost said thank you as another wave of pleasure washed over him.

Her technique hiccuped again—fast rubs at the edge of his ribs, more heat than depth. He waited for the good press to follow, and when it didn’t, he started to push himself up. She adjusted before he could, sliding her palm under his shoulder, levering gently, and then driving her thumb into a knot that felt permanent. A sigh left him before he could catch it. His arms went heavy.

At some point, she switched the lamp to a lower setting, the room slipping into a deeper shade of the same color. In the new, dimmer environment, he became aware of the faintest sound when she exhaled—something wet at the end of the breath, a small, inconsistent catch you might hear in someone recovering from a cold. It appeared when she leaned very close and vanished when she stepped away. He tried not to think about it.

He was ready to speak now, to ask her to pull the underwear back up, to request a drape, and to reassert ordinary boundaries, when her hands landed at the base of his neck and slid in precise mirror strokes down along his spine. They moved in strict symmetry, a matched cadence left and right, knuckles traveling the channel beside each vertebra. The effect was hypnotic. He told himself he would bring up the towel after this pass. After one more. After this last one.

“Is okay?” she murmured, very near his ear again.

“It’s fine,” he said, and heard the way the words chose themselves.

She shifted her weight. The stool feet hissed across the floor and settled near his head. The angle of her reach changed; he could feel her poised directly behind him now, not at his side. The hem of her pants—if they were pants—tickled his temple as she leaned forward, testing the slope of his trapezius with a firm thumb.

David opened his mouth. “Could you—”

The headrest creaked as she angled over him, and the sentence evaporated.

The angle of her reach changed; the stool scraped closer to the head of the table. David felt the space narrow above his crown—and then warmth settled across the back of his neck. Not a hand. Thigh. Another followed, bracketing his head so his ears pressed against skin.

She’s short. Just getting leverage, he told himself. Yet the pressure wrapped rather than balanced, damp heat creeping along his nape while her palms worked his spine. Her breath slid over his upper back when she leaned. That mineral tang rode with it. He tried not to inhale.

“Is okay?” she murmured.

“If you need to stand differently, fine,” he said, meaning the opposite.

Her hands ran lower, the final beat of each long stroke clipping him between the legs. A dull spark jumped his belly. He flinched despite himself.

“Is okay?”

“It’s fine,” he said, heat crawling up his face—and a second, unwelcome heat he could not will away rose farther below.

The alternation continued: jittery friction, then an exact press that unwound a knot; again the jolt at the end that made him tense. The hits weren’t brutal, but they were careless in a way that made his eyes water. Each time the heel of her hand landed, his body betrayed him with a twitch, and each twitch confirmed to him that she knew exactly what she was doing and didn’t intend to alter course. He tried to angle his hips to protect himself.

He hated that his body reacted at all. The collision sent a confused charge through him—pain souring into something electric, then embarrassed warmth. He willed it away, but there was nothing to hide behind. She gave no sign she’d noticed his arousal and kept moving, as though his reactions were irrelevant.

Through the face cradle, he watched her shoes in slivers. Once the hem above them looked like bare skin, then fabric again. Hadn’t she been wearing pants? The memory slid when he reached for it.

Suddenly, her nails grazed his scalp again. She adjusted when he stiffened, then returned with a lighter scrape that made his nerves jump. When she tracked the skin at the base of his skull, he had the sense she could break him open if she chose.

Warmth pressed harder at his nape. It wasn’t the seam of fabric, he was sure of it—its texture was supple and fleshy, but with a faint, regular ridge, shifting bead by bead as she leaned. Then he felt a fold, a crease. He swallowed hard and did his best to banish the thoughts.

When the ridge at his nape shifted again, he paid attention. It wasn’t a single line, but small, firm bumps arranged in an arc, like a zipper felt through cloth. They shifted minutely when she adjusted, pressing and easing in tiny cycles. He told himself it had to be a seam, before the thought drifted.

She moved to his legs. “Is okay?” she asked, oddly formal before acting.

He should have asked for a drape, for space, for anything normal, but he didn’t.

“Yes,” he heard himself say.

A hand slid under both ankles and lifted. With that easy leverage, she peeled his underwear away in one long drag; air climbed him as the fabric cleared his knees and toes. When she set his legs down again, he was completely exposed.

He could have sat up. He didn’t. The failure bothered him as an idea more than an option.

That was when she climbed onto the table in a motion too smooth for the cramped room, and too practiced to be anything other than practiced. Bare thighs met his, unambiguous now, all pretense gone. He chased the certainty that she’d been clothed previously and found only fragments: shoes and a hem. Now there was weight and heat; a damp line traced his inner thigh where her body made contact with his.

From that perch, she worked the muscles of his back in long pulls. Each time she leaned, breath rode his shoulder blade with the same iron note. He tried to turn his face away from within the donut. There was nowhere to go.

Fingers threaded his hair again; nails tracked his scalp, near-pain, then over it. She paused in places as if sampling him. The nails returned to his scalp, slower now, testing boundaries. They combed the crown of his head in near-straight lines, stopping just shy of breaking skin, then dragging down in a path that set his nerves alight. For a moment, the pressure lingered at the soft notch above his spine. Something in him wanted to bolt; the rest of him stayed still.

“Is okay?” she whispered, so near his ear that the consonants brushed him.

He made a sound that was meant to be yes, but wasn’t.

She continued as if permission had been clearly given, moving into the long strokes again.

She flowed forward on the table until her knees framed his ribs, then slid back without the telltale catches of fabric. She was pressing against him, skin to skin now. There was no question about it. Her palms traced long rails down his back and returned up the same tracks, and when she leaned farther to reach, her thighs pressed against his, the ridged arc near her pelvis shifting with her. A wash of damp warmth followed, and the faintest scrape, a delicate rasp that might have been stubble.

He tried to imagine the normal choreography he expected in a place like this—banal chatter meant to reassure, a transactional script. None of that arrived. Instead, she inhaled slowly along his shoulder, then near his ear, and down the side of his neck, where she would pause and hold her breath.

He felt a pinch then, high on the right thigh, causing him to jerk. This was followed by a second pinch on the left. The third landed near the crease where his leg met his torso—a careful pressure, then a nip. Not the pinch of fingers, but of something abrasive and toothlike. Tines. A small, startled sound escaped him.

“I sorry,” she said, perfectly flat. “Is okay?”

“Please, don’t—” he began. The rest fell apart: stop felt too strong, don’t do that too specific, cover me too late.

Her hands slid to his shoulders. “Turn,” she said. “You turn now.” It was an instruction, not a request.

He waited for refusal to rise. Instead, a hush moved over him, sandbagging all semblance of objection. All but involuntarily, he drew his arms in to roll.

Before he could lift his head, cool fabric slipped over his eyes and was tied snugly in one practiced maneuver, and darkness replaced the red of the room, complete and immediate.

With his sight gone, his hearing sharpened. There was a slight thud as the masseuse stepped off the table. The hush of feet on carpet. The faint stretch of something being adjusted. He remained prone, blindfolded, aware of every inch of exposed skin cooling in the air.

“Is okay,” she said, close enough that he could feel the word form at his ear.

“I—can we—” His voice broke on the question when her palm found the center of his back and pressed him gently, decisively flat. There was no anger in it, only unexpected authority.

“Turn,” she repeated, softer now.

He obeyed despite his misgivings, every thought cursing his decisions in real-time. Rolling to his back felt prearranged. The blindfold bit lightly at his temples. It was then he remembered he was naked; the knowledge skittered through him for but a moment before sinking alongside the remainder of his inhibitions.

She did not cover him when he turned. He didn’t know why he was still surprised.

He listened, and heard her take a step to the side. The glassy clink of something set down. The pull of a seal. Somewhere nearby, liquid moved.

“Is okay?” she asked, with no indication of what he was being asked to agree to.

Seemingly against his will, and yet without hesitation, he nodded.

* * * * * *

Liquid moved somewhere to his left—a soft slosh, a rubbery squeak, the wet click of a pump. The scent reached him next. It wasn’t eucalyptus or mint; nothing he could place in a spa. It was green and musky at once, a crushed-leaf sharpness undercut by something fatty, like warm butter salted with something metallic. The mixture reached the back of his tongue and made it tingle.

A cool stripe landed across his shin. Fingers spread it in long, even passes, working from the ankle toward the knee. Wherever the substance touched, the skin went first cold, then gently warm, and finally semi-numb at the edges. Sensation wasn’t entirely gone, but it was muted, as if wrapped in felt.

She avoided his genitals with meticulous care that felt almost mocking after the ordeal of the last half hour. She focused on one of his calves, his knee, and his thigh, then the other leg in the same measured sequence. With each pass, the muscles lost more of their brightness. He could still move, he told himself; he could sit up if he had to. But then he flexed his toes, and the effort seemed gargantuan.

“Is okay?” she asked.

He nodded without meaning to.

Her hands smoothed the mixture along his hips and lower abdomen, spreading warmth that made his abdominal muscles relax by degrees. She paused at the edge of his pelvis—close enough that the proximity prickled—and then moved upward, across his ribs and sternum. The glide should have been clinical, but the thickened oil felt intimate in a way that took his breath away. He kept his breath shallow on purpose, pretending that he was still in control.

She leaned as she worked, and the skin of her obviously bare chest brushed his forearm. The contact was fleeting. The second time it happened, an odd texture caught his attention: not the expected soft give of skin, but a firmer surface underlaid with tiny nodules. At first, he suspected it was a nipple, but a third pass brought an unexpected pressure against his bicep that ended in a pinpoint sting, leaving him perplexed. Then he felt another prick, higher, just below his shoulder, too focused to be accidental. He desperately wished he could remove the blindfold and see what was happening, but taking any action beyond thinking felt daunting.

His limbs grew heavier. He tried to form the words “please cover me” and found the sentence stranded somewhere behind his teeth. Could he even speak anymore?

“Is okay?” she said, her mouth near his ear.

He meant to shake his head. His chin dipped a fraction, bearing more resemblance to a nod than anything. She took it for assent.

“Is okay,” she said, as though concluding a bargain.

She settled her weight lightly across his thighs, not quite sitting, not quite kneeling. The warmth of her pressed into him, unmistakably bare. His mind wobbled around the memory of pants, tried to arrange the images—hem, shoes, fabric—and found the order unreliable. She slid one palm under his lower back, lifted and adjusted his embarrassingly rigid genitals with unhurried confidence, and in that motion, her torso pressed fully against his.

Warmth. At first, all he could feel and think about was warmth. And then, a grid of hard little points met his skin for a beat before drawing away, leaving behind a field of tiny stings.

She leaned in close again, the air near his face once again carrying an unpleasant iron tang. The scent threaded through the odor of the buttery, herbal numbing agent that had been applied to him until he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.

He felt the change in her breathing against his chest—a slower rhythm, with longer pauses at the top. He didn’t want to clock it, but his body refused to cooperate. With each pause, he felt another prick. And with each prick, his body grew increasingly numb, his limbs heavier and increasingly useless.

She slid her palms down his sides and stopped at his abdomen. “Is okay?”

He tried to say no. The word folded. He nodded once, struggling to remain conscious.

Her hands bracketed his navel and spread wider, smearing the last of the warmed mixture in arcs that met at the line of hair below. Every pass left a gentle buzzing behind it. He concentrated on the ceiling he could not see, the red darkness on the inside of the blindfold, the anchoring weight of the table under his shoulder blades. He felt heat pool low in his belly—embarrassment on its surface, something autonomic beneath. She did nothing to encourage that response. She merely waited, palms resting flat. The waiting did more than any touch would have.

When he stiffened, he hated it. He moved to tuck a hand to cover himself, to push her away, but the hand did not arrive. He sent the signal again and got only a twitch in the forearm in response.

She leaned in closer still. The weight of her chest pressed lines of points into him—one, two, three, each a little needle brought to bear, then lifted. His stomach fluttered without his permission, his delicate anatomy throbbing in anticipation even while he struggled to scream in protest. She stayed there, unmoving, allowing his body to communicate its acquiescence.

Her mouth came close to his ear. “Is okay,” she whispered.

It should have been a question. It sounded like an answer to itself.

Words would not gather. Heat shifted through him and settled lower, where his nerves continued to betray him. Shame flickered, then melted away in a semi-conscious haze of confusion, agony, and arousal.

Then, suddenly, he felt warm breath as it touched his lower abdomen. She moved down the centerline of him with a patience that made him want to roll off the table and crawl to the door. He didn’t move.

Her mouth hovered over his erection. He felt its proximity by the change in temperature, by the way the air skimmed that over-sensitized skin and held. He clenched his jaw, expecting contact at any moment. The contact did not come.

Instead, she began to speak.

The language was unrecognizable. The syllables were too smooth and too jointed at once, sliding into each other. Some were voiced so low they were just vibrations felt in his pelvic floor; others were high and grating. The cadence was unearthly, more like a sequence of valves opening and closing than anything approximating human speech.  All the same, his body reacted, as if beckoned.

His skin answered first. The hairs along his thighs rose. Heat gathered and compressed, tightening to a hard knot that throbbed behind his navel. He couldn’t bring breath deep enough to break the pressure. The urge to thrust his hips to meet hers arrived, sudden and unstoppable, dropping through him even with no hand, no stroke, no friction at all.

He tried to think This is wrong, tried to call up the word stop, but it was futile. His body answered only to the orifice poised inches from him, mouthing words he had no choice but to obey.

The pressure built past the point where it should have been released and emptied him, and kept climbing. The pain of it flashed white, blurring his vision. The voice wound tighter, sending shockwaves along his nerves in agonizing bursts.

Finally, explosively, he climaxed. His body seized, writhing in the throes of torturous, unwanted pleasure and pain, wave after wave crashing over him relentlessly.

He expected fluid. None arrived.

But something else did.

It left him in a long, steady stream that he could feel but could not place. It had weight without mass and temperature without heat; it was the feeling of standing too close to a thunderstorm when your skin knows lightning is near, or the feeling of waking from anesthesia when one’s mind has yet to be fully restored. It flowed from him through the point where she hovered and into her waiting mouth.

The voice swallowed greedily between phrases as if whatever was leaving his body was sustenance.

All the while, she did not touch him, and yet he quivered, helpless, as she drained the essence escaping his traitorous body.

He tried to push himself up on his elbows. His elbows did not answer. He thought of his name—David—and it sounded distant and unfamiliar.

The stream thinned. She responded by adjusting the angle of her mouth slightly, and the flow picked up again, as if she had found the sweet spot in a siphon.

Time slipped. The room became red-black through his blindfold, and the room spun.

At some point, she mounted him. He knew because the warmth of her thighs found his hips with practiced accuracy. The skin there was slick with the herbal mixture, but beneath the slickness was a different texture—an armor of fine ridges he had mistaken for gooseflesh when she brushed him before. Up close, the pattern was too regular for that.

Her hands positioned his engorged genitals with a matter-of-factness that shocked him even then.

Then the blindfold slipped. She caught it with two fingers and drew it up off his face.

The room returned as a dim stain, the red lamp turned low, the walls seemingly closer than before. She filled most of his view, close enough that he could see the mask of human skin as a layer that didn’t quite belong. The hair at her temples sat perfectly, each hair obedient; the line of the jaw was almost too straight, the ears too smooth. Her eyes were dark, little more than holes drilled in a canvas.

She reached up and caught the edges of her face behind both ears, pinching points only she could find. When she pulled, a seam opened. It did not tear so much as unzip along a line already intended for that purpose. Skin peeled back over cheekbones with a rubbery tug, and what lay beneath made his thoughts flatten.

There was no gore, just a second surface, leather-dark, slick, and paneled, each panel etched with fine, repeating grooves. Where a mouth should have been was a complex, circular arrangement that reminded him, in a way he was ashamed to think, of gill slits and flower buds and something made for crushing. The discarded human lips hung to either side, useless now, the way a glove looks once the hand has been removed.

“Is okay?” she asked, voice unchanged. The question came from lower in the throat, as if the old mouth had never been involved.

He nodded, though he didn’t mean to. He felt his chin perform the motion in a smooth, obedient arc, even as every ounce of his being recoiled in abject terror.

Heat met him at the same moment, a ring of firm tissues opening around the head of his erection. Not teeth he knew, not enamel, but rows of keratinous nubs arranged in spirals, each one with a hint of sharpness at its tip. They found purchase along sensitive skin and held, then tightened. A gentle clamp. A trial bite. He bucked as far as the numbness would allow, trying to throw her off of him. She ignored his efforts and adjusted her angle, slowly, and fed the length of him into that arrangement by degrees.

Where the ring touched, the stream of vapor that had poured from him earlier, before tapering off, resumed with ferocity. The flow threaded into her, each pulse matched by a subtle contraction deep inside her abdomen. The keratinous nubs ratcheted in tiny increments—grip, release, advance, grip again—until he was seated so deeply that the world narrowed to the point where their bodies met.

She lowered until her torso lay flush over his. The grid on her chest pressed a constellation of points into him that prickled at first, then stung, then sank, each contact a needle of numbness that bloomed outward. She held him there, pinned in alignment.

Something inside her fluttered around him like a jointed tongue. He felt the flutter at several depths at once. He would have arched away if he’d had the strength. Instead, his body delivered only a minute shiver.

Then, abruptly, she went still. A second passed in which nothing moved. Her eyes watched his face without blinking.

“Is okay,” she said.

Suddenly, the ring around him tightened, and the world thinned. The sound that left him might have been a plea, or it might have been gratitude that the ordeal was finally over. He couldn’t tell. The flow poured out of him until the edges of himself grew light, until his hands might have been smoke resting on the table rather than solid matter.

He tried one last time to say no. The word arrived as breath with no substance, while the rest of him dissolved.

She fed until there was nothing left to take.

The last thing he registered was her face leaning in close—human mask folded back like petals, underlying mechanism glossy and content—and the small, satisfied click as whatever valve inside her closed.

* * * * * *

David surfaced like someone hauled from deep water. His lungs burned, but no breath moved until the air came of its own accord, sudden and unasked for. He blinked into a dark room. He no longer wore a blindfold, and the red lamp was off. Everything was still.

He was lying on the massage table, fully dressed. His shirt was buttoned, his belt buckled. His shoes were on his feet, laces tied with knots too neat to be his. He sat up, groaning at the weight of his limbs. His skin prickled as if he’d recently lain in nettles. He rubbed his eyes and felt raised tracks down his neck and arms—tiny crescents, shallow bites stippled across his flesh.

He swung his legs down and nearly collapsed. His knees wobbled, barely able to support him. He staggered, caught the edge of the table, and steadied himself. The smell of herbs and iron still clung to his clothes, soaked through the fibers. His loins tingled.

He didn’t remember much, only flashes: the strange voice at his ear, the ring of ridges gripping him, the peeling of her skin. He told himself he must have blacked out. That explained the gaps. He tried to hold onto them, to string them together, but each time he grasped for a detail, it slipped away.

The door creaked when he leaned against it. The hallway stretched ahead in muffled dimness, yellow light flickering from a single dying bulb. Dingy carpeting muffled his uneven steps. Every joint felt too loose, as though something had drained not only his strength but the articulation from his frame.

At the far end of the corridor, a door glowed faintly underneath. A line of pale light traced the seam at the floor. He followed it, one hand trailing along the wall to keep upright.

The closer he came, the more the smell shifted—less herbal now, and more like cleaning solution. He reached for the knob, intending to leave quietly.

Before his fingers touched it, the door opened.

The owner stood there, the middle-aged woman with the bun pulled so tight it seemed painful. She smiled faintly, as if nothing were out of order, and gestured toward a clipboard on the counter.

“You pay,” she said. Her voice was flat and businesslike.

David hesitated, searching her face for any trace of what had happened, but found nothing. Her expression was a mask of polite expectation. His hands moved of their own will, reaching for his wallet. He slid bills across the counter without bothering to count them. The woman clipped them beneath the clipboard with smooth efficiency, then tapped a line with her finger.

“Sign.”

His penmanship staggered. He wrote something, his name perhaps, though the letters swam the moment he put pen to paper. Regardless, she tucked the paper away without reading it and handed him his card.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling again.

He nodded, though his mind was still struggling to shape questions. What had happened? What had he agreed to? Why did the word okay echo in his skull?

The bell over the door chimed faintly as he pushed it open. The night air washed over him, cool and startling. The street looked both familiar and not. He knew he had parked a car, but for a moment couldn’t recall which side of the road it was on. His vision blurred when he turned, the signs unreadable.

He eventually stumbled into the driver’s seat. His fingers curled around the wheel, but his thoughts had already begun to thin, as though something were plucking them out one by one. He drove home in a haze.

By the time he reached his apartment, the massage parlor was gone from memory. He could not summon the name, or the street, or why he’d chosen it in the first place. All he carried was soreness along his thighs, an aftertaste of iron, and a vague sense of shame.

* * * * * *

A week passed before anything obvious happened. The soreness faded, the metallic taste lifted. David told himself he’d overreacted to a bad massage at a parlor so unremarkable he couldn’t recall anything about it. He resolved to leave them a terrible review online when it came to him.

Then, one night, a quick flutter woke him—the faintest quiver low in his pelvis, as if a muscle had twitched and was waiting to be noticed.

He lay still and felt it again: a ripple under the skin traveling left to right and down. He went to the bathroom. In the mirror, his abdomen looked normal until a thin wave crossed above the beltline and vanished. Another rolled lower. He pressed his palm there and felt something answer from beneath, slow and sure, like a fish brushing a dock.

It was gas, he told himself, or nerves. The thought held until the movement slid downward and gathered at the base of his genitals. The skin there shifted in a way it never had, an involuntary constriction that made his stomach pitch, even as the signs of arousal became evident. He doubled over the sink and dry heaved.

By morning, the sensations returned hourly. He called in sick to work and retired to his bedroom, shutting the door behind him and intending to rest in bed.

However, he suddenly felt an urgent need to use the bathroom, and rushed to it. When he opened his fly, he saw motion along the shaft: a slow, segmented shift from base to tip and back again. Something small pressed outward beneath the skin and traveled, then another behind it. Words left him.

Involuntarily, his hand moved to the base of his engorged genitals, and he began to stroke.

The first spasms arrived fast. When he climaxed, what left him wasn’t fluid.

Something pale, resembling a larva, hit the porcelain with a soft pop and stuck. It wriggled, then moved toward the basin. Another followed, then another. Horrified, he brought his palm down and smeared the first into paste that smelled faintly of brine and antiseptic. He crushed the second with a wad of toilet paper, the third with his heel. The fourth slipped under his hand, surprisingly firm, and squirmed free. He gagged.

They kept coming: thin, translucent bodies the length of a fingernail, tapered and ringed with faint ridges that helped them inch across porcelain, poured from his urethra. A darker thread ran along each core. Every few seconds, another was expelled, the cadence unbroken, and each arrival triggered a wave of sickening near-pleasure that rolled through him without consent. His legs shook. He vomited into the tub.

He tried to pinch the flow shut, and pain flared; the instruction inside him overrode it. He did the only thing left to do: he smashed. Some of the larvae burst with wet cracks. Others flattened and kept writhing until he ground them again.

Time buckled. His phone buzzed five minutes after the first organism hit porcelain. By that time, he had crushed dozens, maybe more, and the quiver in him had slowed, though not stopped. It was impossible to keep up with all of them.

A last, thicker larva slid out with a sensation like a knot passing. He brought the shoe down and felt it pop.

Silence followed. Weakness filled him. He rinsed the basin. Water spun bodies and fragments toward the drain. Some clung to the porcelain with their ridges. He scrubbed until they disappeared down the drain.

He slid down to the tile, back to the tub. The survivors lay near the baseboard, glistening. He brought his heel down, leaving streaks on the grout. The smell changed as the mess warmed—salty and sweet at once.

He meant to stand. His legs didn’t agree. He lowered to his shoulder.

Something tickled his ankle, and he brushed at it. The tickle returned behind the knee, then the inside of his thigh. He lifted his head and saw them. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Far more than he had imagined had been expelled.

These were transparent and moved with a different intent. They oriented toward him and advanced in a wavering line.

He swatted, slow and clumsy. The first wave reached his shin and climbed, each tiny body flexing and gripping with those faint ridges. The sensation wasn’t pain, but wet pressure along the hairs and pores, as many mouths tasted him. He could have swept them off if his limbs had obeyed. They didn’t.

A cluster reached the stippled ridges along his inner thigh and settled. The contact sharpened. Each larva found a point and attached. He felt dozens of small tugs in quick succession. The skin there went cool, then numb in tiny circles that spread as they worked. He tried to kick and managed only a weak jerk. The effect of their toxins was immediate and dramatic.

They climbed, finding the tracks other hands had left a week before. Wherever they latched, the skin cooled, then dulled. A few arranged themselves beneath his navel, head to tail, as if following a diagram. He realized, too late, that they were following the trail their parent had prepared.

He turned his head and saw the slight, iridescent trail some had left on the tile. A few stragglers tasted at his wrist, testing thin places. He shook his hand. Two fell; three didn’t.

Feeding deepened. The first real sting bit through the numbness like a mint-cold needle. More joined, and the stings blended into a field of chill advancing under his skin.

He tried to roll onto his stomach to crush them or cast them away. His body started a turn and stalled at a diagonal. The larvae adjusted without losing purchase. A few detached, poured forward like a seam opening, and reattached higher, closer to the soft places under his ribs.

“Stop,” he mumbled incoherently. The command had no effect.

His vision narrowed to a band across the lower wall, where the paint was peeling. He listened to the small, damp sounds the larvae made while they worked.

When it finally eased, after a long while, he noticed their mouths lifting in unison. Many small bodies turned at once as if listening to something he couldn’t hear, and the line along his abdomen rearranged with quiet efficiency. A few dropped and clicked onto the tile floor, while others flowed toward the warmth between his legs and settled there.

He lay on the floor, exhausted and immobile. At the edge of his view, pale shapes worked over him, each attachment slow and sure. The smell was thicker now, a sweetness braided with metal.

The tiniest teeth set themselves again along tender skin and found purchase.

David closed his eyes, and all at once, in earnest, they began to feed.