by Lily Morton
I laugh, but even as we wander the shelves and exchange banter, I’m watching him closely. His mood seems to have deteriorated. He’s tense now and seems restless and almost cross, staring into space and tapping his fingers on a table.
I consider his bitten nails and his closed-off expression. He doesn’t seem to have taken any pleasure in looking around the shop that he claimed to have wanted to see. And even though I know he enjoys reading because his conversation is peppered with book references, today, he hasn’t spared a glance at the shelves. That’s rather odd, because I’m sure that any book lover couldn’t resist a shelf full of books.
I choose the last of my books and add it to the pile in his arms. Then, seeing the tight expression on his face, I take them back. “I’ll carry these,” I say.
He blinks, almost as if he’s forgotten I’m here, and it stings a little. I’m not used to behaviour like this. People are usually either glad to see me or detest me. There aren’t usually any half measures.
I continue to analyse his expression as we get into the queue to pay for the books. “Have you got a headache?” I ask softly.
For a second, I think he’ll respond sharply, but then he sighs and rubs his forehead. “A little. I’ll take my tablets, and I’ll be fine.” I go to hand my card to the woman behind the counter, and he exclaims, “No, I’m buying those, Mags.”
“Why?”
He smiles at me, his earlier mood easing slightly. “It was my idea, so it’s my treat.”
He says something to the woman behind the counter, who giggles, gazing at him in appreciation. I can’t blame her. I can’t believe that I ever thought him easy to overlook. Every time I see him now, I’m struck by the broadness of his shoulders and the long length of his legs, the cheeky smile, and that angular face.
“Ready?” he asks, handing me the bag of books. “You alright, Mags? You look deep in thought.”
“Just contemplating booking the next few weeks off work so I can read these and have fun.”
He chuckles and I follow him out of the shop. He stops on the pavement and rubs his temples. “Now a drink,” he says briskly.
I watch him for a second, thoughts tumbling in my head. “No,” I say, making up my mind. “It’s my turn to decide the evening’s entertainment.”
“I’m not going to a brothel.”
“Not in those clothes, no.”
That startles a laugh out of him that eases the shadows in his eyes. “Where are we going, then?” he asks with his usual easy-going manner.
“Do you trust me?”
“Not at all.” We gaze at each other for a long moment. A slow smile spreads across his face, pulling out a dimple in his left cheek. “But then that’s half the fun, Mags.”
Chapter Nine
Mags
He follows me as I set off, moving at a slower pace so his leg won’t hurt.
“Are we walking there?” he asks.
“It’s only a few streets away.”
He falls into step beside me, and we walk together, an easy silence falling between us. After a few minutes, I stop. “Here we are.”
He looks up at the building. “Athena Spa and Sauna,” he reads. He nudges me. “Sounds a bit rude. Have we come here for a happy-ending massage?”
I roll my eyes. “I have never paid for a happy ending in my life, and I don’t intend to start today.” I shoot him a quick glance. “Have you?”
“Paid for it?” He shakes his head. “Just a few weeks ago, you had me down as a penniless artist, and now you’ve made me into a baller.”
“I’ve made you into a cretin.”
I enjoy the sound of his laughter as we walk into the foyer. It’s an instantly calming atmosphere with whitewashed walls and lush plants. Recessed lights are dotted about, which will be better for Laurie’s eyes, and the air smells of mint and eucalyptus.
He gazes around with lively interest as I turn to the receptionist. “How are you, Mr Carlsen?” she says.
“Fine, thank you, Cynthia. We’re here for the sauna, and my friend needs a massage.”
“I do?” Laurie’s stunned question overrides the receptionist, and he grimaces. “Sorry,” he says to her. “Go ahead.”
She smiles at him. “What massage would you like?”
“Oh, I don’t know that I do need one—”
“Shoulders, back, and face,” I interrupt, looking at him in a contemplative fashion. “They’re all the areas he’s holding tense.” I wrinkle my nose. “At this point, it would be easier to name the places where he isn’t tense.”
“Not the face,” he says quickly. “I don’t think that would be advised.”
He immediately looks discomfited, and the receptionist stands up. “That’s good, sir. I’ll go and get you some robes, and Annika will come and find you.”
She glides away, looking very at home in this tranquil environment.
Silence falls and Laurie keeps his gaze fixed on the reception desk. Finally, he stirs. “I can feel you looking at me,” he complains.
“What a superpower. Who wants the ability to see through steel and climb buildings? I’m not sure how much use looking at your face would be to world peace, though.”
He laughs, but his gaze skitters away from me. Interesting. However, I don’t push it. Even if I wanted to know why he doesn’t want a face massage, it isn’t for me to grab for answers that he doesn’t want to give. Years of my profession have taught me that little gem. Well, that, and a desire not to get too intimate with anyone.
The receptionist returns, trailed by another woman.
She smiles at Laurie. “I understand you’re here for a massage, sir.”
“Apparently so,” he says dryly.
She shoots a professional glance at him and, in particular, the way he’s standing with his weight to one side, probably to ease the pressure on his leg.
“I notice that you’re favouring one side, sir.”
“Laurie,” he says immediately, giving her a charming smile. “I had a car accident a couple of months ago.”
“Ah.” She gestures for him to follow her. “If you wouldn’t mind telling me where you were hurt, I can assess what massage is best for you and then we can get started.”
He follows her obediently and without a backward glance. I clear my throat. “Don’t mind me,” I call.
They both look back with surprised expressions, as if they’d forgotten I was here. “I’ll be in the sauna,” I say. “I’ll meet you afterwards.”
He gives a careless smile and a jaunty wave of his hand that shouldn’t irritate me as much as it does and then vanishes into the massage rooms. The door closes with a soft thunk behind them.
“Gah,” I say, unfortunately out loud. “Irritating idiot.” I look over to find Cynthia regarding me with an amused smile. “Men,” I say.
“Yes,” she replies fervently. She hands me my robe. “You’re in sauna number three, Mr Carlsen. I’ll show the other gentleman where to go when he comes out.”
I nod, feeling thirty different kinds of awkward, and take the robe from her.
Half an hour later, my irritation has vanished into the dry heat of the sauna. I breathe in the scent of wood and coals, and when I exhale, tenseness eases out of me. The room is small but beautiful, with a perfect temperature, and sweat dampens my skin. I’ve been coming here for years. I like the combination of luxury and comfort.
I lean back against the wooden bench and look contemplatively at the opposite wall. Usually, my thoughts bleed away in here, my focus on nothing more complicated than the tiny bronze tiles on the walls. It’s my form of zen with sweat and silence, and I always come out refreshed. Today my thoughts are tumbling over themselves. I can’t grab a coherent one, but they all seem to centre around Laurie.
The door opens, and the man himself appears. “Blimey, it’s hot in here.”
“Who would have thought it, Laurie? A hot sauna. Whatever will happen next?”
He rolls his eyes. “Maybe you not attempting sarcasm.�
�� He enters the room, the door shutting behind him, and looks me up and down. “Oh, so it’s that kind of a sauna.”
“You shouldn’t wear clothes in a sauna. It’s unhealthy,” I say serenely. “Like wearing your clothes in the bath.”
“That’s the Danish in you. We English would insist on wearing a woolly jumper even on a trip to hell.”
“Hopefully, one of the jumpers that you seem to like so much. They could do with a good burning.” I look down at my naked body. “Are you okay with me being nude?”
He smirks. “Of course. You haven’t got anything I haven’t seen before.”
“It’s what you do with the apparatus that counts.”
But, as he comes closer, I immediately realise the drawbacks to my nudity. He’s wearing a towel wrapped around his narrow hips, and so much of his body is free for me to gaze at. He isn’t plucked or toned like any of the men I usually pick up. They typically have abs like supermodels. Laurie lacks that definition and has a scattering of hair on his chest. He’s wiry and still far too thin and utterly unlike my type, but his olive skin glows in the low light, and when he moves, the muscles in his biceps flex. For some odd reason, everything about Laurie makes my heart beat faster.
I breathe in unobtrusively and will my cock to behave. My gaze slides down over his long legs, and I immediately lose my semi. “That’s a nasty scar,” I observe.
He approaches the bench and looks down at the raised purple-coloured scar. “It looks a lot better now,” he says. “When my mother first saw it in the hospital, she cried.”
He removes his towel, throwing it insouciantly on the bench and settling onto it. I see a flash of a long thin cock and a bush of dark pubes and swallow hard.
He grins at me. “So, are we really okay being naked here, or shall I prepare to be dragged out of the building and thrown into the back of a police car like a TV show from the seventies?”
“You have far too vivid an imagination. This is a private sauna. They have twelve of them, plus the massage rooms and a small spa.”
“You obviously come here a lot.”
“Once a week for a sauna, and I usually fit in a massage when I’m in the middle of a trial because sitting around for all those hours hurts my back.”
He lounges back as easily as if sitting in his bathtub. I note the signs of sleek lassitude that always comes from a good massage. “Did you enjoy yourself?”
“So much,” he says with feeling and chuckles. “Remind me to listen to you sometimes.”
“You’d be better doing that all the time,” I correct him, not even attempting to hide my smile.
“Only if I wanted to court disaster. Before I knew it, I’d have legions of men pursuing me with ribbons flapping around their genitalia. How could I paint under those circumstances?” His smile falters suddenly, and his expression darkens.
I suddenly forget all about my own rules and ask, “How did you have your accident?” My tone is far too abrupt, and he winces. I’m not sure why I’m so irritated that the masseur knows the details, and I don’t. But I am cross.
“I was driving home one night, and a dog ran across the road in front of me. I swerved to avoid it, and the car ran off the road.”
I whistle. “The roads around your home are steep.”
He shoots me a wry glance. “And I have intimate knowledge of the fact. The car rolled three times.”
I go cold at the thought. He could easily have died, and the idea hits me in the solar plexus. I raise my hand to rub at the pressure, and his gaze roams over the expanse of my chest.
I wonder what he sees. I keep fit, running every day and walking everywhere, but it’s a fact that things aren’t as tight as they were. There’s a softness around my stomach and a blurring of areas that were previously well-defined.
I’m gratified to see heat flare in his eyes, but his expression shutters as he returns to the conversation. “The car crumpled. I hit my head on the window and was knocked out. My leg was trapped and suffered a compound fracture.”
“Shit, that’s nasty. You could have bled to death.”
He shrugs. “It wasn’t the best,” he says with typically British understatement. “But it’ll get better. I just need to keep doing the exercises that the physio advised, and it should go back to normal.”
He drinks from his water bottle, the strong muscles in his throat working. His skin is already damp with sweat, and I can smell his lemony soap scent.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask about his headaches, but if he banged his head in the accident, the migraines make sense. He’ll probably get them for a while, and if they’re as bad as I had after getting a concussion, his occasional grumpy mood is understandable. I settle for changing the subject.
“What was your first sexual experience?”
He promptly chokes on his water, and I smile evilly at him.
When he’s finished coughing, he glares at me. “Really? You want to discuss this while we’re naked and sitting in a hot room?”
“It’s the perfect time. We Danes are a social lot in the sauna.”
“I think you use the words ‘we Danes’ rather a lot to excuse bad behaviour.”
My evil smile doesn’t fade. “You might be right.” I nudge him. “You first.”
“You actually want to discuss this?”
I nod. “I get so bored of hearing about politics and recipes and the academic performance of private schools. Sometimes I need a little honesty.”
“That explains so much about why you’re the darling of the dinner parties.”
“Is that my title?” I ask, immediately distracted. “That’s rather fitting.”
“Well, it’s definitely not King of Modesty.”
“No fear. I wouldn’t get very far in life with that.” I eye him. “Go on, then. First experience?”
He settles back against the wooden bench, and I swallow as I watch his muscles move under his damp olive skin. I lean forward to pour more water on the coals and hide my cock, which appears to have a mind of his own today.
“Hmm,” he says, staring into space.
“You have to think about your first, Laurie? Have there been so many men, or are you just rather forgetful?”
“I love how you slut-shame me in one second, and sound concerned the next. I can remember it. I’m just contemplating why it merits remembrance.”
I laugh. “It was bad, yes?”
He scratches his eyebrow, looking thoughtful. “I expect it was the same as everyone else’s. He was my tennis coach, and he fucked me over the net bag of balls in our garden shed with a jockstrap in my mouth to keep me quiet. We got caught by my stepfather, who was so horrified he didn’t know where to look. He recovered his equilibrium enough to send me to my room and ground me for a month before sacking the coach. And there ended my possible run at Wimbledon.”
I gape at him, and the silence stretches. His mouth twitches as I search for words. “You seem to have an affinity with sheds,” I finally observe.
He loses his grip on his hilarity, his laughter pealing.
I’m unable to keep from smiling as his face lights up. He takes a deep breath and catches my gaze. “And that’s my tale of sexual awakening.” He snorts. “Common or garden, really.”
“Oh, undoubtedly.”
“What was yours?”
“Hand job behind the village shop,” I say.
He laughs again. “How very boring, Mags.”
“You got caught with your tennis instructor. How old was he?”
He wrinkles his nose in thought. “Early thirties. I thought he was terribly old.”
We look at each other and start to laugh.
“I know,” I say, wiping my eyes. “I used to think my university tutor was ancient. I later found out he was thirty-five.”
He grins at me, and I shake my head. “You win,” I concede. “That would have been a lovely story to tell at my parents’ dinner table. They enjoyed tales of sexual awakening. I don’t know why they
didn’t just stick to reading Anais Nin and Henry Miller like everyone else.”
“Oh God, those were the days. I once spent ten minutes trying to convince our school librarian that I wanted to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover because I was interested in estate management.” I snort, and he carries on. “Kids today don’t know how lucky they are with online porn. If we wanted porn in our day, the mood was rather killed by the fact that we had to rewind the video tape and then keep stopping and starting it to pause the action.”
He sprawls on the bench, spreading his arms across the back. The position shows off every inch of him, and I give in and stare. His ribs are too pronounced, but his olive skin gleams in the heat and droplets of sweat glisten in his sparse chest hair. Everything about him is deliciously long—his legs, his feet, his fingers, which are tapping a beat on his knee. I curse the fact that I’m naked for possibly the first time in my life as my cock stiffens.
When I look up, he’s watching me, and the atmosphere thickens as though we’re sitting in a bath of warm honey.
“I think you should kiss me,” he says in a conversational tone.
Shock roars through me. “I beg your pardon?” I sound regrettably like Miss Marple.
“Kiss me,” he repeats.
“Did you sustain a head injury in the massage room? I don’t kiss my friends.”
“Try it,” he says with a sunny smile that doesn’t quite conceal the daredevil glint in his eyes. “Go on. Just the once,” he instructs. “I dare you.”
“You are Satan sitting on a towel,” I say.
He huffs a laugh, but his gaze is steady on me, his eyes lingering on my mouth. I lick my lips, and his pupils darken.
“I want to know how you taste,” he says.
My heart thunders in my ears, and I wonder if I’m going to have a stroke in this sauna. If anyone were going to cause it, it would be him. Nevertheless, I hear my mouth say, “Just once?”
He nods. “Can’t hurt.”
“I’m quite sure that was what Samson said to Delilah before she got out her hairdressing scissors,” I observe.
He bursts into laughter, and my control snaps. I reach out, and, grabbing his skull between my hands, I fit my mouth to his. The laughter immediately dies, but I fancy I can taste it on his lips—a tart, lemony taste like sunshine in my mouth.