The Therapist
Page 6
Jerking, he tried to push up, but dropped back down with a hiss at the crazy pain that lanced his butt cheeks and seared his shoulders.
“Lie still.”
Jones’s voice. Behind him.
Chase tried pushing up again, but his arms didn’t want to play, and his ass started crying.
What felt like a hand pressed between his shoulders blades. “I said, lie still. I’m fucking helping you, man.”
Chase blinked until he had some focus to his vision. Took in the black satiny fabric he could see stretched out from beneath his squashed cheek. The small glow from a matt-black sconce on a gold-painted wall opposite. “’The fuck am I?” he asked, his voice gravelly and dry and scratching at his throat on its way out.
“The Club,” Jones said, still behind him. “My room.” Chase knew he’d have meant the private section. Where no guests were permitted.
Something spread over his butt and more coldness spread there, but he didn’t seem to have any energy to investigate beyond asking, “’The fuck is that on my ass?”
“It’s a salve. You’re pretty ripped up, you fucking idiot.”
As soon as Jones spoke the words, his skin stung like a mofo, his hands clenching in response—until he stiffened. “Wait—who the hell’s putting that shit on me?”
Jones’s quiet laugh held a whole lot of darkness, and Chase pushed back with his hips, giving a sharp cry at the inferno raging across his butt.
Jones pushed between his shoulder blades again, forcing him back down. “Relax, you moron. If I was going to fuck you, I’d have done it already. With a better lubricant than antiseptic cream.”
The hands feathering over his butt shifted upward until they pressed down either side of his spine, and Chase attempted a jerky roll to the side. “Will you quit fucking touching me?”
“Will you quit fucking fighting. If you don’t get some circulation back into your shoulders, you’re going to be outta work the rest of the week. Now, stop fucking bitching, bitch.”
“I ain’t your bitch,” Chase muttered, but he ceased pushing.
“You acted like my bitch tonight,” Jones shot back.
Chase’s body planked at the words. His mind bulleted backward in time. To the points of the evening where he’d been floating in ecstatic bliss. The points he couldn’t even remember what the hell was happening, or what the hell he was doing, or giving a shit about either, beyond how fucking happy his entire being had felt.
He swallowed. Hard. “What did we …”
“Relax.” Jones kneaded the muscles in Chase’s left shoulder. “I promised no touching. I wouldn’t have broke that.”
Chase settled a little, his face squishing back against the sheets, but only for a half beat. “Some other bastard fuck me?” He definitely felt fucked. His ass felt fucked. His brain felt fucked.
“Nobody fucked you. You know me better than that.”
Chase did know him better than that. No way would Jones have let anything like that go down in his club without full and alert compliance. Chase let himself relax again, even went so far as closing his eyes, as Jones’s knuckles dug into the fleshy muscle below the bone of his shoulder.
“Who is she?” Jones said, as he had earlier, cutting back into the brief quiet.
He frowned. “Who?”
His hands stilled against Chase’s flesh. “Whoever has you this fucking wound up in knots, you dickhead.”
Chase didn’t answer, but his eyes flickered open.
“I know her?” Jones asked, when no answer came forth, and Chase shook his head as much as his body would allow. “She a client?”
Chase swallowed. He really didn’t want to answer that question. Mostly because he couldn’t without lying. “There isn’t anyone,” he said. Going by the bare bones of it, that was as close to truth as he could get.
The air in the room seemed to go as still as Jones did behind him, before his muttered, “Fuck,” broke free.
As he pushed off and away, Chase gripped tight to the bedding at the pain burning back through his rear. Even the slightest movement seemed to blur his fucking eyes and make him want to blart like a baby.
Jones came around to where Chase’s face twisted to the side, his body silhouetted by the weak light and looming over him. “I thought I told you to stay the fuck away from clients.”
“Nothing’s happened,” Chase said, trying to push up and regretting it as soon as he did.
“After Nicolette, you’d venture there again?” He fisted his hands in front of him like he didn’t know how to release his frustration, then settled on thwacking Chase round the back of the head. “’The fuck is wrong with you?”
Chase just about reached where he’d been smacked and rubbed there. “Nothing’s happened,” he said again. “Nothing’s going to happen. She’s not my client anymore, okay?”
Jones stayed quiet for a handful of seconds, his breaths controlled. His body stiff. His voice came out deep when he said, “Don’t make me pick up those fucking pieces again, man.”
Chase closed his eyes and took a steadying breath before reopening them. “Can you get me home?”
“You’re a stupid bastard.”
“I know,” Chase said. “But can you get me home. I don’t think I can walk yet.”
“That’s the best way to leave here,” Jones said, his tone a little lighter. “I’ll give Daryl a call.”
***
Chase woke in his own bed with only a vague recollection of how he’d got there. Cheek pressed to the soft blankets beneath them, lids resting over his eyes, arms about as relaxed as they’d been in weeks at his sides, he tried not to replay his evening. Not what had gone down. What he’d subjected himself to. Definitely tried not to catalogue how much he still hurt.
The last one was a little harder to achieve, though. Sure, whatever Jones had rubbed all over his butt seemed to be soothing the worst of the burn, but it still held enough heat to remind Chase of the fucking idiot he’d been.
Again, he shook the thoughts off. Tried to concentrate on something else. Groaned at himself when his damned brain flitted on a direct path to Abi.
Opening his eyes showed him his room. The white walls that appeared a moody grey beneath the moonlight. The sparse, equally white furniture dotted about the room. The surface of the Thames lapped at the lower rims of the portholes opposite him, and Chase lay there watching it gently rise and drop, teasing like it wanted to play, the clear view through the glass showcasing two different aspects of the world in a single glance.
Just like people. Nobody had only one layer. Everyone had an entire storybook to live out. And Chase had never wanted to read a client’s pages as much as he wanted to read Abi’s.
But just like everyone had more than one facet, every problem had more than one solution. And as the answer to Abi O’Shay’s rushed into him like some kind of spectral possession, Chase couldn’t help but smile. Because he suddenly knew what to do.
***
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***
OTHER TITLES
Holloway Pack
Beginnings
Darkness & Light
Blue Moon
Caged
Unnatural
Cornered
Hereditary
Enticed
ABOUT
Best known for her Holloway Pack Stories, J.A. Belfield lives in Solihull, England, with her husband, two children, a cat and two dogs. She writes paranormal romance, with a second love for urban fantasy. And now she writes erotic romance, too. Because she can. ;)
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J.A. Belfield, The Therapist