He groans.
A sound of heavy, vibrating relief travels through his back straight into my palms. Absolute surrender.
“Better?” I keep working. I press, release, and circle the skin.
“Different.”
My hands glide over him, smearing the oil and sweat. The friction breeds more heat.
The silence shifts. It stops being clinical. It thickens. Congeals. The air in the room transforms, saturating with pheromones and unspoken intent.
“You should stop.” The words vibrate through his chest wall, straight into my palms.
“I’m almost done.”
“You should walk away right now.”
“I’m not walking away.”
“Iris...” His voice fractures. Just a hairline crack in the stone, but it’s enough. “I’m hard. I’m hurting. And you’re playing with fire.”
The words hang between us, heavy, undeniable.
I don’t pull away. I should. Reason demands it. Self-preservation demands it.
I don’t.
My gaze drops.
The gray sweatpants leave nothing to the imagination. The fabric runs thin, worn supple with age. He’s hard: strained, engorged, unmistakable. A brutal, physical truth jutting right there in front of me. His want is aggressive and straining against the cotton.
He catches me looking.
His expression hardens, muscles jumping as frustration flashes across his face. He hates his inability to hide it. Hates his body betraying him while I stand here composed, clothed, clinical.
“Yeah. That.”
His voice drags like a rasp of sandpaper.
My pulse hammers against the base of my throat, trapped and wild.
“I see it.”
“Then stop. Before I do something we both regret.”
“Just one more second. The muscle is almost released.”
My hands return to his shoulders, but the shift already happened. The line is gone. The work is no longer clean. His skin runs slick beneath my fingers, heat and tension bleeding through.
Anatomy fades.
The man doesn’t.
Awareness sharpens instead: his size, his strength, the danger coiled beneath his restraint. The fact that right now, all that power stays leashed beneath my hands. The fact that he could snap me in half, but he sits here, trembling, letting me touch him.
My thumbs trace the ridge of his traps, glide upward toward the base of his skull. I lean closer without meaning to, my bodyhovering over his, my breath disturbing the damp hair at his temple.
“Iris. You’re too close. Last warning.”
