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eighteen
Rhett perched on the edge of the massage table and Constance settled herself on her rolling stool, which had been moved. She pictured Rhett, rolling around the room, unable to sit still even when he was sitting. She looked down at her clipboard, which held his intake form. “So no medications or allergies?”
“Nope.”
“Not pregnant?”
He smiled. “I’m pretty sure.”
Constance could tell her joke had defused some tension. Now to pose her next question, in just the right way. “Anything you didn’t mark that I should know about?”
“Sure.” He pressed his hands on the edge of the table and leaned forward a little. “How about ‘If your name happens to be Constance, give me a text and let me know you’ll be my massage therapist today.’”
Constance looked up and saw he was doing the smile that was contained mostly in his eyes. That meant he found humor in this, but didn’t want her know it. “I should have texted,” she agreed. “But, had I texted, would you have canceled?”
“Probably.”
“So I made the right choice.”
“I could still leave. My leg feels fine. I don’t really need to waste your time.”
“Your leg doesn’t feel fine. And there are other issues I could address. You wouldn’t be wasting my time.”
“Oh, yeah?” Rhett’s voice had a challenging edge. “Like what?”
Constance rose and stepped closer to him. She studied his face, his posture and his energy. “You’re exhausted.” She noted the fatigue around his eyes. “My guess is you have trouble sleeping most of the time. One of the reasons you love your job is that it takes you here—” she held up a hand, over her head “—so that when you come back down to here—” her hand sank to eye level “—it feels normal. Even though you should be here.” Her hand went near her heart.
“Hmm.” Rhett made a noncommittal noise. “And how did you get all that? Are you reading my aura?”
“I don’t see auras.” Constance brushed off his comment as a rare show of self-defense. “But energy is real, and I’ve had a lot of experience with it. Yours is big, like most introverts. But it’s even bigger than most introverts. Bigger than most people I’ve met.”
His eyes widened just the tiniest bit, like she’d said something that interested him and he hadn’t reacted quickly enough to hide it. “Big? I thought introverts were supposed to be antisocial wallflowers, collapsing in on ourselves.”
Constance noted the sarcasm. “Quite the opposite. It’s my experience that introverts have big, wide-reaching energy. We absorb more, and if we’re not careful, we take in more than we want. Some of us have too much energy, which makes us overly sensitive to our surroundings. Extroverts, on the other hand, have to absorb energy from others in order to function at their best. Which is why they love groups and can’t be alone and all that noise. Most of us are a mix of the two. You—” Constance held up her hands near Rhett’s chest “—start well outside your body. This keeps you strong without needing a lot of fuel from the outside world. That’s good. But it also leaves you vulnerable to taking in things you might not want to, and to reacting stronger, and harder, than those who have duller senses. It’s helped you survive. That’s its purpose. And I’m guessing it’s served you well. But when you don’t need to be in survival mode, it can be exhausting.”
Rhett grew quiet, twiddling his thumbs as he stared down at his hands.
“Right now, everything about you is a bit...” Constance drew a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, gesturing with her arms in a dropping motion. “Like that. You need to recharge.”
Rhett looked up at her with narrowed eyes, all sarcasm in his face gone. “And you can help me do that?” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
Constance stopped herself from saying yes. She couldn’t make a definitive promise, so her words had to be chosen carefully. “Your sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive. My job is to get you into parasympathetic. That’s easier to do with some than others. But I’d love to try.”
A soft smile played around his lips. He spread his hands open. “You’re great with the leg. But this is different. Some things just can’t be fixed, Stanzi.”
Constance leaned next to him, against the massage table. “I had this guy I used to see every week, at Walter Reed. The first week I met him, all he would let me do is hold his head in my hands while he lay faceup on the table. We stayed like that for the full half hour. Just a blanket over his body, music in the air and my hands supporting his head. He barely relaxed.” Constance watched Rhett’s eyes change. Usually, he had some form of guard up. Now, she could see him opening. “Week two, same thing. But by the end of the session he’d relaxed enough I could feel his weight grow heavier. Week three, he fell asleep about twenty minutes in. Week four, he let me move around to other places, just putting my hands on his shoulders, his arms. No massaging, just placing my hands on him. It went like this for months. By the time he went home, I was able to do light massage over his clothes and he called me by name. He even gave me a hug goodbye.”
Rhett sucked in his lower lip. He looked around the room. After a while in silence, he turned back to her and shrugged. “Okay. I’m all yours.”
Constance started with a warm towel to his back. This would begin the massage on a relaxing note. She checked in with Rhett once, who gave one-word answers to her questions about being comfortable and the temperature of the table, and then went quiet. She let the music fill the room. For the first few minutes, she didn’t even touch him. Just as she’d massaged Humphrey, Constance worked only the energy that lived several inches above Rhett’s body before she finally rested her hands on his back. His muscles twitched as she neared, but once she finally laid her palms on his bare skin, he didn’t resist.
Over time, she slowly deepened her pressure. This was the first time she’d seen Rhett with his shirt off, so was the first time she saw the tattoo he had on his heavily muscled upper back, between the shoulder blades. He had a cross there, the horizontal portion done in Celtic knot-work and the vertical portion in colorful Mexican tiles. The center read USMC. Constance hadn’t seen one like it, and she’d seen a lot of tattoos. The unique blend of cultures and affinities suggested Rhett had had a hand in creating it himself.
The lower portion of his back had several scars on the left side, the most lateral one a circular shape. Constance slipped her hands around the front. As she suspected, there was a similar scar there, just outside the obliques. She didn’t touch him there right away, just swiped over the wound a few times before finally giving a light massage to the affected tissue.
Constance worked Rhett’s back longer than most clients. She found tension in all the muscles along his spine, which was no surprise, based on all the heavy gear he’d have worn for years. Despite that, she kept her touch medium. This session wasn’t the time to go deep, risk him bracing or focusing on breathing to keep his mind off the pain.
He did that every day.
