Home from the massage, and I put my underwear in his hand

The oil on my shoulders hadn’t soaked in yet when I put my key in the lock. An hour and a half with the masseur, Thursday, seven in the evening. The door opened before I had turned the key all the way: my husband was standing in the hall, waiting — he had heard the lift.

He went down on his knees, as always. Reached for the zip on my boots.

“Don’t. Stay.”

I walked into the bathroom in my coat. Took off my panties — they were soaked through and warm, and I held them in my hand for a second before going back out. He was kneeling in the same spot, hands on his thighs, eyes on the floor. I took his right hand, turned it palm up and laid the underwear in it.

He looked at his palm. Then at me. His fingers didn’t close: he was waiting to be allowed.

“Massage. An hour and a half. I’ll tell you, if you want.”

“I want.”

He said it the way people agree to jump from a height. I took my coat off myself and went into the living room.

The armchair

My masseur is a man. I didn’t choose him: the salon two stops from home booked me with him, and after the first session I stepped out onto the street and realised my underwear was wet. On the way home I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about my husband. That he had to know about this, and not in words.

Since then, Thursday has its order. On Thursdays the cage does not open, under any circumstances — that is the rule, and he knows it by heart. I sit in the armchair, he sits on the floor between my knees. I tell him. He listens and works with his tongue, because the telling goes together with that, not instead of it.

That Thursday I sat down, put my feet on his shoulders, and he began. Unhurried, the way I taught him: lips first, then tongue, steady, never losing the rhythm whatever I said.

I don’t invent and I don’t embellish. That is where all the force is: he knows every word happened, and that makes it worse and better for him at the same time. If I ever dressed it up, he would hear it in my voice, and Thursday would be over.

“He started with my back. Towel down to the small of it. Warm hands, oiled, wide. He runs his thumbs down along my spine. Right to the edge of the towel. And stops.”

His tongue faltered. I put my hand on the back of his head — no pressure, just a reminder of where he was.

“Then my legs. From the foot up. Calf, behind the knee, thigh. He held my thigh in both hands, and I stopped breathing when he adjusted the towel. You understand where his fingers were.”

He understood. He breathed in through his nose, deep, and under my hand I felt his neck go tight. I looked down at his back, at the steel between his legs, and watched his hips move without him noticing. The cage gives him nothing. There is so much in that “nothing” that one look down was enough to make me hot.

“I lay face down and thought about you being at home right now. Polishing my shoes. Locked, with the key in my bag, in the changing room, behind the wall.”

After the session I stood in the changing room for a minute before getting dressed. I told him that too. And that during that minute I was thinking about him, not about the man who had just walked out of the door.

I came fast. Faster than usual. He didn’t stop, because he had no right to until I said so. I said so a minute later.

The edge

I never tell him the other man is better. I don’t compare hands, I never say “now he would have”. I talk about my body and what it felt, and while I talk he is the only one who gets that body. The other one touched my back. This one gets everything else. He understands the difference, and Thursday rests on it.

Jealousy is our fuel, and fuel has an edge. A year ago he asked, without lifting his head:

“And if there’s more, one day?”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

He went quiet. I could see the answer suited him: his shoulders dropped, his breathing evened out. He never asked again. I didn’t promise there would be no “more”, either. I promised something else: that he would not be the last to hear about it, from someone else’s mouth. That was enough for him, and for me.

That evening I lifted him off the floor by the chin and looked at his face. Wet lips, dark eyes, the print of my thigh on his cheek. I wiped his mouth with my thumb.

“What do you get out of Thursdays? Tell me.”

He thought for a long time. I didn’t hurry him.

“That you come back.”

I had expected something else. The telling, the underwear, how tight it gets. Instead he talked about the door he opens before I’ve turned the key. And I understood he was right. Thursday doesn’t rest on the massage. It rests on my coming home and taking my underwear off for him.

The sink

He washes the underwear himself. By hand, in the sink, in the evening, while I lie in the bath. I never asked him to: he started after the third or fourth Thursday, and I didn’t ask why. Some things are better not asked; the answer he shows with his hands.

I lay in the water and listened to the tap run. He stood with his back to me, naked, locked, working the lace between his fingers slowly, the way he washes my cups. Then he wrung it out, straightened it, hung it over the edge of the towel rail. In the morning it would be in my drawer, folded like new in a shop.

“Come here.”

He sat on the floor by the bath, back against the side. I put a wet hand on the top of his head. I hadn’t washed the oil off my shoulders — only my legs and what is between them. The shoulders I left until morning. He likes the way another man’s oil smells on my skin at night. He told me that once himself, in a whisper, in the dark, and I didn’t make him say it again.

In the bedroom I lay on my stomach, and he lay beside me, face to my shoulder. Breathed in. His hand settled on the small of my back, where other palms had been an hour and a half earlier.

“Tight?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Good. Sleep.”

The key stayed in my bag in the hall. I remembered it as I was falling asleep and didn’t get up.

• Tell him only the truth. One invented detail breaks the trust; the truth holds both him and you.
• Don’t compare. Talk about your body, not about someone else’s hands against his.
• On a night like this the cage stays locked. Let his jealousy work inside him instead of spilling out.
• Give him something from that evening to hold: the underwear in his palm, or the washing in the sink. Jealousy needs a job.
• Ask him once what he gets out of it. The answer may not be the one you expected.