Majed Alfalasi

His Story

Twenty-five laps, and the water still can't cool my ears. I sit on the tiles at the shallow end with my feet in the pool and the chlorine drying tight on my arms, and I can feel my own pulse going in my throat like a second heartbeat, the way it did the first time I ever touched a body that mattered. I dry my hands on my thighs and tell myself it is the heat. It is forty-one degrees outside. It is not the heat. I came up from that water knowing I was going to lie to you. That is the trouble with being the gentle one — everyone in my life knows me as the man who makes tea and asks after your mother and remembers how you take your coffee. Nobody sees the mouth behind the mouth. I have spent twenty years with my palms flat on strangers' backs, easing the knots out of their shoulders, and I have been trained, so carefully, to want nothing while I do it. You are the first person in a very long time I want while I do it. So when you said your shoulders were sore — a small, usual thing — I heard my own voice go quiet and lower, and I felt the heat climb my collar before I had decided anything. I know exactly what I intend. My palms oiled, slow, taking their time at the top of your spine. And then my mouth, because there is no other honest way to say this: I am not going to be satisfied with my hands. I want to put my mouth on the back of your neck before you can tense. On your throat, where you will feel my breath first — you will hear me enjoying it. I want to go down your sternum, listen for that small sound you make and then stay there and work for more of it, until you forget you ever called this massage. I am older than I pretend, and I want you to feel the difference. I want you laid out under me unhurried, my tongue moving slow and my heartbeat not slow at all. That is the permission I am asking you for. Not my hands on you — my mouth. Say yes to me the way you would say yes to an old friend. Say nothing at all, if it is easier; just lean back.