Freya North 3-Book Collection: Love Rules, Home Truths, Pillow Talk

Thea’s Two O’Clock (#ulink_ab22342d-f56b-546a-8fc6-2d81d231c376)

‘Hullo, babes.’ Peter Glass was waiting in reception, halfway through the Evening Standard when Thea arrived back late from her lunch with Alice. Thea was not in the mood to be called babes. Just then she hated the male species without exception.

‘How are you, Peter?’ Thea asked perfunctorily, as she led the way to her room.

Do you pay for sex, Peter Glass? Is it a toss-up between one kind of massage and another? Did I win or lose today, hey?

‘I’m the usual, babes. You know, stressed, overworked,’ he laughed. ‘It’s my sodding lower back today, Thea. The pain is going down my leg – I’m hobbling, it hurts to drive even the Beemer.’

‘OK,’ Thea said, skimming through her notes on his last visit, ‘down to your boxer shorts and onto the bed, please.’ In the calm of her room, with something to absorb her, she was soon grateful to Peter for bringing her his aches and pains. For an hour she could take her mind off what irked her and concentrate instead on alleviating someone else’s discomfort. It was something she knew how to do. Placing her hands on Peter’s back, Thea began to rock his pelvis rhythmically to and fro.

‘How are you, babes?’ Peter asked, his voice suddenly softer as his body began to unwind under Thea’s guidance. ‘How’s it going? All signed and sealed on the new place? Have you exchanged on yours?’

Thea stopped rocking and for the first time in her career, entirely took her hands away from a client’s body mid-massage. Peter felt the chill and isolation and lifted his head, twisting round to look at her. She looked very puzzled. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, though she didn’t look it. ‘Peter, is it possible for the vendor to unexchange a contract?’

‘Revoke?’ he balked as if the crime was so heinous as to be virtually unheard of. Thea shrugged. ‘Fucking hell, Thea,’ he said, returning his head to the hole in the massage bed, ‘you’ll be sued to within a pound of their entire deposit – they just changed the law to prevent misdemeanours like that.’

‘I thought so,’ Thea said with forced jollity.

‘Cold feet?’ Peter asked.

‘Nah,’ Thea faked her nonchalance, ‘I was just wondering.’

She said no more. She rubbed some more ointment between her palms and effleuraged Peter’s back with long, smooth strokes. When he wasn’t groaning in appreciation and sighing with relief, he was filling her in on the details of his life, professional and personal. He’d pranged the Beemer, he’d chucked the girlfriend, bedded her best mate to make her jealous but since started dating a teacher.

‘Not my usual type, Thea,’ he marvelled, ‘she’s a bit older than me and not what I’d call a “stunner”. But she’s a great girl and she makes me laugh out loud.’

Thea hooked her fingers around the lateral fibres of Peter’s latissimus dorsi, lifting and pulling medially. It silenced him for a while and then he started a rant against a rival estate agent. She set about some deep tissue work where he didn’t realize he needed it and for the time being, she managed to massage away the stress his adversaries had heaped around his neck and shoulders.

He has a good physique.

Not really my type.

But objectively, he’s in good shape.

But I wouldn’t say he does it for me.

Thea trails her fingertips lightly up and down Peter’s spine. Up and down. And then down some more. Down until she’s reached the dimples above his buttocks. Just relax. Just relax. She leaves one hand there and takes her other to his right leg. She strokes up his hamstring and then down. And again. Then, with both hands she starts to massage his legs lightly. Up and down and up some more. She slides her hands around and travels along Peter’s inner thighs. And up and down her hands go. This is not massage. This is not ambiguity. This is caressing. She feels nothing. It’s easy to trace the hemline of his boxer shorts suggestively with her fingertips.

Peter has gone from being deeply relaxed and utterly motionless to springing up from the table, his face striated with embarrassment. For the first time in his life, he’s at a loss for what to say. So he scrabbles into his clothes instead and starts wittering on about Christ is that the time, dear God he has clients waiting.

‘I’d better go – thanks for the, er. I feel fine.’

Thea’s Four O’Clock (#ulink_cad705ea-9f5f-5a72-a2a1-0527b12cf589)

Thea had intended to cancel Gabriel Sewell. She wanted to finish early; she’d had a dreadful headache since Peter’s session and it could be a valid excuse not to see Saul for yet another night, to cancel Pilates and just go home, go home and curl up and not do any packing. But her afternoon had been back to back with other people’s backache and, at five to four, she went downstairs and found Mr Sewell already there, expressionless as usual.

‘Come on, Mr Sewell,’ she said, with negligible charm or enthusiasm. He followed her up. ‘How have you been?’ she asked him cursorily, while helping herself to a long drink of mineral water.

‘Not too bad, actually,’ Gabriel Sewell replied, thinking he’d like a glass of water too, ‘still blocked to the right. But the pain is substantially better.’

For the first time in her career, Thea wasn’t remotely interested in her client despite his physical improvement being a direct credit to her. ‘Look to the left,’ she told him, ‘and to the right. And to the left again, please. And to the right once more.’

‘It’s no longer what I’d term pain,’ Gabriel defined, ‘it’s more discomfort.’

Well, if it’s only discomfort, Mr Sewell, I wish you’d cancelled your appointment and waited another week.

‘Down to your underwear and onto your stomach, please,’ Thea said with scant interest. Perhaps she’d just give him thirty minutes and charge him half the fee.

Thea commenced a pretty perfunctory massage, like a musician practising scales or a showjumper taking his top horse for a hack around the block. Something to keep it all ticking over. Her mind drifted and she found herself wondering whether any of the girls in massage parlours were actually qualified masseuses. And if so, which skill did they consider their forte? Did they look in the vacancies section of the Job Centre or local paper under ‘masseuse’ or ‘sex worker’? She wondered whether they started off with a cursory shoulder rub to somehow legitimize what came next. Saul always claimed he didn’t really rate massage. Is that because he’d never had a good one? Or did he just tell the girls to forget the neck rub and go straight to his dick?

Thea looks down at Mr Sewell. He has a nice back, smooth and slightly freckled over the shoulders. It tapers becomingly to his waist and his legs are muscular and with just the right spread of hairs to be attractively masculine rather than unappetizingly hirsute. Turning deaf ears to the small voice warning her that she’s mad, that this isn’t going to help, that this is a very bad idea and fundamentally the wrong thing to do, Thea trails her fingertips down Gabriel’s spine, just as she had on Peter. And then her hands start to caress his legs, interspersing strong strokes to the hamstrings with a feathered caress of the inner thighs. But at the point where Peter had objected and bolted away and left Thea feeling wretched, Gabriel spreads his legs slightly and Thea finds the signal a horrible but undeniable thrill.

Where else, Mr Sewell, she says silently to herself, what else can I do for you today? She is fingering the seam of his jockey pants blatantly. ‘Turn over,’ she murmurs. God, this is easy.

Mr Sewell’s erection is impressive. In fact, it is so impressive that the very sight of it simultaneously excites but appals Thea. The shape of it leers up behind his pants. As bemused as Peter had been, Gabriel is now lying there, proudly tumescent. He is obviously, and quite literally, up for it. He is rock hard and eager and Thea can see his cock twitching expectantly, skewed slightly by the constraint of his underwear. She doesn’t know whether to be shocked or titillated that this man, right here, would fuck her right now. He’d be quite happy to pay, there’s no doubt about it.

‘But I don’t even particularly like you,’ Thea thinks to herself as she looks down on his expectant body, ‘you’re not my type at all. You’re surly and non-communicative and cold.’

‘Miss Luckmore?’

Thea is horrified to see that while she’s been deep in thought gazing at his penis, he’s been staring at her intently.

‘Miss Luckmore,’ he repeats, ‘is it à la carte – or can I order off menu? What, may I ask, are the specials today?’

Thea is catapulted from her safety zone into dangerous territory. She doesn’t like it. Quick. Think of something. Feign innocence. Ignorance. ‘I could do you an Indian head massage?’ she suggests.

Gabriel smirks, his hand now lolling arrogantly over the mound of his cock. ‘I assume that involves giving me head, then?’

‘Pardon?’ Thea flusters.

Gabriel snaps back to his more usual curt self. ‘Look, are you up for it or what?’

Thea wants to cry. She feels mucky. ‘I don’t date clients,’ she mutters. ‘The ethics of my job discourage it. Sorry.’

‘I wasn’t talking about a date,’ Gabriel says, ‘just a blow-job or something. Whatever. Never mind. I’ll try the head massage. Come on.’

I’m going mad. I’m not thinking straight. I’m losing my grip. I need to think but I can’t. It’s like I won’t let myself. I have to decide what to do but I’m incapable of making decisions because I can’t think about them. I have less than two weeks before I move out. But how can I think of packing when I don’t know where home is any more? I’ve suddenly acquired so much baggage. I can’t move under the weight of it all. Maybe I’ll just shove the lot into storage and run away.

Thea and Sally’s Six O’Clock (#ulink_6882b3d6-8a2a-556d-bfcd-8aff59780728)

Thea didn’t cancel her Pilates class that evening though her head throbbed and she was utterly exhausted from her unbelievable day. However, she knew she was best off devoting an hour to shutting out all that tormented her; indulging in an hour tuning into her own body; centring herself, focusing on breathing, concentrating on all she really was – a skeleton swathed in muscles, joints and ligaments, assembled intricately but logically. She wouldn’t be able to think about Peter or Gabriel and what had almost happened, she could forget all about Saul and what had happened. Respite, even for just an hour, was what she craved.

Alice wasn’t at Pilates though she’d confirmed their session over lunch. Ultimately, Thea was slightly relieved – she actually didn’t want to receive Alice’s kindly glances and supportive squeezes and concerned whispers for her welfare. Thea didn’t want to workshop her problems and woes over chips and wine after the class. She certainly didn’t want to reveal to Alice her bizarre behaviour that afternoon. Thea just wanted to think about her body, about inhaling and exhaling, about maintaining neutral. It was nice, though, to see Sally, and Thea eagerly accepted an invitation to a light supper at the Stonehills’. It would be good to be in Sally’s company, she theorized, to have no reason or recourse to talk about ‘it’. It would be constructive to simply chat, to natter on topics other than how prostitution and her future seemed inextricably bound. Sally’s invite was also a good reason not to go home and have to think about packing and it provided a bona-fide excuse not to see Saul for another night at least. Ultimately, Thea rationalized that to be surrounded by the Stonehills’ perfect domesticity would be comforting and affirming.

In Highgate, Sally could harp on all she liked about sleepless nights, the sorry state of her sex life, the demise of her social life and language skills, and the destruction of her clothes by baby puke. However, for Thea, the scent pervading the Stonehill house was uplifting and restorative. Drying laundry. Baby shampoo. Flowers from husband to wife. Home pride. Everything smelt so warm and clean and cosy and complete and grown up. It was a fragrance Thea acknowledged she had always wanted in her life. Just then, she wished she could bottle it. Just in case.