Notes · from the practice

On receiving

Watch what happens when you give a woman a compliment. Before it has even landed, she's returning it, deflecting it, or explaining it away. Now slow that reflex down, put it on a massage table, and you have the first twenty minutes of almost every first session I give.

The urge to give something back isn't politeness. It's armour. Being given to, with nothing to manage and nothing to repay, is more exposing than being undressed. So the body keeps a little department open, even under warm oil in a candlelit room: tracking whether I'm bored, whether her sounds are acceptable, whether she should offer to turn over before I have to ask, whether any of this is fair on me. She's receiving a massage and running a small business at the same time.

She's receiving a massage and running a small business at the same time.

Most touch in most lives is a trade. It arrives with a mood attached, or an expectation folded inside it, or a ledger quietly updating somewhere. A body learns this early and doesn't forget it just because someone lights a candle. Which is why saying "you owe nothing here" does almost nothing. She's heard words before. The words are not the message.

The message is time. Hands that don't speed up when she stops performing gratitude. A pace that doesn't check its watch. The fortieth minute arriving exactly as unhurried as the fifth, until the department with the ledgers, finding nothing to do, closes for the evening. There's a specific breath a woman lets out when that happens. I'd know it anywhere.

What's left when the armour comes off isn't dramatic. It's quiet. Limbs go heavy. The face empties in the best way. Somewhere in there, pleasure stops being something she's hosting and becomes something she's simply in. That, more than anything done with oil or hands, is the actual service.

The strange part: it only flows one way, and that's exactly why it works. The moment there's something to give back, the department reopens. So no, there is nothing to give back. Not conversation, not reciprocity, not even delight, though delight tends to show up anyway, uninvited, around the time the fists open.

Abi