Others tried to get her to ‘take care of it’ for them. Those assholes got blackballed. As well as blueballed. As she thought that, Manny barely caught that giggle back.
Mr. Carbone, who always had himself a Carboner during his massages, just pretended it didn’t exist. She liked that best. It was a natural physical reaction, no big deal, and she much preferred to simply get on with the massage and ignore the stiffy in the room.
The boner wasn’t the most distracting thing about working on Mr. Cabone. It was his nasty, old man feet. He got a full-body shiatsu every week, and Manny didn’t mind his little boner or his full carpet of inch-long grey body hair (okay, that wasn’t great; it made her hands feel all pins-and-needly), or the fact that he talked about his kids and grandkids the entire fucking hour, and his breath always smelled like something might have died in his throat. But when she got down to his feet, they were all cracked and gnarled, with long, yellowed toenails, and it took all of Manny’s will to stay calm and actually put her hands on those mummified things. Blech.
But Mr. Carbone had been her first regular at the Seagazer. He’d seen her three times—four, counting today—and he’d tipped fifty percent each time. Call her a foot slut, but Manny could smile and rub his cracked, yellow arches for that.
She covered up those nasties with the sheet and went to the side of the table and patted his arm. “Okay, Mr. Carbone. That’s it for today. I’ll get you a glass of water while you dress.”
He caught her hand in his. “Thank you, Emma. You treat me good. You’re such a good girl.”
Manny didn’t like to be touched, especially not when she didn’t know it was coming, and she extricated her hand from his as cordially as she could. “You’re welcome, Mr. Carbone. You’re a nice man. I’ll get you that water.”
She escaped into the hallway and shook her hand out. She felt unexpected touches like that as pain and anxiety. She knew why; she’d had a whole line of mental health professionals explain it to her since she was seven years old. But no one had been able to make it not true. The best she’d been able to achieve is to stop freaking out. With lots of therapy and medication.
Her family had thought it was beyond weird that a girl who could barely stand to be touched would choose a career as a massage therapist, but actually it was the perfect job for her. It kept her feeling human. She spent her days touching people who lay passively while she did so. They were alone in a quiet space, and she was in almost total control of the physical contact. It was a kind of human contact she was comfortable with, and it even gave her extra reserves to deal better with the kind of contact she couldn’t avoid. Massage was what was keeping her, she was pretty sure, from turning into some weird hermit who kept her urine in mason jars or something.
As she went down to get Mr. Carbone his water, Manny ran her schedule through her head. Today was a fuller day than she usually booked. She was little, not quite five feet, and she had little hands. Those hands worked well for massage, getting into some good, deep places, but after five appointments in a day, she was tired. Today, though, she had eight, and one of them—her next, in fact—was a fucking ninety-minute deep tissue. Heather, a new maybe-friend since she’d started at the Seagazer, had called in sick, and Manny, whose afternoon had been on the light side, had taken over Heather’s afternoon appointments.
She brought Mr. Carbone his water and accepted a little envelope from him—the spa left envelopes for tips—and then she led him to reception so he could pay and book his next appointment. He gave her a little kiss on her cheek. He always did that, so she’d steeled herself, her sphincter clenching a little, but she smiled.
“Heather’s one o’clock is set up in Suite 4, Emma.” Sydney, the receptionist. gave her a strange look as she shared that information. Manny couldn’t quite read it. She wasn’t great at understanding meaningful looks.
“Okay. Thanks, Syd. I need five. Has he been in there long?”
“Nope. Maybe three minutes. But I guess I forgot to call him, so he didn’t know it wouldn’t be Heather until he got here. He’s okay with it, though.”
Manny nodded, waved again to Mr. Carbone as he headed out, and went back to the staff lounge for a quick chug of Rock Star and a couple of minutes of her own therapeutic massage, rubbing and stretching her hands. Ninety minutes of deep tissue. Ouch. She checked her appointment record. Luca Pagano. Pagano. Huh. Manny sucked at names, but she knew the Paganos were the construction guys she saw around since she’d moved to this little burg. That, and it was hard not to know the Paganos were like real-life Sopranos or Corleones. She guessed they were all probably related. Okay, then. It felt like she should know them more, but nothing was coming to her. Either way, she’d be extra nice. She could manage that.