and around him. His eyes, they were looking at me in a way that would give my dad a stroke. That brought me partway back to reality.
“Um… over there?” I pointed at the massage table.
“You sure you work here?” he asked.
“Yeah, I… I normally work in Tier-2…”
Austin closed the distance between us and leaned down towards me. My heart tried to jump up my throat to get a better view out my mouth at all that solid muscle so close to me, and my ability to breathe be damned.
“Because, if you’re another girl that stole a uniform just to get in here… well, I’ll have to do to you what I did to her.”
A drop of water fell from his head and landed on my ear, making me flinch. The scent of soap and the faint musk of him filled my lungs as I took a deep breath to offer whatever reassurance I could.
“I promise I work here,” I squeaked.
I’d been around men before, I’d seen Austin on TV before, but I’d never felt anything like this. I’d always been able to keep what my father called my evil nature shut up in a box, but something about this was different.
Maybe it was the way he carried himself, that presence I felt. Maybe it was the fact that he was the hottest man I’d ever laid eyes on and he was only wearing a towel.
Whatever it was, that part of me had kicked a hole in the side of its box and was yelling at me to reach out and run my hands all over that perfection. I gulped, because that’s exactly what I was supposed to do, in my professional capacity.
“Hmmm. Too bad. All those rules, huh?” he said.
No doubt he was talking about the rules concerning no sleeping with the fighters. I got that talk during my induction right after the fire safety lecture. Despite that, if rumors were true, then Austin had taken liberties with more than one ring girl in his time with the NHBFC.
The tattooed fighter walked over to the massage table and climbed on, leaving me in a daze for a few seconds before I followed. There was a fully-stocked basket of massage oils on a shelf underneath, and I pulled one out at random while he settled himself in.
I poured a little on to one palm and rubbed my hands together to warm everything up. That was lesson one in the massage course I took earlier in the year, and although there hadn’t been anything in that lesson about chanting “professional, professional, professional” in your mind, I did that for a moment too, before I touched him.
Even his back was roped with well-defined muscles and tattoos, enough to make a girl blush. In my course, we’d always had same-sex massage partners. Michelle, the girl in my class, felt nothing like this.
There was just so much of him to touch.
You mean apply therapeutic massage techniques to, my conscience chided me. Yes, that.
I had to get more oil to get enough coverage on that broad back, but once everything was sliding nicely, I lost myself in the thoughts that forced their way into my mind. Honestly, I could have happily done this for hours, without a care in the world, until I felt something I shouldn’t have felt while on the job.
Between my legs. What was that? Oh no! I was absolutely, undeniably, wet. I glanced around nervously, as if Gordon might be there with my final paycheck in his hand, but there was nobody else in the room.
Maybe Austin felt me lose my rhythm, because he chose that exact moment to make my predicament even worse.
“Hop on. Straddle me. You’re not getting enough pressure on from the side.”
“Um… I’ll j-just try harder, sorry.”
The prizefighter, who had all his professional wins so far via submission, lifted his head and looked at me with unbendable will in his eyes. “You sure you work here? I said hop on.”
“OK, sorry. Please don’t say anything, I need this job. I… I didn’t know how things were done over on this side.”
Austin rested his head down again, and I climbed up as carefully as if I was crawling on paper-thin ice. Positioning myself over him, I set one knee down on either side of his hips.
He was right, I was definitely able to apply more pressure this way, but I couldn’t say much for my technique anymore, because all I could think about was how there was two-hundred and