Karina

Ding-dong. The bell on the door of the spa rang and I sprang up from the rolling chair I was lazily circling in. We hadn't had a customer in almost an hour and not one of us had anyone on the books, so I was tending to the spa alone. I had dusted and vacuumed and filled up the oils in everyone's rooms. There was literally nothing else to do except scroll on my phone, and I was purposely trying to avoid that. I went through my typical pattern of typing Kael's name in, and as usual, there was nothing new. He had completely disappeared from my life. No apology, no trying to make excuses. Nothing. I blocked and unblocked him twice before tossing my phone onto the desk. The door opened forcefully and I had a potential customer to relieve my boredom. The man walking up to the counter had a sharp, square jaw like a pit bull, and an Alabama State cap covering dark hair and hooded dark eyes. He was tall, ungodly so.

"Hi, how can I help you?" I asked him, looking up at the clock on the wall and out the glass door behind him. It was dark and that gave me chills. I hated being in the spa alone lately. I couldn't tell why, but I'd had this anxious, dreadful-as-hell feeling in the pit of my stomach for the last couple of weeks and just couldn't shake it. All I could think about was my brother going to basic training and being screamed at by drill sergeants. I couldn't stop imagining him with his hair buzzed off, in ACUs doing push-ups and obstacle courses in the scorching sun. Visions of him dodging IEDs and gunshots overseas consumed me, making my brain even more chaotic.

By the time the man spoke, I had mentally left the lobby and was on a different planet. I was becoming so detached from my daily life that I wasn't sure if I was in the right headspace to be giving treatments to clients.

"Do you have any openings right now?" he asked in a husky voice.

My stomach dropped for the third time.

"Uh . . . " I thought about telling him no, that I was booked for the rest of the night, but I really needed the money and my electricity was due the next week. And he most likely wouldn't try to murder me. He didn't know I was alone here and that was good.

I wished I didn't have to think that way, and even though I knew that I was more paranoid than most people, I also knew as a woman there were dangers around me all the time.

"Yeah . . . what sort of treatment are you wanting?" I asked him, pointing up at the menu on the wall.

The laminated posters were all curled up at the corners, and some of the prices were barely legible because of Mali's scribbly handwriting that had been fading since the spa opened. Every once in a while, I tried to use a Sharpie to trace over the faded sign, since Mali couldn't care less about it. She rolled her eyes every time I told her I would gladly make a new one since it seemed to only bother me.

"Like, an hour? I need a massage bad. My back is all fucked up right here." He rubbed his hand on the top of his hip, twisting his body slowly.

"I can do an hour treatment. This is your first time here, yeah?" I recognized every regular client, mine and everyone else's.

He nodded and I slid the clipboard with the new client sheets over to him. His fingernails were dirty and his hands were so dry that his knuckles were cracked and had white rings around them. His face looked younger than his hands, but even looking straight into his almost black eyes, I couldn't guess how old he was. I could tell he worked hard and either was from Alabama or just liked the team.

As he filled out the paperwork, I slid my phone from my pocket and discreetly checked it. A notification popped up right as I went to unlock the screen. It was from Instagram; I had two new followers and three likes on my latest post, which was a picture of a dandelion peeking up from blades of grass. Two followers, huh? I might as well be an influencer with my three hundred followers and twenty likes on some of my posts. My fingernails on a chair got hundreds of likes, though, so it clearly didn't take much to impress the people of the internet.

"Here you go," the man said, interrupting my daydream of being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to post aesthetically pleasing photos on an app.

"Thanks . . . " I looked for his name. "Thomas. When you're ready, I'm all set."

He nodded and I led him back to my room. When we stepped inside the small space, he felt even bigger to me. So big that I
had to look up at him when I spoke. I turned the music on and circled around the table to light another candle on the shelf.

"Besides your lower back, do you have any problem areas for me to focus on?"

"My head," he said, and I waited to see if he was joking or not.

He smiled a little and looked way less murderous when his cheeks dimpled.

"They don't pay me enough for that, so anything else?" I smiled back at him, and he shook his head. He wasn't so scary after all.

"And for pressure? Do you want more Swedish, Thai style? Light, medium, deep tissue?"

He looked confused. "Don't know the difference, but I guess medium? I've never gotten a massage before."

I groaned internally. I would either turn him into a regular or ruin his first experience. I hated the pressure. Self-inflicted, yes, but it still made me anxious. Why did I always have to be like this? It was exhausting.

"Okay." I forced a small smile. "I'll give you a few minutes to undress to your comfort level and place your personal items in the basket. Go ahead and lie face down under the sheet and blanket when you're done, and I'll be back in about two minutes or so. Take your time."

I walked out of the room and tied the curtain closed. I found myself on my phone again, this time rereading my last one-way conversation with Austin. Three where are you? messages and one if anyone should be pissed and not answering, it's me later and still nothing. My twin brother and I had been through our share of fights and there had been times that we didn't speak for weeks, but this was different. He'd done something that he knew would put a huge crack in our relationship and didn't seem to give a single fuck about it. Unanswered calls, even more unanswered texts. He completely ghosted me. His audacity was at an all-time high.

He was a fucking liar now—no longer just a boy who fibbed sometimes to get what he wanted from our parents or from girls. He was a man now, one who fucking lied to me and joined the Army with the help of Kael, whom I should have known better than to trust in the first place. But of course I was charmed by him, just like he'd planned, and I allowed myself to be used in the game he was playing with my father. A game more involved and way more intricate than I could even think about right now. I scrolled the conversation all the way up to when Austin was on his way here from his short-lived stint in North Carolina with our creepy uncle. Everything had changed so much since then, it felt like a completely different reality.

"Uh, ma'am?" The voice scared me enough to jump from right where I was standing in the hallway back to reality.

"Shit," I whispered to myself. How long was I out in the hallway? I had no idea.

"Coming!" I peeped, instead of just playing it off like he had been waiting the appropriate amount of time.

Pulling back the curtain, I rushed over to the table to attend to my neglected new client, who for sure was never coming back, not even to murder me, let alone to get another treatment.

"How is the headrest? Are you comfortable?"

He nodded and I pulled the sheet up to cover his entire back to begin. As my hands slid across his shoulder blades, my mind wandered out of the room, down the hall, and out the front door to the same place it always went lately.