Page 39 of Service Included

“Tell me about these spear guys who make your eyes sparkle.”

It was Nico’s spear that made all sorts of her parts light up, but she wasn’t going to say that out loud. He knew.

She picked up Nico’s hand while considering what to say that wouldn’t sound pedantic. “The sculptor Polykleitos worked in roughly the second century before the common era. Historians think he wrote a text laying out a mathematical formula definingthe”—she was about to speak the inevitable phrase—“ideal male proportions.”

A smarter woman would have had a bet riding on her blurting that out.

Cradling his empty palm, she felt the cool damp left by the water bottles. “Writers a few centuries later claimed that his formula began with the length of the bone at the tip of the pinkie finger.” She caught his pinkie between her thumb and first finger, and stroked from the base to the end, pressing lightly to feel each joint where his bones connected, each crease, each callus.

His breathing grew louder.

“Supposedly, he related the length of each finger to the other fingers.” Her thumb caressed the inside of each of his fingers, first the pinkie, then the ring finger, the length of his middle finger, and then to his first finger. She squeezed her fist around his thumb and tugged gently.

In reaction, his eyes fluttered closed.

“He set a ratio for all the fingers to the palm.”

She pressed hard at the center of his palm, where the lifeline and largest creases left a gap that seemed to be made for her to massage.

“The palm to the wrist.”

His wrist was too wide for her fingers to completely encircle, so she watched the veins angle across the roped tendons as she stroked them.

“The wrist to the forearm.”

Her hands moved up to the joint of his elbow as he leaned toward her, his silk hair falling forward to brush the corner of his parted lips.

“And so forth.”

She squeezed, pulled down the length of the hardened muscles back to his wrist, and breathed out a whisper.

“And so on.” They had leaned so close to each other that she could feel her own breath deflect from his shoulder.

His searing heat forced her away from him to search for the water.

“Art history.” His eyelids fluttered open when he spoke, showing dark pupils. “Fuck.”

“It’s my thing.” She struggled to twist the white plastic cap so she could drink, thirsty with need, but also awkward and shaking.

He popped the seal on the second bottle and swapped with her, and they both drank.

While she let the cold water work from within, he picked up the red marker, still capped, and placed the plastic-covered tip on her ankle. The depression behind the joint was a spot she’d never considered, but the touch jolted through her, telling her there must be a bundle of nerves clustered close to the surface. That small gesture had alerted them all. When he drew the closed marker up the curve of her calf, the thin plastic bottle collapsed in her grip, sending a surge of water into her mouth.

Gulping, she felt cool drops on her chin. She was intimately aware of how her lips fit against the mouth of the bottle, her lower one cradling the opening and the upper one pressed into the hole, trying to prevent the flow from swamping her. When she had to swallow, his gaze focused on her throat. It felt like he would watch her drink it all, but water wasn’t quenching her thirst.

He rotated the marker, and now the side of it rubbed up and down the tightest spots on the outside of her thigh, the ones that she was always supposed to stretch and never managed to. The puny plastic implement wasn’t a foam roller, wasn’t enough to ease her tension, not nearly enough. She wanted his hands.

When she replaced the bottle’s twist cap, the way his gaze followed her motion made her aware of the elongated bulletshape she gripped, how she wrapped her fingers around it and parted her lips, how the ribbed plastic felt. Even the wordribraised all sorts of connections in her mind. Condoms advertised them.

Not to mention,ribwas only a few letters away fromridge, and that word made her think of his stomach muscles. His cock, she couldn’t help noticing, was again partially erect, and she could see one particular ridge of pink flushed skin, separating the smooth bifurcated head from the shaft.

“What else did your sculptor do?”

“Well, Polykleitos—” Her voice cracked in the middle of a name she’d said a hundred times. “Presumably, he used live models, so I guess I should show, not tell.” She set the bottle next to the mattress and rose to her knees, then lifted her arms, elbows bent, until her raised hands were even with her temples but about a foot away from either side of her head. “Another statue he’s well known for is theDiadoumenos, which depicts an athlete tying a long ribbon around his forehead after he wins.” She curled her fingers as if holding a stretched piece of cloth in each hand, even though she doubted Nico had noticed that detail given how his gaze had focused on her upthrust nipples. With her hip bones facing the door, she rotated her shoulders and upper torso a few degrees toward him to recreate the sculpture’s full effect. “Of course, it’s a classic contrapposto example too.”

“Hmmm.” His shoulders swayed closer to her. “The coffee-shop pose again.”

Their chests almost rubbed, and she couldn’t help imagining him tossing her on her back and pounding into her. Soon.

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