Page 27 of How to Score Off Field

“Are you doing a color?” the little woman asks.

I glance over at Tess. “Uh.”

“He’ll just get them buffed,” she supplies for me, taking charge. “No color.”

“What about you?”

Tess riffles through these weird little plastic sticks that have fingernails glued to the end of them, and each one is painted a different color. Her toenails are painted hot-pink, and she glances over at me, holding one of the plastic sticks toward me.

“What do you think of this pink?”

“It’s cute.”

“Or I could do white?” She shows me the white one.

Uh. “Do the pink?”

She seems to be mulling this over, biting the inside of her cheek as she does, sipping her latte, totally in her element.

Meanwhile, my feet are getting tickled.

No, not tickled. She’s buffing them with some rock thing, sweeping it back and forth across the bottom of my feet, driving me insane ’cause I yell out, “FUCK. THAT TICKLES!”

All heads turn.

All of them.

Everyone in the place is staring.

Shit.

Did I say that out loud?

But fuck, that tickles.

I stuff the rest of the spinach wrap in my mouth so I shut the fuck up even as this lady tortures me. I thought this was supposed to be relaxing!

I press a button on the massage chair, and it powers up, a hard ball pressing into the small of my back, moving upward as it vibrates. My entire body is rumbling and shaking.

“How do you paint someone’s toes when their entire body is shaking?” I ask the woman still going to town on my feet.

“Practice.” She grins at me.

I shut the chair off and watch the woman as she grabs a metal cheese grater from her bucket and scrapes it across my heel, back and forth, back and forth.

Interesting.

“You have lots of calluses.”

Yeah, which is a good thing because if I didn’t, my shoes would hurt like hell, and I’d have blisters.

“Don’t shave them off. I should probably keep ’em.” I grimace ’cause that just soundssobeyond idiotic. “Sorry. Um, I’m an athlete and, um, don’t want my feet to get blisters.”

She plonks the cheese grater thingy into a jar of blue liquid.

I can’t tell if she’s annoyed as she plunges my leg back into the water and begins scrubbing my legs with grainy, sandy goo.

“What is that?”

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