"You'll be ditching your jeans and wearing linen next."
☆

"Ok…" Tully now focuses on Ben's right hand. He runs his fingertips over the contours of Ben's palm, inhaling a deep breath as he does so before exhaling just as deeply. 

Ben finds his breathing mirror Tully's as he becomes transfixed on Tully's face. His eyes are closed. Long lashes dusting the golden brown skin below. His lips parted, teeth tugging lightly on his lower lip. Deep in thought as to what he was supposedly getting from Ben's now perspiring hand. 

"You are nervous." He concludes, feeling the heat radiating from Ben's palm. "Why is that? I promise you're in safe hands." Tully adds with a smile. He opens his eyes to see Ben had been staring at him, before he quickly overts the gaze. 

"I'm not nervous." Ben lies. "It's just a little warm in here." But his body was betraying him badly and he knew he probably would not be able to keep up the pretence for much longer. Especially when Tully's fingers suddenly gravitate towards Ben's arm as the beating pulse in Ben's wrist is taken. 

"Mmm...sweaty palms, raised pulse and…" Tully now raises Ben's hand to his eye level. "You're shaking." He again lowers the hand, but doesn't let go of the hold. "Ben, do I make you nervous?" 

"What?" Ben laughs a little hysterically at the notion. "Of course not! Why would I be nervous of you? It's just this experience. That's all." 

"So you at least admit it." Tully says grinning widely.

"Admit what?" Ben says, now worried that this again was one of those trick riddles Tully kept on pulling on him. 

"That you're nervous. That's something you denied less than a minute ago. Maybe your inner self will be easier to discover than you realised." With that, Tully finally lets go of Ben's hand. He looks down  at where the contact had been. Tully then gets up and proceeds to move behind Ben,  now sitting on his relocated cushion behind him, legs criss crossed by Ben's lower back. "Let me ease your nerves a little." Tully speaks low and deep over Ben's left shoulder as he takes his hands to Ben's upper back and proceeds to gently press his fingers into the clothed covered skin. 

Was this really supposed to help? Being massaged by his current infatuation wasn't going to make Ben relax, it was probably going to make him more tense, or something far more embarrassing ... "Oh...oh my…"  The feel of those fingers on parts of his back and shoulders where he thought didn't possess an issue of tension, suddenly felt very relieved. 

"Feels good huh? I can feel your muscles relaxing already." Tully hums once again over Ben's shoulder. And it was true, as Ben feels his body slowly come down from an anxious high. Maybe this mystery man was onto something.

***

"So he just gave you a massage?" Malroy furrows his brow on hearing about Ben's taster session. 

"And he read my palm." He adds as he refills the coleslaw tub. 

"And, what? Does he predict the future now?"  Malroy wonders. This guy seemed a little like a charlatan to him. 

"No, he didn't read my palm for that. He could tell my state of body and mind from it." Ben insists as he stares into the distance in recollection.

"Ben, you sound like him already." Malroy laughs as he shakes his head. 

"No I don't!" Ben tuts as he finishes the job he was doing. "Anyway it worked. I was much more relaxed after the massage. Tully says you have to be at one to find oneself and you can't do that if you're on edge."

"Yep, you definitely sound like him." Malroy repeats. "You'll be ditching your jeans and wearing linen next...and you haven't even had to pay for the pleasure." 

"Get lost Mal." Ben huffs as he heads to the closed door, turning the sign to 'open'. "I actually think his sessions may help me and I'm going to pay for more actually." 

"With what Ben? We get paid a pittance, even me and I'm a keyholder." Malroy points out, before a savoury notion crosses his mind. "Wait...are you giving him…"

"Free sandwiches ...when he comes in." Ben says, cutting Malroy off from his sentence. "And don't worry, I am paying for those," he reassures his supervisor.

"Yeah you are." Malroy insists. 

Ben doesn't reply. He may well be stepping blindly into a world of the unknown. A world where he was trying to make sense of the nonsensical in exchange for a few sandwiches, but Ben actually didn't care too much either way. What he was interested in was Tully. And if all this meant that he was going to get a massage with those hands of his, it was worth every crumb.