The First Time I Asked For This: A Westchester Woman on Her First Erotic Massage

I was forty-three and I had never, not once in my life, asked a man to touch me only for me. Every encounter, even the loving ones, had been a transaction of sorts — I gave so I could receive, I performed so I could be wanted. The idea that someone might come to my home in Scarsdale, set up a table by the window, and spend ninety minutes attending only to me — without any expectation of return — felt almost dangerous. Like an indulgence I would have to pay for later in some currency I hadn't named.

I filled out his questionnaire at midnight on a Tuesday, a glass of red wine half-finished beside me. He asked what I wanted. Not in clinical terms — in real ones. Did I want soft or firm. Did I want him quiet or did I want his voice. Did I want toys, his mouth, his hands, all three. Were there places I did not want him to go. I sat there for a long time before I answered, because no one had ever asked. I wrote: I do not know. I think I want to find out.

He replied within the hour. He said: then we will find out together, and you will tell me at every turn. Nothing happens that you do not want. If you change your mind in the middle, we stop. If you want me only to hold your hand for ninety minutes, that is what we will do.

He arrived on a Thursday in the late afternoon. The light through the bedroom window was that low Westchester gold, the kind that makes everything look like a memory before it has even happened. He brought the table himself, and clean white linens, and a small candle that smelled faintly of cedar. He was Italian, salt in his beard, calm in a way I was not used to in a man. He asked me to show him where I would be comfortable. He did not look at me like a problem to be solved.

When the time came to undress, he stepped into the hallway and pulled the door almost shut, and called through it that I should arrange myself however I liked under the sheet. When he came back in he never looked at the parts of me I was holding my breath about. He folded the sheet back inch by inch as he worked, and covered me again before he moved on. That alone almost undid me.

His hands were warm. They knew things. They moved across my shoulders and down my back the way you read a letter you have been waiting for — slowly, paying attention, lingering where the meaning was. When he reached the places I had braced for, he did not rush. He waited until my breath changed. He told me, in a low even voice, that I did not have to do anything. That I did not have to be beautiful or quiet or generous or skilled. That I only had to let go.

I cried, a little, somewhere in the middle. Not from sadness. From the strange relief of being received. He noticed without making it a thing — he simply slowed down, rested one hand on my sternum, and waited. When I was ready he went on. At one point I felt myself getting shy, the old reflex of wanting to hide my face, and without my asking he draped a folded cloth across my eyes, soft as a whisper, and said, you do not have to be looked at. Only felt.

What he did after that is mine. I will say only this: he was generous in the way I had read about and never quite believed in. He wanted nothing back. When it was over he covered me up and brought me water in a glass with ice in it, and sat in the chair across the room while I came back to myself. He did not crowd me. He did not require me to be charming.

I paid the second half of his fee at the door, gladly, and probably looking like a woman who had just discovered electricity. He said, in that quiet voice, that he was glad I had found him. That I should be good to myself this week. That he hoped to see me again whenever I wanted.

I booked again two weeks later. I am writing this on the train home from the city, a small private smile on my face that the man across the aisle keeps trying to figure out. I am not going to tell him. Some things, finally, belong only to me.