The noises she made, however, took their toll.
“Stop with all the moans,” I grumbled after a good five minutes of aural torture.
She released a breathless gasp, but she whispered, “You need to do this every day, and it’ll put me in a good mood.”
Lips twitching, I said, “As you get bigger, I can do that.”
“Every day?” She twisted her head to the side to look at me. “You’re unreal, do you know that, Mr. O’Donnelly?”
“I sleep with an angel in my bed. It makes me holy.”
She snickered but gently laid her head back down, sighing as I tried to work any soreness out of her major muscle groups without going so far that she’d complain about being tortured.
“You should have gotten into massage therapy,” she teased me.
“Yeah, I can just see Da approving of that career route when I was in high school.”
I heard the smile in her voice as she mumbled, “You could have massaged him out of his bad mood.”
“See, that’s where I’d fail at the masseur shit.
“I like to rubyou. That’s it. No one else. Sure as fuck not my da.”
A hiccupping laugh escaped her, and a couple seconds later, she whispered, “I wish he got to meet Bump.”
Five years without him and it was still an open wound.
I didn’t like talking about him.
I knew it wasn’t healthy, but nothing about my life really was.
I figured I’d suppress everything until I had a heart attack. Or an ulcer. Or maybe even a hernia.
Preferably an ulcer.
Clearing my throat, I murmured, “I’m glad he doesn’t get to meet Bump.”
“You are? Why?”
“Because he wouldn’t read the room.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I don’t want Bump doing what I do for a living.”
“Me neither. Unless it’s what he wants.”
“Does anyone want to be a sniper?”
Inessa sniffed. “You wanted to be a soldier, didn’t you? First? Before that?”
“True.”
“Was it a vocation?”
“No. I wanted to get away from Da and the mob. See how that turned out,” I said with a grimace, rolling my eyes. “Anyway, stop talking about this. I just worked all the kinks out of your shoulders and they’re back again.”
Only when she was as limp as overcooked spaghetti did I start to tease her.