Summary: Tama Tonga is a massage therapist who is controlled and outwardly professional. But a sudden obsession with a soft-spoken new client slowly dismantles the system he has built to contain his darker impulses. He slowly unravels across their appointments as he quietly rewrites her ordinary behavior into something that confirms everything he has already decided.
Pairing: Tama Tonga/OC
Warning: 18+!! This is a dark fic that will have non-con, stalking, dark themes, etc. If that is not your cup of tea, please do not read!
A/N: Obviously AU, Tama is not the Tama we know and love. It's been a while since I've written and I really like exploring the dark side of things, so here we are.
Word Count: This will be posted in parts. Here's chapters 4-6 around 3570 words
Chapter 4: Containment
I have always been good at managing myself.
This is something I know the way I know other facts about my own body. My resting heart rate, how much I can lift, how long I can run before my form starts to break down. I am disciplined in the way that people who have something to discipline themselves against are disciplined. Not effortlessly. Deliberately. Every day, deliberately.
I built the system when I was 22 and it has worked without significant failure since then.
I think about that. The years of it working. The evidence of my own control.
The runs first. Early, long, the kind that ask something real of you. I come home wrung out and clear headed and for a few hours the noise sits at a manageable volume. I have a bag I hit in the corner of my apartment three times a week. I sleep on a schedule. I eat well. I keep the apartment ordered in a way that probably looks excessive to anyone who doesn't understand that external order is a language the internal responds to.
And then the other thing. The arrangement. The pressure valve, as I have always thought of it. Controlled. Consensual. Careful in all the ways that matter.
The system has worked.
Past tense arrives in my thinking without my choosing it and I notice that.
3 weeks after her second appointment, I try the app again.
The woman I meet is attractive, direct, and has communicated clearly what she wants, which I have always appreciated. There is an honesty to these arrangements that I respect. No performance of something it isn't. Everyone arrives knowing the terms.
We have a drink first. Conversation flows naturally. She is funny, actually, in a dry way I would enjoy if I were more present.
I am not very present.
I know before we've finished the drink that this isn't going to do what it's supposed to do. I know and I go through with it anyway because the alternative is going home and lying in the dark with the noise. And I am not ready to admit what the noise is about.
It's mechanical in a way it has never been before.
Not unpleasant. Just hollow. Like going through the motions of something whose meaning has quietly left without telling you.
Laura, the name of the woman, doesn’t seem to notice. Or maybe she does, but she’s gagged and unable to call me out. I yank her head back by her hair, a tear forming in her eye. Normally, I would find this beautiful. Normally, I would be focused, breathing it in.
But I’m not. I am just simply breathing to function.
I run through our agreement in my head like a checklist. I play the part much like Laura is. But I can see she’s present. She’s here.
I’m not. She isn’t aware that I am not.
But.
She is aware. That's the word I keep finding. She is completely, actively aware. Watching me. Responding to me. Every reaction a reply, every moment a conversation between two people who are both present and both participating.
And I think about stillness.
I think about hands that know where to place someone and a body that simply allows it.
I think about breath released on instruction without hesitation or performance.
The apartment is quiet and ordered. It’s exactly as I left it and I look at my hands flat on the table. I think about what I am doing.
I am not a man who lies to himself. That has always been a point of something close to pride. I have looked at the parts of myself that most people would look away from and I have looked steadily and called them what they are. It is not comfortable but it is honest.
So.
Honest then.
I want what I cannot arrange. I want what has not been offered and will not be offered and exists entirely outside any system I have ever built to manage myself.
I want the real thing.
The thought sits on the table between my hands like something I've set down.
The runs get longer. The bag in the corner takes more of me. I add weight, add distance, add anything that asks the body to be so exhausted it stops asking questions.
It helps the way it helps to bail out a boat with a cup. Technically doing something. Not solving anything.
She is in my head at a frequency I have stopped trying to measure. Not intrusively, not the way a song gets stuck, nothing so passive or irritating. More like a presence. Something settled. That room she moved into in my mind–she has arranged things now like it’s permanent. I am aware of her there the way you're aware of someone in the next room. Constant. Almost comfortable.
That comfort is the part that should concern me.
I think it might be the part that concerns me least.
I find her online 11 days after the 2nd appointment.
This takes very little effort, which I note without surprise. People distribute themselves across the internet with an openness that has always struck me as interesting. Not reckless exactly. Just unaware of who might be paying attention.
I pay attention.
I find what she lets me find and I look at it the way I used to look at the inside of a house I had slipped into in the dark. Still. Thorough. Taking inventory of a space I was never meant to be in.
Her life in fragments. Small ones. A coffee cup in a particular shop, a street I now know, a friend whose laugh she captures in a short video. These are things she offered to everyone and no one specifically. I take them as personally as anything I have ever been given.
She posts something that doesn't fit the shape I have made of her.
Something confident. Sharp edged. A comment that surprises me.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I fit it into the shape anyway. File it somewhere that doesn't disturb the architecture. People are allowed to be more than one thing and still be fundamentally what you know them to be.
A coffee cup in a window, the street visible behind it, the particular angle of morning light that tells me it's east facing. The shop name is reflected faintly in the glass. I don't look for it deliberately. I just notice. I have always noticed things other people let slide past them.
I find the shop in 4 minutes.
I'm not keeping track of how long these things take me. I notice that I notice anyway.
I want to be precise about what this is.
I am not delusional. I understand the difference between what is real and what I want and I have always been able to hold both without confusing them. This is important to me. I am not the kind of man who loses his grip on things.
What I am is thorough.
I have always been thorough. As a kid I wanted to know what was on the other side of closed doors, what people kept in drawers, what a life looked like from the inside when no one was performing it for anyone. That curiosity has never felt like a flaw to me. It feels like attention. Like caring enough to actually look.
Her life assembles itself in fragments over the following weeks and I am a patient assembler.
The coffee shop is 3 blocks from an intersection I now know. She walks, which means she lives within a reasonable distance of the places she tags. She has one friend who appears consistently, whose face I have memorized without intending to. She has plants on a windowsill that she photographs occasionally when the light hits them correctly. She had a relationship that ended some months ago, readable in the negative space of her posts, in what stopped appearing rather than what did.
She lives alone.
I file this the way I file everything about her. Carefully. In a place I can return to.
She doesn't know she's given me any of this. She put it out into the open and walked away. And I came along and picked it up.
I have always been good at picking things up quietly.
There is a version of this, I know, that another person might look at and feel troubled by.
I am not that person.
What I feel when I map her is something closer to intimacy than anything I have found in the arrangements, in the careful consensual evenings that have always left me feeling like I performed something rather than experienced it. This is different. This is learning someone the way they don't even know themselves. Seeing the shape of a life from the outside with the kind of attention nobody in her life is probably paying.
A caption. Sharp and dry and a little ruthless in a way that doesn't fit the shape I have built of her. I read it again. 3 times. I sit with the discomfort of it the way you sit with something that needs to be reconciled.
This is different from the other post. The one I fit into her shape.
This is not the gentle, careful person who thanks the receptionist and says please and goes soft under my hands. This is someone with an edge I haven't accounted for. Someone who knows exactly what she thinks and isn't particularly concerned about how it lands.
I sit with it the way I used to sit with locked doors as a kid. Not frustrated. Curious. Examining the problem over until it shows me the way in.
Then I think about it more carefully.
People contain more than one thing. I know this. I have always known that the version of a person you access in one context is not the whole of them. She is gentle in my room because my room asks for gentleness. Because I make it safe to be soft. That is something I do for her, something I give her, and it doesn't make the other parts of her untrue.
I look at the post again and something shifts in the discomfort. Turns into something else. Curiosity. Want, even.
I have the soft version. I have the still version. I have the version that breathes out when I tell her to and stays exactly where I place her.
It makes me want to know them.
All of them. Every room she contains. Every version she keeps for different contexts and different people.
I want the parts nobody gets.
I set my phone down, look at the ceiling, and think about that want for a long time. How specific it is. How it has been sharpening from something formless into something with edges and detail and the clear shape of intention.
I don't look away from it.
I have never been able to look away from what I want.
I tell myself I am going somewhere nearby. Technically true. There is a gym in that direction, a route I could justify if justification were something I required.
I park 2 streets over and I walk.
It is a quiet neighborhood. The kind where people leave their windows lit in the evenings and don't think about who might be outside looking in. I have always thought this was a particular kind of innocence. Not stupid exactly. Just unaware.
She is unaware.
I don't know which building yet. I have narrowed it to a block from details she has distributed without thinking, the angle of light in photographs, a partial street sign in the background of a video. I am close.
Standing on her street for the first time feels like something I don't have a clean word for. Recognition, maybe. Like arriving somewhere you have already been in your head so many times that the physical version of it feels like memory rather than discovery.
I stand there for a few minutes.
The night is quiet.
I put my hands in my pockets and I breathe and I think about her somewhere above me, or nearby, or close enough that the distance is finally something I can measure.
Close enough that it has become a problem of logistics rather than longing.
I wasn't going to. I tell myself that and almost believe it.
A light in a window, the plants she photographs, the angle I have memorized. 3rd floor. 4 windows. A door that faces the street.
I stand across from it for 63 seconds.
I count because counting is something to do with the part of my brain that would otherwise be doing something I'm not ready to name yet.
Then I walk back to my car.
I drive home.
I make dinner and eat at the table. I wash my plate and put it away and the whole time I am somewhere else entirely. Standing on a quiet street looking up at lit windows. Counting seconds like a man who is still in control of himself.
I am already in the room when I hear her at the front desk. I don't need to look at the clock. I know the sound of her arrival the way I know my own heartbeat now. Automatic. Constant. Something I stopped choosing to listen for because it became something I simply heard.
She is warmer than the first time and less warm than she will never get to be. That thought arrives and I let it sit. I have stopped managing my thoughts the way I used to, redirecting them like traffic, keeping them in lanes. It costs too much and accomplishes nothing. And I am tired in a particular way that has nothing to do with sleep.
I am tired of the space between what I want and what I allow myself.
"Hi," she says, smiling, and moves past me into the room.
I close the door.
"Same pressure?" I ask.
"Yes please," she responds.
There it is. That word. I have heard it from her mouth enough times now that it has become something I collect without meaning to. A small offering she doesn't know she keeps making.
I smile and tell her to take her time getting comfortable. I turn to my oils and I breathe. Slow. Steady.
My hands know what they are doing tonight. I do not need to be present for them. I discovered this somewhere around the 3rd session and have been grateful for it since. The body remembers. The hands remember. They will do the work and do it well and I can be somewhere else entirely.
She settles and goes still. That thing in my chest does what it always does.
Quiets.
I begin.
My hands find her shoulders and I watch them move across the planes of her back. I think, not for the first time, about the size of them. The span. I am not a small man and my hands are not small hands. Against her they look like ownership. Like something that has already decided.
I watch my thumb trace the line of her spine and I think about everything I know about this back. Every knot, every pattern of tension, every place she holds what her life does to her. I have mapped her more thoroughly than anyone alive has mapped her.
I think about the word I found for her weeks ago.
Uncomplicated.
Something waiting to be picked up by the right hands.
I work up toward her neck slowly because I have learned that slowly is what she responds to. Most people brace when they feel pressure building. She does the opposite. She softens into it. Anticipates without knowing she anticipates, her body already beginning to yield before I have fully committed to anything.
That quality in her has kept me awake more nights than I will ever account for.
I work into the base of her neck and she makes the sound.
Small. Caught. The breath that hitches when a knot releases, the involuntary answer her body gives before her mind has time to decide anything. I have thought about that sound more than I have thought about most things. The way it belongs to me in a sense she doesn't understand yet. I produced it. My hands, my pressure, my knowledge of exactly where she holds herself.
I pause for one second longer than I should.
She doesn't notice.
She never notices. She is too far gone into the particular safety of this room, this table, these hands that have never done anything but take care of her.
I reposition her arm and she lets me move her without a word, without a flinch, without the slight resistance that most people can't help. Her muscles are loose and her trust is complete. I place her exactly where I want her and she simply remains there.
She already knows how to be still for me.
The thought is not new. It is well worn by now, turned over so many times in the dark that it has gone smooth. But it lands differently tonight. Heavier. More final.
Like something that has stopped being observation and started being fact.
Near the end I tell her to breathe out. Routine. Clinical. Something I say without thinking because I have said it ten thousand times.
She exhales immediately.
Completely. The whole body releasing on my instruction, no hesitation, no question. Just her breath going out of her because I asked it to.
I close my eyes for one moment.
One moment of what this actually feels like when I stop pretending it is just work.
One moment is all it takes to feel that twitch. That heat pooling low.
Then I open them before it takes over. I finish the session and my hands do what they know how to do. I say the right things and she comes back from wherever she goes during these hours. She sits up carefully and rolls her neck.
I look at her for a moment. Really look. The way I have been looking for weeks from a careful professional distance, the want behind my eyes is something I have kept in a room she was never supposed to know about.
The door to that room has been open for a long time now.
I go to the back room and I sit. I put my hands on my knees and I look at them for a long time. The width of them. The steadiness.
I think about her breath going out because I asked.
I think about her building 3 blocks from a street I can now walk in my sleep.
I think about a door on the 3rd floor.
I think about the teenager I was, slipping into dark houses just to know what was inside. The specific quiet of a space that belonged to someone else. The feeling of standing in the middle of someone's life and holding all of it without them knowing.
I let them run all the way to the end, the full shape of what I want, the full detail of it, and by the time I pull into my parking space something has settled in me that has not been settled in months.
Maybe longer.
I sit in the car in the dark and breathe. I think about stillness. Hers specifically. The particular quality of a person who has learned, without knowing she's learned it, to be quiet under the right hands.
I think about bringing that home with me.
I think about how long I have been patient.
I go inside and I sleep better than I have in months. In the morning I wake up certain in a way I have not been certain about anything in years.
2087
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