He'd been rubbing at his own shoulder blade in her doorway for a full minute before she told him to stop making it worse.
"Lie down," she said. Not a question. She said it the way she said most things to him — like it had already been decided years ago and they were only now getting around to it.
He lay face-down on her bed with his shirt balled up under his chin, and she settled onto the backs of his thighs the way she always had, the way that had never once meant anything, until tonight it might.
The oil was warm because she'd held the bottle under the tap first. She'd learned that trick from someone else, a long time ago, and tonight she was glad she still remembered it.
She found the knot below his shoulder blade with two fingers and he made a sound into the pillow that neither of them acknowledged.
"Fifteen years," he said, muffled, "and you never once did this."
"You never once asked."
She worked slow circles into the muscle, and his breathing changed under her hands, and she felt it change, and didn't stop, and didn't say anything about that either.
When the knot finally gave, he exhaled like something had let go that wasn't only muscle, and for a while neither of them moved — her hands still flat on his back, his back still rising and falling under them, the two of them deciding, without deciding, to stay exactly where they were.