Page 57 of The Confidentiality Clause
I look across her to Shaw, who’s sitting furthest away from me.
“You seriously said yes to this?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “Anything to make my wife happy.”
Sutton leans over and gives him a kiss.
I roll my eyes and sit back in my chair.
“Lighten up, Carolina,” Ariel says. “This is supposed to be relaxing.”
“Getting beat up while being boiled alive is relaxing?”
“Don’t be a baby. It’s not that bad. Beauty is pain.”
“Is that what they tell women to sell them awful things? You have my full permission to boycott all of it. Starting with this.”
Her head tips back as she laughs. I bite back a smile at the sight.
“Thank you for yourpermission, but I’m good. We like this, don’t we Sutton?” Ariel asks my sister.
Sutton nods. “Pedicures are amazing.”
“If you say so,” I mumble.
Four people walk out of a back room dressed in all black. Is this a cult? It feels cult-adjacent. Leading the charge is the tiny mean grandma from before. She sits on the rolling chair in front of me. Oh, great. This is going to go swell.
She taps my right leg. I look at her blankly.
“Put your foot up,” Ariel whispers next to me.
I gingerly set my foot on the towel the woman has laid out. She grabs a package of metal torture instruments and dumps it out in a basket nearby. Then she picks up something that resembles the pincers of a poisonous bug and starts pinching at the skin around my toenails.
“Ow! What is she doing?” I whisper to Ariel, who keeps laughing at me.
“She’s trimming the dead skin around your nails.”
“The skin feels very alive to me.” I wince as she clips away to her heart’s content.
Each metal tool is a different form of agony. Ariel and Sutton chat away like this is normal, meanwhile Shaw is asking the guy working on his feet how he got into the business and what his life story is. How he’s managing coherent words while being tortured is beyond me.
Ariel turns to me. “Why do you look like you’re having a tooth pulled? Chill.”
I glare at her. “This is miserable.”
“It looks like she’s moving on to the scrubs and massage now. That should be better for you.”
I force my muscles to relax as the woman spreads some kind of gritty paste all over my legs. The scrub, if I had to guess. Thewoman massages it into my shin and it feels…okay. Weird, but not in a bad way.
I draw in a deep breath, then let it out in a surprised yelp when she puts the paste between my toes.
“What is wrong with you?” Sutton asks through a fit of giggles.
“Why is she touching my toes so much?”
“Because it’s apedicure,” Ariel says, wiping tears away from how hard she’s laughing.
Shaw is laughing with them, and I’m ready to leave when she starts on my other foot.
