Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
But I don't say that to Mila. Those smiles are private. They're mine. I've earned every single one of them through jokes and stubbornness and the particular alchemy of being the girl who makes the man who doesn't smile, smile, and they live in my collection where nobody else gets to browse.
"Try the dress," she urges. "For me."
The fitting room is small, curtained, mirrored on three sides. I unbutton my uniform and step into the green dress and the fabric slides over my hips and settles against my skin and it feels like nothing. Not nothing-cheap. Nothing-light. Air with a sheen. The straps are thin and my shoulders are bare and my collarbones show and the green turns my skin warm and makes my hair look almost black and in the mirror I don't look twelve.
I look twenty. I look like a woman who works on a ship full of beautiful things and is, for the first time, wearing one. And oh chops, my eyes are stinging, because this is the girl who counted forty-two euros and wore rolled-up trousers on her first day and couldn't button her uniform and now she's standing in a three-panel mirror in a dress that fits like it was made for her and she looks like she belongs on this ship.
She finally looks like she belongs.
I open the curtain.
Mila is waiting. Her eyes move over me, quick and thorough, and her hands come together under her chin.
"Perfect," she pronounces. "Absolutely perfect. Turn around."
I turn. The fabric moves with me. In the three-panel mirror I can see myself from every angle and behind me I can see Mila, and I'm watching her face because her face is always worth watching, she gives so much with it, warmth and approval and delight, and I'm about to say thank you, it's beautiful, I can't let you buy this when I catch her hands.
Her right hand is gripping the strap of her bag. The knuckles are white.
I find her face in the mirror. Her smile hasn't moved. Not a millimetre. The warmth, the delight, the shining eyes, all exactly where they were, and her knuckles are white on the bag strap.
The knuckles. The smile. Both there at the same time. And one of them is lying.
Then I blink, and her hand loosens, and she's reaching for her wallet, already turning to the counter, already saying "We'll take it, and do you have shoes? Something simple, a low heel, she's young, she doesn't need height, she needs to feel like herself but better."
I stand in the green dress in the three-panel mirror and I try to name what I just saw. I can't. It was there and then it wasn't. A fracture line that disappears when you change the angle. If I'd glanced a second later I'd have missed it. If I'd glanced a second earlier I might have seen it form.
Mila comes back with a shoebox and a receipt and she takes my arm and we walk out of the boutique together and she squeezes my elbow and says, "He's going to lose his mind when he sees you in that."
I laugh. She laughs.
The sounds are identical. The shapes of them are different and I can't figure out how.
Mila
MILA CLOSED THE CABIN door, engaged the lock, and stood with her back against it for three seconds. She counted them. An old habit, from before the ship, before Artem, before any of this. Three seconds to close whatever face she'd been wearing and open the one underneath.
The one underneath was very still.
She crossed to the desk. The laptop was where she'd left it, positioned to catch the satellite signal that was strongest between eleven PM and two AM, a window she'd mapped during her first month aboard. The lid opened. A sixteen-character key. The encryption took four seconds to handshake.
The screen resolved. A chat window. Secure, routed through three relays, untraceable. If anyone came looking, this line had never existed.
Status update.
A pause. Then a cursor.
Go ahead.
Mila studied the screen. She thought about the gallery on Tuesday night. Star's back against the wall. Artem's hands pressed to the panels on either side of her head. His forehead dropping to her shoulder, his mouth against her collarbone, and the expression on his face, the unguarded one, the open one, that Mila had spent eleven years trying to put there and never had.
She thought about the green dress. The mirror. Star turning, flushed and young and astonished by her own reflection. How the girl's eyes had stung with tears because a twenty-euro-account masseuse from Nice was beautiful in a dress and couldn't believe it.
She thought about what it cost to smile while her knuckles ached.
He's distracted. The girl. It's a problem.
The cursor pulsed. Then:
Handle it.
Mila closed the laptop. She sat in the dark cabin, in the chair by the porthole, and faced the black water. The ship hummed beneath her. Sixty-two hertz. She didn't know that fact. Artem did. Artem knew the frequency of his own ship's engines, knew the weight of a four-hundred-year-old handkerchief in a girl's palm, knew how many sugars a twenty-year-old masseuse took in her coffee and what time she started her morning and what her hands felt like on his scars. He knew all of this because he'd chosen to learn it, and he'd never chosen to learn a single comparable thing about Mila in eleven years.