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)
Mila isn't wrong.
I just can't make that matter like it should.
I DON'T CANCEL THE session.
Thursday, eight PM. Star arrives on time, because she always does, because punctuality is part of the scaffolding that holds her together like discipline holds me together, and we are, in this one way, exactly alike. I hear her in the corridor, the soft flat shoes, and then she's in the room and she's looking at me with that face. The one she thinks she's hiding. She's not hiding anything. Star Thornton has never hidden a single thing in her life. Everything she feels is right there, in her hands, in the flush at her throat, in her eyes finding mine and holding on like she's afraid I'll disappear if she blinks.
"Hi," she breathes.
"Hi."
She oils her hands. The cedarwood fills the room. I lie face-down and her palms find my back and I close my eyes and let her work and I don't think about Mila's voice in the gallery saying you'll destroy her.
I think about it the entire time.
Her hands find the scar along my left shoulder blade. The long one. She knows it now, knows it like she knows her own treatment room, by touch, by instinct. She doesn't flinch at it, doesn't adjust her pressure, just works the tissue with a patience and competence that got her hired at twenty when therapists twice her age couldn't match her scores. Her thumbs trace the border of the muscle and I feel my body do the thing it does with her, the thing it refuses to do for anyone else: yield. Give ground. Let her through the muscle and the tissue and the bone and into the space underneath where everything I carry goes still for an hour.
One hour. That's what she gives me. One hour of silence in a head that hasn't been silent in five years, and I should sit up right now and say this was a mistake and walk out and cancel the remaining sessions and let her hate me for a few weeks until the sting fades and she goes back to laughing with Curtis and humming in supply closets and forgets about the man who kissed her in a gallery over four-hundred-year-old lace.
Her hand crosses the burn scar on my lower back. Her fingers adjust without pausing. She remembers where every scar is. She's mapped me. My body is a territory she's surveyed and she carries the chart in her hands and she doesn't even know she's the only person in the world who has it.
I don't sit up. I don't say anything. I lie there and I let her touch me.
I am a coward.
FRIDAY. MILA AGAIN.
Gallery after hours, the laptop open between us, satellite feed running. The actual work I'm on this ship to do. The reason I hired Mila three years ago. The thing that should matter more than a girl with cedarwood on her palms who pressed her forehead to a porthole and smiled at the sea.
"I saw you this morning," Mila mentions, not glancing up from the screen. "Bringing her coffee."
"Mila."
"I'm not lecturing. I'm observing." She scrolls through a data table. Her tone is conversational, easy, the tone of someone discussing the weather forecast, not dismantling a man's defences. "You brought her coffee in a guest mug. Not a staff cup. A guest mug."
I brought her coffee in a guest mug because the staff cups are thin and cool in two minutes and I wanted it still hot when she found it. I calculated the walk time from the guest lounge to Deck 7 and added forty-five seconds for the elevator and chose the thickest mug they had because ceramic retains heat longer than porcelain. I did this at five-thirty in the morning while reviewing port manifests and I did it without thinking, same as I used to strip a weapon without thinking, same as my hands used to do things my brain hadn't authorised because they'd been trained to.
My hands have been trained by Star Thornton. That should alarm me. It does alarm me. I'm alarmed and making coffee.
"It's coffee," I insist.
"It's not coffee. It's you telling every crew member on Deck 7 that the owner of this ship is hand-delivering breakfast to a twenty-year-old therapist." She lets that sit. "You think people don't notice? You think Green doesn't notice?"
Green notices everything. Green has the eyes of a man who's spent thirty years in hospitality and can read the politics of a room from how people arrange themselves at a buffet. If I'm bringing Star coffee in guest mugs, Green knows. If Green knows, the staff knows. If the staff knows, Star becomes a target. Gossip, resentment, the particular cruelty that service hierarchies inflict on anyone who appears to be receiving treatment she didn't earn.