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)
Planner entry: Saturday, 23:00. Door closed. Client reassigned. Composure: intact. Heart: status pending. Action required: turn around. Walk away. Count the stairs.
I turn around. Walk to the service stairwell. Down six flights, my hand on the railing, each step landing evenly, my body doing what bodies do when the person inside them has left temporarily. The stairwell smells like cleaning fluid and the metallic bite of the ventilation system and I count the steps because counting is something to do with the part of my brain that wants to replay his face in the doorway, the grip of his knuckles on the frame, how he spoke my name before he spoke the word reassigned.
Seventy-two steps. Staff deck.
I walk to my cabin. My bunkmate is asleep. I change out of my uniform in the dark, folding each piece as Mr. Green taught us, tunic first, trousers second, because I'm a professional, that's what I am, that's what I was before him and it's what I'll be after, and I put them in my locker and close the locker and lie down.
The ship hums. Sixty-two hertz.
I know that now. I didn't before him. I didn't know the frequency of the engines or the weight of a four-hundred-year-old handkerchief or the taste of coffee and salt or the sound a man makes against your mouth when something inside him breaks open. I didn't know any of that and I was fine. I was absolutely fine before I knew it and I'll be fine after because fine is what I do, fine is my primary skill set, I have been fine through things that would make a lesser woman's planner crash and my planner hasn't crashed yet, my planner is—-
My planner is running on a loop in the dark and it doesn't help because the planner is where he lives now. He's in every slot. Every blank space where his name used to be. Thursday 8 PM, recurring, cancelled. Friday 6:30 AM, cancelled. Tuesday 2:30, cancelled. My schedule is full of holes shaped like him, and I can't run a planner that's more absence than appointment, and for the first time in my organised, colour-coded, schedule-dependent life the system has failed me, the system doesn't work, and I'm lying in the dark with nothing to hold onto and nothing to count and nothing to file under anything.
Sleep doesn't come.
SUNDAY. I WORK.
My first client is a woman in her sixties, German, tension in her lower back from too many hours in a deck chair with a paperback. I warm the oil (eucalyptus, not cedarwood, never cedarwood, I'm not touching the cedarwood, the cedarwood can stay on the shelf until the end of time), I place my hands on her spine, and my hands do what they always do. They find the knot. They soften it. They don't shake and they don't hesitate and they don't carry anything into the room that doesn't belong there because my hands have never failed me and they won't start now.
"That's lovely," the woman sighs into the face cradle. "You have a gift."
"Thank you."
I have a gift. I have hands. I have the thing Madame Gilles told me was the only part of me that mattered and the thing he told me was not the only part that mattered and one of them was right and one of them was wrong and since he's the one who closed the door I'm going with Madame Gilles on this one.
My second client falls asleep in twelve minutes. I finish the session in silence, lower the lights, leave a glass of water on the side table. My third cancels. I use the hour to restock the cabinet, wiping each bottle with a cloth, labels facing forward, as Mr. Green prefers. Eucalyptus. Lavender.
Cedarwood.
I pick up the bottle and my hand tightens around the glass and for one bright, furious second I want to throw it. I want to hurl it at the wall and watch it shatter and let the whole room reek of him and then open every window and let the sea air carry it away, every molecule, every trace, and I want to stand in the broken glass and the smell and scream.
I put it at the back of the shelf. Label turned away.
That's worse. Throwing it would have been clean. Throwing it would have been an act, a decision, a moment with a before and an after. This is just me, putting the thing I can't look at where I can't see it but knowing it's there, which is basically what he did to me. Shelved. Label turned away. Still there, not destroyed, just hidden on a shelf in a room he doesn't enter anymore.
Note to self: stop comparing yourself to a bottle of massage oil. You have more in common with the bottle than you'd like to admit but that's beside the point.