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)
MONDAY. TUESDAY. THE days have a particular quality now, a flatness, as if someone reached into the world and turned the contrast down. The ship is the same. The corridors, the spa, the amber lights, the hum. The Mediterranean through the portholes is the same blue-green it was last week. Nothing has changed except the thing that changed, and I don't think about it, and I don't talk about it, and when Mila appears at breakfast on Tuesday with two coffees and says "Darling, you look tired, are you sleeping?" I say "Fine, thank you" and drink the coffee and it tastes like coffee.
Just coffee. No ghost of his mouth. No memory of a guest mug left on a counter by a man who calculated ceramic heat retention at five-thirty in the morning because he wanted it still warm when I found it. Just coffee. Just a beverage. Just a thing people drink in the morning without having emotional crises about it.
I eat. I work. I fold towels. I restock oils (except the cedarwood, which stays at the back, label averted, like a person at a party who's been told not to make eye contact). I eat again, standing at the counter in the staff mess, because the tables are full and I don't mind. I've eaten standing my whole life.
Mr. Green pulls me aside on Wednesday morning.
"Thornton. Mr. Almazov's recurring sessions have been cancelled. All of them. Effective immediately."
"I know."
He regards me with those dark brown eyes that have seen a hundred new hires come through and he can see the ones who will last and he hired me because he believed I was one of them and right now he's checking, silently, whether he was right.
"You're my best therapist," he declares. "I'd like that to continue."
"It will."
He nods. Goes back to the reception desk. I go back to my treatment room and prep the table for my ten o'clock and my hands don't shake and I'm proud of that and I hate that I'm proud of that, because pride in the absence of shaking means shaking was a possibility, and before him it wasn't. Before him my hands just worked. Before him steadiness was default, not achievement. And now it's an accomplishment to get through a table setup without trembling and I hate him for that, briefly, viciously, with an anger that flares hot and then turns into something worse, which is grief, which is the understanding that I don't actually hate him at all and I wish I did because hate would be simpler and cleaner and it would fit on the planner.
Wednesday, 9:30 AM: hate Artem Almazov. Duration: 4 seconds. Outcome: failure. Rescheduled: indefinitely.
ON THURSDAY, THERE'S no coffee outside treatment room two.
This isn't news. The coffee stopped when everything else stopped. But on Thursday I arrive at six-thirty for my early schedule and the counter is bare and the corridor is empty and I stand there for a second too long, scanning the surface for something I know isn't coming, my eyes sweeping the counter like an idiot, like a dog at a door, like a girl who hasn't processed the obvious fact that the man who brought her coffee every morning for three weeks has stopped bringing her coffee because he's stopped everything because he closed a door and told her to be reassigned.
I go inside. I set up the room. I work.
THE UPPER DECK IS OFF-limits now. Not by rule. By choice.
The engine room too. The gallery after hours. Suite 12, the guest corridors, the service stairs to Deck 14 where the wind is cold and the sea is black and a man once told me he missed who he thought he'd be and I'd told him my bunkmate snored and he'd smiled, actually smiled, and I'd thought that smile was mine.
Everything above is his. Everything below is mine. Staff deck, spa, staff mess, cabin. The parts of the ship that belonged to me before they were ours, before he walked me through doors marked NO ACCESS and showed me where he goes when he can't sleep. The thin carpet and the amber lights and the frying oil from somewhere aft. Bread rolls and folded towels and sleep in pieces, two hours at a time, and when I wake at three AM and the ship is silent and the hum fills the dark cabin, my palm presses against the wall and feels it vibrate and I don't think about heartbeats.
I don't.
I think about Madame Gilles, who would light a cigarette and tell me Étoile, the table doesn't care about your feelings, the client doesn't care about your feelings, your hands don't care about your feelings, so put them to work and cry on your own time. I think about the fourteen ships that turned me down before this one took me on. I think about the forty-two euros and the bus from Nice-Ville and the fact that I'm still here, still on this ship, still earning four hundred euros an hour, and a closed door doesn't change that. A closed door doesn't erase the Tiffany glass or the jade figure or the heated floors or any of the real, solid, earned things that were mine before he ever spoke my name in a voice that made it sound worth keeping.