Page 64 of Hold On to Me
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 carryit 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.
MONDAY. TUESDAY. THEdays 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'Sno 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.
