Page 50 of Hold On to Me
"You don't know me well enough to say that," I point out, and my voice comes out lighter than the moment warrants, because if I let my voice match the weight of what he just told me I'll crack.
"I know you were kind to a woman in the boutique yesterday who couldn't decide between two scarves. You spent fifteen minutes helping her. It's not your job."
I remember the woman. Elderly, French, travelling alone. She wanted the blue one but kept reaching for the red one and I could tell she was lonely and wanted someone to tell her which one to pick so she'd have a reason to keep talking. I picked blue. She bought both. And I'd walked away feeling warm and useful and glad I'd stopped, and I hadn't told anyone about it, because it wasn't a thing worth mentioning. It was just being a person.
But he saw it. Somehow, somewhere on this enormous ship with its three thousand guests and twelve hundred crew, he saw ME in a BOUTIQUE helping a woman choose a SCARF, and he REMEMBERED it, and he's bringing it up now, face-down on my table, like it's evidence he's been building a case with.
"You saw that?" I whisper, and my voice has gone thin and strange.
"Yes."
"That's not... that's not being good at something. That's just being a person."
"Not everyone is."
Three words. And how he says them, low and certain, with this edge of something dark underneath, like he's speaking from extensive personal experience with people who are not, in fact, persons, people who would walk past an old woman struggling with scarves without a second glance, and he's lying here telling me that being a person is a skill and I have it and he's noticed and OH CHOPS my eyes are stinging and I cannot, I CANNOT cry during a session, if I cry during a session Mr. Green will reassign me and I'll lose this, I'll lose the cedarwood and the scars and the silence and the way he asks questions that reach into the middle of me and find things I didn't know were there, and I can't lose this, I can't, so I blink hard and swallow harder and keep my hands moving because my hands are the part of me that works when the rest of me is falling apart.
"Your hands." His voice has dropped again, into something that makes my fingers tremble against his skin. "You think they're the only valuable thing about you."
I stop.
"Mila mentioned it," he explains.
Mila. I told Mila that, last week, over coffee in the staff mess. A throwaway comment, half-joking, a real insecurity wrapped in a laugh:my hands are the only valuable thing I own.Mila had laughed. "Oh, darling, don't sell yourself short," and I'd smiled and eaten my croissant and thought nothing of it.
And then she told him.
She took the thing I confided, the splinter of truth inside the joke, and carried it to him like a report, and now he's lying on my table with my hands on his bare skin and he's repeating my own insecurity back to me with the clear, unmistakable intentionof dismantling it, and I don't know whether to be grateful or devastated or furious at Mila or furious at myself for saying it in the first place.
"She was worried about you," he offers. "She told me you undervalue yourself."
I don't know if those were Mila's words or his translation or something else entirely and this is his translation, and right now it doesn't matter because my eyes are burning and my throat is closing and I'm standing behind a man who just used six words to crack open something in my chest that I've spent twenty years keeping shut.
"That's not the only valuable thing," he tells me.
I take my hands off his back.
I step away from the table. One step. Two.
"I'll step out while you dress," I manage, and my voice doesn't crack, but oh, it comes close, it comes so close that I can feel the fracture line running through every syllable, and I leave the room and close the door and walk to the end of the corridor where the porthole frames a grey sea that goes on forever, and I press my knuckles to my mouth and breathe through my fingers and don't cry.
I don't cry.
But something in my chest is cracked open like an egg and I can feel it, the raw wet edge of it, and he did it with six words on a massage table at seven in the morning and I don't know how to close it back up. I don't know if I want to close it back up. I don't know anything right now except that the sea is grey and my knuckles are white and a man just told me I'm worth more thanmy hands and it's the kindest thing anyone has ever told me and also the most terrifying because if he's right then I've been wrong about myself for twenty years and that's a lot of wrong to absorb on a Friday morning before breakfast.
He comes out two minutes later. Dressed. Coffee-dark shirt. He walks toward me and I don't move because I can't decide whether to turn around or keep facing the sea, whether to be the professional who says thank you and walks away or the girl who turns around with wet eyes and sayshow dare you say that to me on a massage table,and then he's beside me, not touching, not speaking, just standing there with his eyes on the same grey water.
"I shouldn't have told you that," he concedes. "During a session."
"No," I agree, and my voice is steadier now, or at least steadier enough. "You shouldn't have."
"I'm not going to apologise for meaning it."
I turn to him. He turns to me. Close enough that I can see the flecks of grey in his eyes and the small scar on his left hand and his jaw is tight because he's holding something back, something that lives in the muscle and the bone of his face, and I know what a body looks like when it's restraining itself because I've spent two years training to read exactly that, and what I'm reading right now is a man who wants to say more and is using every ounce of his discipline not to.
"Goodnight, Star," he murmurs. Even though it's morning. Even though it's seven AM and the sun is barely up and goodnight makes no sense, except it does, it makes perfect sense, because that's how we end, that's the word he's made ours without asking, and the corner of his mouth does the thing, the lift, thealmost-smile, and it lasts longer this time, two full seconds, and then he walks away.
Almost-smile #4: goodnight at seven AM. Duration: two seconds. The longest yet.
