Page 63 of Hold On to Me
"What happened?" she demands.
Her voice is low. Calm and direct. Just the question, the same voice she uses when she asks about pressure preferences andthe same voice she used when she whisperedgoodnight, Artemoutside her cabin door and the same voice that has been asking me real questions in dim rooms for weeks and every time I've answered because her voice makes a room that my words walk into.
I can't walk into it this time.
I grip the door frame. My eyes trace the circles under hers and I put them there. The tight line of her mouth and I put that there too. Every small, visible mark of damage on her face, mine. I did that. The man who was supposed to protect her did that.
"Star."
"Don't." Her chin lifts. Not defiance. Something harder. Something that cost her every euro of courage she scraped together to come here. "Don't say my name like that and then close the door. Tell me what I did."
"You didn't do anything."
"Then what changed?"
I grip the door frame and my knuckles ache, the same knuckles she traced through oil every Thursday, the same knuckles she knows the topography of better than I do, and the ache runs from my hands up through my arms and into the place behind my ribs where I keep the things I can't say, and what I can't say is:nothing changed. Everything is exactly the same. I want you in every room on this ship and in every hour of my day and in the engine room at midnight and on the upper deck in the dark and the only thing that changed is that someone I trust told me the truth, which is that wanting you will get you killed.
"I think it's best if you're reassigned," I tell her. "I'll speak to Green. Another therapist can take the sessions."
Her face does something I'll carry for the rest of my life.
It doesn't crumble. It doesn't break. It doesn't do any of the things that faces do when they receive news they can't absorb. It goes still. Completely, terrifyingly still. The stillness of a body absorbing a blow too large to express and too sudden to process, how a building goes still in the instant after an earthquake before anyone knows whether it's going to stand or fall. She stands in that doorway and her face empties and her eyes don't blink and her hands, her extraordinary, irreplaceable, four-hundred-euro-an-hour hands, hang at her sides without moving.
She nods. Once.
She nods and I close the door and I stand on my side of it with my forehead against the wood and I listen to her footsteps. The soft flat shoes on the carpet. Walking away. Getting quieter.
Gone.
The suite is dark. The balcony doors are open. The sea is black and the ship hums at sixty-two hertz and I'm standing at a closed door with my forehead pressed against it and my hands pressed against the wood as if I can feel her through it like she felt my scars through oil, as if proximity to the last surface she stood near is enough, and it isn't, it isn't even close, and the silence where her footsteps used to be is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
This is the right thing.
This is the right thing.
I'm going to keep telling myself that until it stops being a lie.
Star
THE CORRIDOR IS VERYbright.
That's what I notice first, standing outside Suite 12 with my hand still raised where the door was. The amber LEDs on the guest deck are warmer than the ones on the staff levels, closer together, and they pour gold across the carpet and the cream walls and my knuckles, which are suspended in the air six inches from polished wood that isn't there anymore because he closed it.
I lower my hand.
My feet are pointed toward his door. My shoes are the flat ones, the ones with the soft soles that don't make noise on carpet, and my trousers are rolled at the waist because they're still half an inch too long because I never hemmed them because hemming them was on the planner at priority level low and I never got to it because I was busy falling in love with a man who just told me to be reassigned.
I nodded.
Why did I nod? Why didn't I say something? Why didn't I saynoorwaitoryou kissed me in a gallery over a four-hundred-year-old handkerchief and told me I changed you and held my hand with the hand you wouldn't let me touch and whispered my name into my collarbone like you were confirming something and now you're REASSIGNING me and I deserve more than a closed door, I deserve more than a nod, I deserve at least thecourtesy of an explanation that isn't a polished wooden surface three inches from my face—-
Why didn't I say any of that?
Because I'm twenty. Because I'm staff. Because when the man who owns the ship tells you it's over, you nod, because that's what girls like me do. Girls who counted bus fare in centimes and ate cereal standing over the sink and applied to fourteen ships before one let her aboard. Girls who carry the bone-deep certainty that they do not get to keep beautiful things. Those girls nod. They always nod. They've been nodding their whole lives at doors that close and things that end and people who leave, and the nodding is so practised it happens before the brain has finished processing the blow, which is efficient, really, very time-effective, A+ crisis management, well done, Thornton, top marks for speed of acceptance.
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 wordreassigned.
