Page 65 of Hold On to Me
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 fryingoil 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 meÉtoile, 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.
My hands are the most valuable thing about me. That was true before he told me otherwise and it's true now.
It has to be true now.
CURTIS DOESN'T ASK.
He sits with me at dinner on Friday, drops into the chair across from mine with his tray and his easy grin, and he doesn't saywhat happenedorare you okayorI told you to be careful.He talks about a client who sneezed during a facial and knocked over a candle. He tells me the kitchen is testing a new breadrecipe for Saturday brunch, sourdough, and he's already located the overflow stash, port-side pantry, second shelf, same spot. He steals an olive off my plate without asking.
I don't laugh. I eat. I nod in the right places. I pick up my fork and put food in my mouth and the pasta is fine and the bread is fine and everything is fine in the specific, airtight, weaponised way that "fine" means when you're using it as a shield rather than a description.
Curtis keeps talking. He doesn't fill the silence to fix it. He fills it to keep it company. And that distinction, the difference between a person who talks to make you feel better and a person who talks so you don't have to be silent alone, is the kindest thing anyone has done for me in a week, and I don't have the words to tell him that, so I eat my olive-less pasta and let him talk about bread.
At the end of the meal he picks up his tray, stands, says: "Same time tomorrow?"
"Sure."
He goes. I sit with my empty plate and the noise of the staff mess around me and I think: he's a kind person. Curtis is twenty-one years old and he has a good heart and he brings me bread locations and doesn't ask questions and I should be having dinner with him every night. I should be laughing at his stories and stealing olives off his plate and being twenty in the uncomplicated way that twenty is supposed to feel.
I don't know how to be uncomplicated anymore. I lost it somewhere between the corridor and the gallery and the engine room and the door, this ability to be simple about anything, and I want it back so badly I could scream.
I don't scream. I bus my tray. I go to my cabin. I lie in the dark.
The hum is the same. Everything is the same.
SATURDAY. ONE WEEKsince the door closed.
I'm restocking the supply closet on Deck 7, shelving towels on the upper rack, when my hand goes still. Not because of a sound or a sensation. Because of an absence. I'm reaching for the shelf and my mouth is closed and I realise that I haven't hummed since last week.
Curtis noticed the humming. He clocked it, the change in me, the supply-closet song. He told me I was different. He told mebe careful.
I'm different again now. Different in the other direction. And I hate it, I hate that he took that too, the humming, the stupid involuntary humming that I didn't even know I was doing until it was already mine and Curtis pointed it out and I'd stood there with towels in my arms thinkinghuh, so this is what happy sounds like when it leaks out,and now it's gone and the closet is silent and I'm standing here with a towel in my hands and my jaw clenched and I want to be angry because angry has somewhere to go, angry has an address and a postcode and I could deliver it to his door like I delivered myself last Saturday at eleven PM, but I can't get there. I just feel empty. A closet with no song in it. A planner with no entries. A girl with excellent hands and nothing to hold.
I put the towel on the shelf. I close the closet door.
THE GREEN DRESS ISin my locker.
I haven't worn it. I haven't returned it. It hangs on the hook behind my uniform, folded in the tissue paper from the boutique, and every morning when I open the locker to get dressed I see the edge of it, the deep green fabric with its sheen, and I close the locker and put on my whites and go to work.
Mila bought it for me. Mila, who squeezed my elbow and promisedhe's going to lose his mind when he sees you in that.Mila, whose knuckles went white in the mirror while her smile stayed warm.
Giving it back would be the sensible thing. Walk to the gallery, hand it to her, say thank you, it was generous, I won't need it. That would be clean. Final. Exactly the decisive action Madame Gilles would approve of.
The dress stays. I don't know why. Maybe because it's the only thing left from the part of my life that had him in it. Maybe because it fit, and things that fit me are rare, rarer than I'd like to admit, and this dress fit me like his hand fit my jaw. Maybe because when I stood in that three-panel mirror I saw a woman, not a girl, and I want to believe she's still in there somewhere even if nobody's looking at her.
The locker closes.
SUNDAY. SECOND WEEK. I'm in the staff mess at lunch, alone at the end of the long table, eating rice and something with chicken that tastes like nothing, when Curtis sits down.
