There's abut,and I can't locate it. It sits at the edge of my awareness like an off note inside an otherwise perfect chord, and you can't quite point to it but you can feel it and it makes your teeth itch. She says something kind and I believe it and then ten minutes later I'm replaying it and finding the splinter.
Like having a child around.Was that a compliment or a measurement?
She bought me a coffee, remembered the sugar, but also told me yesterday, "You're so sweet, it's almost hard to believe you're old enough to be working here," and when I told her I was twenty she laughed. "Twenty! To be twenty again," and her eyes did something I can't name. They went somewhere else for half a second, somewhere cold and calculating, and came back, and the warmth was exactly the same as before. Exactly. As if she'd practised it.
Maybe I'm imagining it. I'm twenty and she's in her thirties and she's been on this ship longer than I've been a therapist and she knows the Almazovs by name and she probably thinks I'm a sweet, harmless kid who needs looking after.
Maybe that's all it is.
Maybe I need to stop overanalysing the only woman on this ship who's been kind to me and just eat my lunch and be grateful.
Note to self: stop finding splinters in gifts. Not everything is a puzzle. Some people are just nice.
I SEE THEM TOGETHERon Wednesday night.
I'm leaving the spa late, because a client ran over and I stayed to restock the oils and wipe down the tables because Mr. Green does spot checks and I'd rather be tired than sloppy. The staff corridor on Deck 5 runs past the Tranquil Antique Gallery, and the gallery is dark except for a single lamp at the back, throwing a yellow circle across a table I haven't seen before. Not a display table. A working table.
Artem is sitting at it.
I stop walking. I don't mean to, but my feet make the decision for me, the same way my hand stops mid-stroke when it finds a knot, an involuntary response to something that requires attention, and oh chops, does he require attention. He's in the same dark shirt, sleeves pushed up, and he's leaning forward with his forearms on the table and something spread out in front of him, papers and a laptop, and his face is different. Not the guarded blankness of the massage room or the corridor. He's focused, intent, the lines of his jaw hard, his mouth set, and he looks like a man doing work that matters, real work, the kind that furrows brows and locks jaws, and something about seeing him like this, when he doesn't know I'm here, when there's glass between us and he's not performing anything for anyone, does something to my chest that I don't have a planner entry for.
Add to planner: 23:15, brief cardiac event caused by man reading documents behind glass. Duration: unknown. Recurring: probably.
Mila is beside him. Standing, leaning over his shoulder, one hand resting on his arm while her other hand points at something on the screen. She's talking. I can't hear her throughthe glass but I can see her mouth moving, quick and animated, and I can see his head turn slightly toward her, listening.
Her hand is on his arm.
It's nothing. People touch each other's arms all the time. It's a gesture, friendly, professional. Colleagues do it. Friends do it. I do it to clients when I'm explaining where I found tension. It's meaningless.
Except Mila's hand doesn't rest on his forearm the way you'd touch a colleague. It rests there comfortably, without asking permission, a hand on its own kitchen counter, its own sofa arm. And Artem doesn't move away. He lets it stay.
I stand there for three seconds. Maybe four. And then I keep walking, because the girl who picks up ancient necklaces and gets choked up about craftsmen and schedules her own emotional breakdowns in planner format is standing in a corridor pressing her fingertips against nothing and she needs to get a grip and go to bed.
My flat shoes don't make any sound on the carpet.
They don't notice.
THURSDAY. EIGHT PM. Session two.
He's already on the table when I come back in, face-down, towel across his hips, the room warm and dim, and my hands are already oiled with cedarwood because at this point I should just tattoo a sign on my forehead that says I CHOSE THIS SCENT BECAUSE IT SMELLS LIKE HIM AND I'M NOT COPING WELL, but admitting that would mean dealing with it and I'mnot ready to deal with it so we're going to continue the fiction that cedarwood is my professional preference and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the man on my table.
I place my hands on his back.
His skin is just as hot as before. The scars are exactly where I mapped them last week, every ridge and line in the same place, because of course they are, they're scars, they don't move, but my fingers trace them with this ridiculous sense of recognition, like they're greeting old friends, which is insane, I've known this man for eight days, I should not be on a first-name basis with his scar tissue.
But this session is different. Not in technique. In him.
Last week there was resistance in his muscles, that braced-for-impact quality, the body that decided to stop relaxing between hits. It's still there, but underneath it, something has loosened. Just a fraction. Most people wouldn't feel it, but I'm not most people and my hands are the smartest part of me, and what they're telling me right now is: the muscles along his left shoulder blade give a half-degree more than they did last Thursday. His rib cage expands a little wider on the exhale. And the fist, when I work the burn scars on his lower back, doesn't come. His fingers stay open.
He's letting me in. Physically. One degree at a time.
And that thought, that specific thought, is the most dangerous thought I've had on this ship, because "letting me in" is not a phrase you're supposed to use about a client. "Responding to treatment" is what Madame Gilles would say. "Reduced guarding" is what the textbook would say. "Letting me in" is what a girl says about a man, and I'm not supposed to be a girlright now, I'm supposed to be a therapist with a certificate and a professional demeanour and a planner that works, except my planner hasn't worked properly since the corridor encounter and at this point I think it might be permanently broken.
Seven AM restock. Eight-thirty, Mrs. Dumont. Ten o'clock, open. Don't think about how his body trusts your hands. Eleven-fifteen—-
...his body trusts my hands.
Oh chops.
