Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
"Be careful," he tells me. "Okay?"
"Curtis—-"
"I'm not asking who. I don't need to know who." He picks up his tray, stands, and his grin comes back, easy and warm, the Curtis grin that makes every room brighter and every dinner less lonely, but his eyes stay on me a beat too long. "Just be careful."
He leaves. I sit with my coffee cooling between my palms and the staff mess clattering around me and I think about the fact that Curtis didn't ask who and what that means, whether it means he already knows or whether it means he knows enough not to want confirmation, and either way there's a heaviness in his "be careful" that I can't shake because Curtis doesn't do heavy. Curtis does light. Curtis does stolen olives and snoring impressions and Uncle-Curtis Christmas cards. If Curtis is doing heavy, it's because he sees something I don't.
I pick up my tray. I go to work. The humming doesn't stop but I do it quieter now, with the supply closet door closed.
MILA TAKES ME SHOPPING.
"It's criminal," she declares, steering me through the boutique on the promenade deck with one hand on my elbow and the other gesturing at racks of clothes I could never afford, her voice bright with the performative outrage of a woman who considers underdressing a moral failing. "You've been on this ship for five weeks and you haven't bought yourself a single thing. Not a scarf, not a pair of earrings. Nothing. Criminal, darling."
"I send my money home." This is true, sort of. There's no home to send it to, exactly. There's a savings account in Nice that I feed like a stray cat, small amounts deposited regularly, hoping it'll grow into something that can sustain me if this job ends. But "I send my money home" sounds better than "I'm saving every euro because I've been broke my entire life and the terror of going back to nothing keeps me up almost as much as my bunkmate's snoring," so I say the better thing and Mila accepts it with a sympathetic tilt of her head.
"Well, today you're not sending it anywhere. Today we're spending it."
"Mila, I can't—-"
"I'm buying. Hush." She pulls a dress off a rack before I can argue, holds it up against my chest, tilts her head, and her eyes sweep over me with that quick, thorough, cataloguing precision I've seen before, the efficiency of a woman who knows exactly what she's doing.
The dress is green. Not the pale jade of the gallery figure or the muted sage of the necklace she showed me weeks ago. A deep, true green, almost black in the folds, the fabric thin and soft with a sheen that catches the boutique's warm lighting. Simple cut. No beading, no embellishment. Just a dress that falls straight and knows what it's doing.
"Try it," Mila commands.
"I don't need a dress. When would I wear a dress? I own two pairs of shoes and one of them is the spa flats."
"When someone takes you to dinner, darling. When someone asks you to put on something that isn't a uniform and go somewhere beautiful." She holds the dress higher, the fabric pooling over her arm, and her smile is wide and warm and aimed at me like a spotlight, and then she says: "I saw you. In the gallery. Tuesday night."
My stomach drops through the floor of the boutique, through Deck 5, through the hull, and into the Mediterranean Sea.
"You and Artem," she continues, casual, fond, as if she's describing something adorable she caught on a nature documentary. "Against the wall. Darling, I'm thrilled."
She looks thrilled. Her whole face is bright with it, eyes open and shining, that generous smile that makes you feel like you've been given permission you didn't know you needed, and my heart is hammering because SHE SAW, she saw us, she saw his forehead on my shoulder and my fists in his shirt and him whispering my name into my collarbone, and she's standing here holding a green dress and smiling about it.
"I didn't—-" I start.
"Don't apologise. Don't you dare." She smooths the dress against my shoulder with one hand. "He deserves someone who looks at him like you do. That man has been alone on this ship for too long, buried in work and old ghosts, and you..." Her hand smooths the fabric, then drops. "You're good for him. I can see it. He's lighter. He actually smiled at me yesterday. Did you know that? He never smiles."
He smiles. The lopsided one. He does it when I say something that catches him off guard, or when I'm being stubborn about calling his deck "secret," or when I told him about the cat in Nice that fell asleep on a client's back. He smiled in the engine room when I told him about the boiler pipes.