Star #3
"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.
But I don't say that to Mila. Those smiles are private. They're mine. I've earned every single one of them through jokes and stubbornness and the particular alchemy of being the girl who makes the man who doesn't smile, smile, and they live in my collection where nobody else gets to browse.
"Try the dress," she urges. "For me."
The fitting room is small, curtained, mirrored on three sides.
I unbutton my uniform and step into the green dress and the fabric slides over my hips and settles against my skin and it feels like nothing.
Not nothing-cheap. Nothing-light. Air with a sheen.
The straps are thin and my shoulders are bare and my collarbones show and the green turns my skin warm and makes my hair look almost black and in the mirror I don't look twelve.
I look twenty. I look like a woman who works on a ship full of beautiful things and is, for the first time, wearing one.
And oh chops, my eyes are stinging, because this is the girl who counted forty-two euros and wore rolled-up trousers on her first day and couldn't button her uniform and now she's standing in a three-panel mirror in a dress that fits like it was made for her and she looks like she belongs on this ship.
She finally looks like she belongs.
I open the curtain.
Mila is waiting. Her eyes move over me, quick and thorough, and her hands come together under her chin.
"Perfect," she pronounces. "Absolutely perfect. Turn around."
I turn. The fabric moves with me. In the three-panel mirror I can see myself from every angle and behind me I can see Mila, and I'm watching her face because her face is always worth watching, she gives so much with it, warmth and approval and delight, and I'm about to say thank you, it's beautiful, I can't let you buy this when I catch her hands.
Her right hand is gripping the strap of her bag. The knuckles are white.
I find her face in the mirror. Her smile hasn't moved. Not a millimetre. The warmth, the delight, the shining eyes, all exactly where they were, and her knuckles are white on the bag strap.
The knuckles. The smile. Both there at the same time. And one of them is lying.
Then I blink, and her hand loosens, and she's reaching for her wallet, already turning to the counter, already saying "We'll take it, and do you have shoes? Something simple, a low heel, she's young, she doesn't need height, she needs to feel like herself but better."
I stand in the green dress in the three-panel mirror and I try to name what I just saw. I can't. It was there and then it wasn't. A fracture line that disappears when you change the angle. If I'd glanced a second later I'd have missed it. If I'd glanced a second earlier I might have seen it form.
Mila comes back with a shoebox and a receipt and she takes my arm and we walk out of the boutique together and she squeezes my elbow and says, "He's going to lose his mind when he sees you in that."
I laugh. She laughs.
The sounds are identical. The shapes of them are different and I can't figure out how.