Chapter 3 Staff Orientation
The second test confirmed the first.
I didn’t see the printout. I saw the aftermath of it, which was Marlene clearing her morning, two appointments rescheduled by a tight-faced Poppy who relayed them without her usual editorial.
I saw the directress standing in front of the board at ten in the morning with a coffee going cold in her hand, looking at the blank wing, the scrubbed-clean rectangle with the one lonely magnet, like something had come loose in it overnight that she’d spent eight months holding pinned.
And I saw her at her desk through the glass that afternoon, drafting something on a single sheet, slow, deliberate, every word weighed before it went down.
Twice she stopped and read it back. Once she nearly tore it up.
Then she folded it and locked it in the desk drawer, not the file room, the desk, and rested her hand flat on the wood a moment before she let go and turned the key.
I had no idea what was on the page. I had a strong and growing idea that my name was.
So I did what I do when a situation is bigger than my information. I worked.
I serviced the radiators in the staff wing, bled the air, balanced the flow so the far rooms stopped running cold.
Poppy trailed me for an hour with a mug of tea and a running commentary on the guest list that constituted, as far as I could tell, the single most comprehensive intelligence operation in the canton.
“That one tips like she’s apologizing for something,” she said, of a name on her clipboard.
“That one cries on day three, every program, like clockwork, and then she’s grand.
That one walks the corridor at two in the morning.
They all think nobody knows. I know. Knowing is the entire job, Adam, the desk is just where they make me sit while I do it. ”
“Go on, then. Impress me.”
“Don’t tempt me, I’ve nothing but time and a memory like a steel trap.
” She blew on her tea. “Suite four orders the milk bath and then doesn’t get in it, every time, just looks at it.
Suite seven has rung the desk forty-one times this stay to ask whether the mineral water is ‘working yet,’ which, no comment.
The countess in the garden wing tips Ute and only Ute, because she’s frightened of her, which, correct.
And there’s a gentleman’s wife, won’t say which, who’s booked the same week three years running and has never once mentioned a husband in three years of small talk, which tells you everything about who comes up this mountain and why. ”
“Who comes up this mountain and why,” I repeated.
“Women with money and a thing they can’t buy in the city,” she said, and the laughter drained clean out of her voice.
“That’s the clientele, the lot of them. That’s the business.
They come up here to stop being whatever they have to be down there.
” She caught herself getting sincere and corrected hard.
“Anyway. Suite seven’s going to ring again in the next ten minutes, you watch, she can sense when I’ve sat down. ”
The desk bell rang faintly from the front hall, two corridors away.
“That’s her,” Poppy said, with the grim satisfaction of a woman whose dark prophecy has come true on schedule, and went.
“You know everything in this building.”
“I know everything in this building,” she agreed, without an ounce of false modesty, and then, the brightness flickering for an instant: “Which is its own problem, when there’s a thing nobody’ll say out loud.”
She didn’t say which thing. I didn’t ask. We both knew we were circling the same blank rectangle on the board, and neither of us had the clearance to land.
Bianca found me at the staff sauna at nine that night.
“You’re not staff until you’ve sweated with staff,” she announced, in the doorway of the little wood-lined room off the wellness wing, the part the guests didn’t use.
She was already in a towel, hair piled up, the steam giving her deep-tan skin a sheen that the low amber light made into something out of a painting.
“House rule. Made it up just now. Get in here.”
I got in. There was a code to it I didn’t fully have, but I had enough of it to know that turning down Bianca Moraes when she invited you to do something was both impossible and ill-advised.
I sat on the lower bench in my own towel and we sweated, and she talked, and the steam came up off the coals, and she was utterly, joyfully shameless about her own body in a way that left me with no honorable option but determined eye contact.
She’d taken the upper bench and stretched out along it like a cat that owned the building, one strong thigh bent up, the towel barely covering what it was meant to.
Steam beaded on her collarbone and ran down.
Her dark hair was piled high and already surrendering, curls escaping at the nape, sticking to her neck.
The lamp was the color of honey and it found every plane of her, the strong shoulders, the trim waist, the heavy curve of her that spilled past the edge of the bench.
I kept my eyes on her face. It was a feat of engineering.
“You did the radiators in the staff wing,” she said. “My room’s warm for the first time since November. I noticed. I notice when men are useful, it’s a weakness of mine.”
“I aim to be useful.”
“Mm. Aim higher.”
She noticed the eye contact and was charmed by it.
“You keep looking at my face,” she said. “Most men don’t manage it this long. It’s nice. It’s a little insulting. Mostly nice.”
“I was raised right.”
“You were raised polite, which is different.” She tipped her head back against the wood and closed her eyes and let the heat work on her. Then, with no wind-up, no change in her face, she said the thing she’d climbed the stairs to say. “You know what they found in your blood.”
It wasn’t a question, but I answered it like one. “No. I know they found something.”
“They found the thing.” She opened her eyes and looked at me, and for once Bianca Moraes was completely serious.
“I’ve worked here ten years, Adam. I figured out years ago what this place actually is.
The waters are water. The supplements are vitamins.
The success rate everybody whispers about, the guarantee, it was never the mountain.
” She paused. “It was one man. One donor. The same one, for twenty-two years. And eight months ago he retired, and the printer’s been quiet, and the board’s had that blank wing, and the directress has been losing the thing this whole place is built on. ”
The steam hissed. Below the wellness wing, faintly, the pumps I’d fixed hummed on.
“And today the printer wouldn’t shut up,” I said.
“And today the printer wouldn’t shut up.
” She picked at the hem of the towel, not looking at me.
“I’m not supposed to tell you. Marlene will tell you herself, tomorrow probably, with files and a contract, properly.
But I’ve watched the queue form for tomorrow and I’m thirty-one years old and I’ve spent a decade in this building making the most expensive bodies in Europe feel wonderful, and I’ve decided I’m done waiting politely at the back for my turn at the good things.
” She turned on the bench to face me fully, and the towel slipped, and it slipped with intent, and she let it, and her dark eyes were laughing and dead earnest both.
“So before there’s a schedule, and a chart, and a queue with my name somewhere polite in the middle of it, I’m going to jump it.
If you want me to. Tell me if you don’t and I’ll laugh about it for ten years and we’ll be fine. ”
I looked at her, all of her, finally, after all the days I’d been not letting myself, and she watched me do it and the easy noise went out of her, all that warm weather she carried into a room gone suddenly quiet and watchful and close.
“I want you to,” I said.
“Good answer.” Portuguese, the first of it, slipping out under the English. “Bom. Then let me show you something. Call it technique. I’m always teaching.”
She reached to the caddy on the bench and came back with the oil.
“This is how you warm it,” she said, pouring a slick pool into her palm and working it between her hands until it ran.
“Body temperature. Never cold. A cold hand on a warm man is a crime.” She knelt up on the bench beside me and put her warmed, oil-slick hand flat on my chest and slid it down over my stomach, her eyes following her own hand, narrating, instructing, her voice dropping into the husky teaching cadence she’d used on the table this morning except the lesson had changed.
“You read the body. You find where it’s holding.
And you do not,” her hand closed around my cock, slow, the oil making her grip glide effortlessly from root to head, “apologize with your hands. You mean it.”
I made a sound I didn’t plan to make, low in my chest, and my cock jumped hard in her fist. She grinned.
“There,” she said, pleased, working me with that exact unhurried craft, two hands now, one cupping low to roll my balls in her warm slick palm while the other stroked up the shaft and broke into a slow corkscrew twist at the head that found something I didn’t know was there.
A bead of precum welled at the slit and she smeared it down with her thumb, spreading the wet of me into the oil, and watched my hips twitch when she did.
“See? Technique. Anyone can grab. Not everyone can read.” She kept her dark eyes on my face, on the effect of her, calling my reactions back to me like a clinician of pleasure, telling me what she was doing and why and exactly what it was getting her, watching my cock thicken and flush in her hands and approving of it out loud, and I let her, because she was extraordinary and because I’d worked out by now that being witnessed was its own thing for her, that the running mouth was the point.
But I wasn’t going to lie there and be the lesson.