Chapter 5 #2
“Okay,” she says. “Here’s the deal. Hypothetically.
If you stayed—and I’m not saying you’re staying, I’m saying hypothetically—you would need to be invisible.
No one sees you. No one hears you. You stay in the studio or the house, and if someone comes to the door, you become a puddle or a throw rug or whatever slimes do to hide. ”
“I can do that.”
“And we set boundaries. Clear ones. About the touching and the sensing and the—” She waves her hand again. “All of it.”
“Of course. You set the rules. I follow them.”
She nods slowly, chewing the inside of her lip. “Okay. Well, that’s how it’s going to have to be for a little while, until I get this order taken care of. Then we’ll find somewhere more permanent for you.”
The stool she’s sitting on creaks as she shifts her weight, and I see the micro-wince she tries to hide when the movement pulls at something in her lower back.
A spasm, just beginning, the muscle fibers tightening around a vertebra that’s been quietly misaligning for weeks.
“When’s the last time you slept more than five hours?” I ask.
“I don’t know. A while.”
“And you’re producing twenty units a day.”
Her eyes narrow. “How do you know that?”
“Your calendar.” I nod toward the wall behind her. “The word Verdance is written across the top, and you’ve circled the number twenty on every day for the next twenty-six days.”
Maisie turns to look at the calendar, then she turns back to me.
Her expression is difficult to read.
Irritation and something underneath it, something that looks like the exhausted relief of a person who has been carrying a weight alone and suddenly realizes someone else can see it.
“You’re very observant for a jello man.”
“I’ve had eighty years of practice.”
That almost-smile again, quick at the corners of her mouth.
She pulls the clip from her hair, shakes it loose, twists it back up.
The motion is automatic, something she does dozens of times a day, and it exposes the line of her neck and the tight cords of muscle running from her skull to her shoulders, every one of them taut as piano wire.
“I need to get back to work,” she says. “I’ve got six more batches of salt scrub to mix tonight, and the honey-lavender needs to be packaged by morning for a local order.”
She stands with a determined look in her eyes.
Then her lower back seizes.
I see it happen in slow motion: the spasm gripping the muscles along her spine, the involuntary arch, the way her hand shoots out to grab the worktable edge.
Her coffee sloshes over the rim.
Her breath catches, a sharp intake through her teeth, and she freezes in that position, locked between sitting and standing by a body that has finally decided to send a message she can’t ignore.
“I’m fine,” she says through clenched teeth.
The lie is so transparent it practically glows.
I hold still.
Every particle of me wants to move toward her, but I hold still.
Her knuckles go white on the table edge.
The coffee mug tips sideways in a slow, lazy arc and she can’t catch it because catching it would mean letting go, and letting go would mean falling.
Coffee spreads across the worktable in a dark pool, soaking the corner of a shipping label, and she doesn’t even look at it.
Her eyes are squeezed shut.
Her breathing has gone shallow and rapid, the kind of breathing that means the pain has crossed the threshold from discomfort into something animal and consuming.
I can feel it from here.
I don’t need to touch her.
The spasm radiates a heat signature I can read from four feet away, the muscles clenching so hard they’re pulling her spine out of alignment in real time.
This has been building for a long time, every shift compensated for, every warning ignored, and now the bill is coming due all at once.
“Maisie,” I say, my voice low, the register that carries warmth without volume.
“Don’t.” Her command comes out tight and airless. “Just give me a second.”
I give her ten.
I count them in the rhythm of her pulse, which I can feel through the floorboards, fast and thready.
She tries to straighten.
The spasm tightens.
A sound escapes her, involuntary, somewhere between a gasp and a groan, and the shame that follows it across her face is worse than the pain.
She’s embarrassed to be hurting in front of me.
She’s embarrassed to need anything at all.
Eighty years is long enough to learn patience.
It’s also long enough to learn when patience becomes its own kind of cruelty.
I move toward her.
Slowly.
My footsteps are nearly silent because my feet are barely solid, just enough structure to carry me across the concrete floor.
I stop within arm’s reach and I don’t touch her.
I let my warmth do what it does naturally, radiating outward in a gentle ambient field, the way a sun-warmed stone gives off heat after dark.
I know she can feel it.
I see the goosebumps rise along her forearm.
“I can help,” I say. “If you’ll let me.”
Her eyes open.
They’re glassy, bright with the kind of tears that come from muscle spasms and not from sadness, though the sadness is there too, banked underneath everything else like smoldering coals.
She looks at me, and I see the calculation happening, the war between what she needs and what she’s willing to accept from something she met twenty minutes ago, something that arrived in a crate, something that isn’t human.
“You don’t even know me,” she whispers.
“I know where it hurts,” I say.
And I raise my hand, open-palmed, and hold it an inch from the small of her back, close enough that she can feel the heat pooling between my surface and her skin.
Close enough that the fine hairs along her spine lift toward my palm like iron filings toward a magnet.
I hold it there, an inch away, and I wait for her to close the distance or tell me to step back.
Her breath shudders out.
Her fingers tremble on the table edge.
And she leans back into my palm.