Page 1 of Satisfied By the Slime
Chapter 1
Discreet Packaging
Maisie
The thing about making twohundred pounds of salt scrub by hand is that your body starts negotiating with you around hour two.
First, it’s reasonable.Hey, maybe switch arms?Sure. Great idea. I switch arms.
Then it’s more pointed.That shoulder thing is happening again.Iknow. I adjust my grip on the spatula and keep stirring.
Then, somewhere around the forty-minute mark of the second batch, my body drops all pretense of diplomacy.
It sends a white-hot cable of pain from my right shoulder to the base of my skull in a pointed remark that I better finish soon.
I suck in a sharp breath and my whole body locks up, teeth clenched against the sudden flare.
“Okay,” I say to the empty studio. “Duly noted.”
I set the spatula across the rim of the mixing bowl and press the tips of my fingers into the spot between my shoulders where a furious little knot of muscle has taken up permanent residence.
The heating pad velcroed around my lower back is doing its best, God bless it, but it’s hardly making a dent.
The desert night presses its familiar silence against the studio walls, the kind of quiet that only exists in a town small enough to hear your own heartbeat.
I want to stop, but I can’t.
The email from Verdance glows on my phone screen, propped against a row of curing rosemary-oat bars like a tiny billboard for my future.
Six hundred units. Thirty days. A number at the bottom that I’ve looked at so many times today it’s lost all meaning and then found it again—that slow vertigo of yes, this is real, this could save me, I just have to not screw it up.
That number would clear my credit card. The bad one. The one I lie awake thinking about with a sick, rolling dread that spikes every time I remember it exists.
I pick up my wine, take a sip—okay, more of a gulp—and do the math again.
Twenty units a day.
Cure time of seventy-two hours for the scrubs, which means I need to start one hundred and forty units within the first week or I’ll bottleneck at packaging.
Ingredient costs I can cover if I order the shea butter inbulk, which means another charge on the card, which means I’m thinking about the card again and that awful dread is hanging over me…
I should call Gram tomorrow. She’d know what to say to give me the courage to push through another day. She always does.
I was eight the first time Gram let me help make her signature soap. I had stood on a wooden stool in her kitchen on the outskirts of town, stirring the lye mixture with a wooden spoon almost as tall as I was. She watched from behind me, one hand over mine on the handle, the other resting on my shoulder.
Slow and steady, baby. Let the heat do the work.
For Gram it was a hobby, something to do to pass the long desert afternoons that stretched out like taffy. She had her wool felting, her alpacas, her dog-eared romance novels. Soap-making was just another thing to keep her hands busy.
For me, it became the thing I reached for when I didn’t know what else to reach for.
I moved to Coyote Springs because of those visits. Because some part of me never forgot how quiet the desert could be at night, how Gram’s house felt like the only place where I didn’t have to be anyone in particular.
I take another sip of wine and stare at the half-built shelving unit against the far wall.
Kyle designed it two years ago, back when we were going to open a brick-and-mortar shop together.
Phase One of the expansion, he called it.
