Page 21 of Satisfied By the Slime
“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 wordVerdanceis 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 clenchedteeth.
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.
