Her days are other people’s bodies. Shoulder after shoulder she finds the wrong thing with her thumbs and presses until it confesses. The clinic waits one flight up from the street; in the waiting room stands a wire rack of leaflets about afterward, restocked on Tuesdays by a man who nods, initials the clipboard, and is gone. Her hands are insured to the second knuckle and read quarterly at the desk downstairs, grip and span and tremor, and the premium moves with the reading. Nothing she does off the table is covered.
Evenings she wants weight. A person’s, not a patient’s, across her back on a Sunday morning with the light coming up the sheets. She buys the wide bath sheet. She buys the second pillow and sleeps on her own side, practicing.
People like you form lasting bonds, the app says, and puts a small gold ring around her photograph. The men are good. The fireman who cooks with his sleeves pushed up and cries at films without checking whether she has seen. He lifts her onto the counter mid-sentence and finishes the sentence after, her heels hooked behind his thighs, flour on her arse for the rest of the evening. The widower who asks twice and means both askings, who undresses her like unpacking something posted carefully and holds her hips as if they had a handle. The carpenter whose hands smell of pine and who measures her waist with one spread hand, a span he means to remember; a workman about it too, unhurried, thorough to the edges, and she comes with his thumb pressed into the knot of her right shoulder, trade answering trade, and pays for it on the Monday reading, the tremor up, the premium up with it — a night charged to a hand. She likes the specific: the crook of an elbow, the smell of a neck after a late shift, a man’s full weight on her for the length of a breath and no longer. She knows the Latin name of every muscle that moves under her and uses none of it; what she says is harder, and there, small words her hands have always known. Sex is good and she says so out loud in the dark. It surprises them both. The mornings are the best part. Then they are the part she waits out.
The funicular man is three nights in March. Her thumb walks his spine one bone at a time and stops at the seventh; under her thumb his breath stops with it. On her table, breath stops at the seventh in the week after bad news. He sleeps like a man on a ledge, one arm over the side. On the third night, at the door, she gives him the compliment she keeps for the ones who make it easy — “You’re good at this, the way a hotel is good at it” — and watches his face do a small wrong thing with it. She means it kindly. On the stairs down she almost goes back up. She does not go back up.
Later his message sits at the end of the thread, the two words you say to someone pouring. Say when. She remembers answering. She remembers the sentence she made, kind at both ends, and sending it on a wet Thursday. Months on, hunting a plumber’s number, she scrolls back. The thread ends at Say when. Nothing under it. Her sentence is nowhere — not sent, not drafted, not anywhere. The thread wins. She was the one who never said.
The wanting goes quietly, a tide out past the marker. There are roadworks by the depot. She has been meaning for a month to change her route home, and has not, and takes the same street every night and is mildly annoyed by it every night. She starts booking the baths on Fridays. The assistant suggests a warmer opening. She declines the suggestion. It’s been a while, the app says. X is still nearby. She lets it be a while.
The old baths keep the last unphotographed light on the hill. Phones die in the wooden lockers. Under the dome the steam moves like weather that has chosen a room, and the women are every age at once, plain and unposed, wet stone, wet skin, the attendant with a rower’s forearms scrubbing her back to the exact edge of too hard. Heat finds the week in her shoulders and takes it out of her hands one knot at a time — her own trade done to her, wordless, unbilled.
“Just you?” the attendant says at the long slot.
“Just me.”
The woman two hooks along is teaching her daughter which words are dear, saying each one twice, the way you do with money in front of a child. The girl repeats them and gets one wrong and they start again.
The water takes all of her weight. She lets it.