Maisie sets the mug down.
Her jaw works, and I can see her cycling through responses, discarding the ones that would require her to feel something, selecting the one that keeps her standing.
“Well, for the record, I’m fine. The shoulder thing is just repetitive motion. The sleep thing is temporary. And the—”
She gestures vaguely at her whole torso.
“The everything-else thing is just what running a business solo looks like.”
“Of course,” I say, and I keep my voice gentle and my colors steady. I don’t argue, because she’ll figure out that I can tellthe difference between fine and what she actually is, and she’ll figure it out in her own time.
She studies me over the rim of her mug.
Her eyes are sharp, assessing, the eyes of someone who has learned to evaluate everything for what it will cost her.
“You said you were what I needed. On your listing, and again just now. What does that mean, specifically? Because ‘adaptive deep-tissue relaxation’ covers a pretty wide range, and I’d like to know which end of that range we’re talking about.”
“Whichever end you want.”
“That’s a politician’s answer.”
“I adapt. That’s what I do. If you need a massage, I’m a massage. If you need someone to help you work and haul heavy materials, I can do that too. If you need—” I pause, choosing carefully. “Anything else. I can be that.”
Her cheeks color.
She knows whatanything elsemeans, and I know she knows, and the space between us fills with the particular electricity of twopeople who are both aware of something neither is willing to acknowledge yet.
“Right now,” she says, very firmly, “what I need is to understand the logistics. You’re alive. You’re in my house. You’re pretty big and look hard to hide.”
“I’m used to hiding,” I say.
She shakes her head. “All it takes is one glimpse from the wrong person. I live in a town of four hundred people who are very, very bored.”
I hesitate to ask, “Just how bored?”
“Well, last week an emergency town hall meeting was called because someone thought the local diner’s ‘famous’ pie recipe had altered, and we had to do a whole taste-test tribunal and everything. People around herereallydon’t like change, and if anyone finds out I’ve got an eight-foot slime in my studio, the Ladies’ Auxiliary will have me excommunicated by next week.”
“I can be smaller,” I offer.
Her eyebrows rise. “Howmuch smaller?”
I let my form condense, pulling my mass inward and downward.
My height drops from eight feet to six, to four, until I’m practically a puddle on the floor. I imagine if I had lungs, this would be how it’d feel like to exhale.
She stares. “Huh.”
I offer as I pull back up into my standing form, “I’ve squeezed into cracks and crawl spaces for much of my life. Hiding is easy.”
She hears something in that sentence.
I watch it land, watch the way her expression shifts from logistics to something softer, something that furrows the space between her eyebrows.
She opens her mouth, closes it, then takes another sip of coffee instead of asking whatever she almost asked.
“Okay,” she says. “Here’s the deal. Hypothetically. If you stayed—and I’m not saying you’re staying, I’m sayinghypothetically—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 tothe door, you become a puddle or a throw rug or whatever slimes do to hide.”
“I can do that.”
