Bergamot on my wrist

The ice is melting on my desk and the cold is the only honest thing in this room. Four marks. Plum. I keep counting them like if I count enough they'll belong to someone else. I emailed the photo to Yu-jin. Her chat is a grey dot. I told myself I wouldn't watch the dot. I'm watching the dot.

Tuesday. Sage blouse. Specifically. I know what specifically means. I've known since the third time Im let his hand rest on mine a beat too long at the front desk. I smiled through it. I smiled so well I'm now the one they ask for. I made the bruise possible by being good at my job.

I scanned the subway car from Hangangjin to Yeonnam and the charcoal suit wasn't there. That should feel like relief. It doesn't. The way he stopped outside the kalguksu place and crossed into the convenience store like choreography — someone knows my walk. I don't know who.

I'm ranking tonight the way I rank guests at check-in. Im is platinum: most dangerous, most access, most smile required. Cha I can't rank because I've never seen his face, which is worse. Yu-jin is the only person I trust and she is silent. Hye-jin is the witness. Tuesday lobby six is the only appointment I made today that I actually mean.

The smaller version, so I can sleep: Im corrected me about a uniform detail. I overcorrected. Tomorrow I'll be more careful. There. That's the version I could send my mother if she ever texted, which she won't, because I haven't called since the seventeenth and the silence is now the size of a hotel corridor.

The real one: a man's thumb pressed the vein in my wrist until I could feel my own pulse in his hand, and he told me what to wear for a man I haven't met, and I walked home photographing myself in a bathroom mirror like proof of a thing I haven't decided whether to call a crime. If Yu-jin and Hye-jin do nothing I'll go to the lobby on Tuesday in the sage blouse and smile, because that's what I'm for. That's what I've been for since I took this job instead of the one my mother wanted. I picked the bruise.