Oil Slick

"You brought massage oil on a ferry?" Ben said, watching Marnie pull a squat plastic bottle out of her duffel. She held it up to the little dome light in the sleeper cab, turning it so the label caught the glow. Almond scent, the cheap kind you'd find at a drugstore, and enough of it to grease a truck axle.

"Half a liter of it," she said. "I planned this, Ben. I've been planning this for two weeks."

He was twenty-three and sitting on the edge of his sleeper bunk in the parking garage of an overnight ferry, surrounded by diesel fumes and tied-down rigs, and his girlfriend of eight months was holding a bottle of oil like it was a trophy. "Planning what, exactly?"

"An extended massage. A proper one. You drive eleven hours a day and you never let me work on your shoulders, so tonight, before I get on a plane to Japan for six months, you're going to lie there and let me fix you."

He grinned at her. Marnie was twenty-four, all elbows and camera straps, and she'd been talking about this Japan job since July. She flew out the morning after the ferry docked. "So we're talking about a massage massage. Not a massage that turns into, you know, other stuff."

"That's up to the massage," she said, solemn, and then she cracked up. "God, your face. Yes, Ben, there's a decent chance the massage turns into other stuff. But the massage comes first. I have a whole routine."

"A routine."

"Marnie's famous shoulder rescue. My cousin pays me in wine for it. Just because I take pictures for a living doesn't mean I don't have hands."

"I've noticed your hands," he said. "I've had several thoughts about your hands."

"I'm sure you have." She kicked off her sneakers and climbed up onto the bunk, patting the mattress. "Shirt off, facedown, arms at your sides. Go."

He pulled his t-shirt over his head and looked at her. "Fair warning, if you pour warm oil on my back there's a strong possibility of an erection happening. I feel like you should have that information before we start."

"Noted and, frankly, expected," she said. "Facedown."

The ferry pulled away from the terminal around midnight, and by then he was stretched out on the bunk with his face in the pillow and the engine humming up through the mattress like the world's biggest cat. The parking garage decks below the passenger areas were mostly empty, just rows of trucks and cars chained down for the crossing, and nobody came down there. They had the whole dark deck and a six-hour crossing to themselves.

Marnie straddled the back of his thighs, which she had no business doing if she wanted this to stay a massage, and unscrewed the cap. "Okay. Deep breath."

The oil was cold at first, a thin river down his spine, and then her palms spread it around and it warmed up fast. She worked the heel of her hand up along the muscles next to his spine, slow, pressing hard, and he heard himself make a noise into the pillow.

"There it is," she said. "There's the noise. You hold all your stress right here, see, this whole band." She dug her thumbs in along the top of his shoulders and he made the noise again, louder.

"You're going to kill me," he said into the pillow. "You're going to murder a truck driver on a ferry with your thumbs."

"That's the idea. Breathe."

She was good. That was the surprise, she was actually good, working down his back in long slow passes, stopping on the knots and leaning into them until they gave up. The oil made her hands slide instead of drag, and every pass ended at the waistband of his jeans and started back up, and by minute five the warning he'd given her was fully in effect. He pressed his hips down into the mattress just to get some friction and she felt it through his thighs and stopped.

"Ah. I felt that."

"You were supposed to feel that," he said, muffled. "That was communication."

"That was you humping the mattress during my professional massage." She leaned forward and put her mouth by his ear. "We're forty percent through the routine. Stay with me here."

"You're straddling my legs and your hands smell like almonds. I'm a simple man."

"I know you are, sweetie." She sat back up and poured a little more oil, right in the small of his back this time, and it ran down over his hips before she caught it. "Oops."

"Oops? OOPS? There's oil in my waistband, Marnie."

"Oil is a natural part of the human body," she said, with the confidence of a woman who had never cleaned oil out of anything in her life.

He lasted another ten minutes. He really did. She got down to his lower back and did this thing with both thumbs that made his whole spine unlock, and then she slid her hands around his sides to his front, just resting them flat on his stomach, and said, "Okay, so, medically speaking, we might need to address the front situation after all," and that was when he tried to flip over.

"No, no, no," she said, grabbing his shoulder, laughing. "Facedown. The routine says facedown."

"The routine can be amended." He got halfway over, one arm under him, and his whole slick back slid on the oiled-up mattress like a seal on a boat ramp. He ended up half on his side, pinned under her knee, and she was laughing so hard she had to grip the bunk rail.

"You're like a wet bar of soap," she said. "I can't hold you. You're unholdable."

"Help me up, then." He reached for the bed frame to push himself around and his palm, which was apparently made of oil at this point, shot straight off the metal rail. His elbow swung out, caught the bottle sitting on the little shelf by the pillow, and sent it spinning.

Marnie made a grab for it. She got one hand on it and the cap, which she had never fully screwed back on, came free in her grip, and half a liter of almond oil poured out across the sheets in one long glug.

"Oh no," she said, very quietly. "Oh no no no."

There was a moment where they both just looked at it. The oil was everywhere, a dark shiny lake spreading from the middle of the bunk toward the pillow, running into the seam, pooling in the dip where his hips had been, dripping slowly off the edge of the mattress onto the floor of the cab.

"Okay," Ben said. "Okay. So that happened."

"You knocked the bottle."

"My hand slipped off the rail because you oiled my entire body, Marnie, this is on you."

"Half of it is on my knee," she said, and lifted her leg up, and it did actually drip. Her jeans were soaked through at the knee and shining. She looked down at the lake again. "We are not sleeping in that. That's not a bed anymore, that's a fryer."

"So what do we do?" He sat up, and the movement made a sound, an actual squelch, and they both looked at his back, which was gleaming in the dome light like a glazed ham.

Marnie pressed her lips together. Then she lost it. She fell sideways onto the dry corner of the bunk, wheezing, holding her oily knee up out of the lake like it was precious.

"We're trapped on a boat," she got out, "in a bed of oil, and my flight is at nine a.m., and I smell like a bakery," and then she couldn't talk anymore.

Ben lay back down, carefully, in the oil, because the oil was the whole bunk now and resistance was pointless. "Well," he said, staring at the ceiling. "We did say the massage might turn into other stuff."

She wiped her eyes and rolled over to look at him. She was still straddling the frame, one oily knee on either side of his legs, hair stuck to her cheek, and