Page 24 of Hold On to Me
“You must love it. The travel.”
“I do.” She set the bread basket on the table with the ease of a woman who had been placing things at exact angles her entire professional life. “It suits me.”
“Andrei is lucky to have you.” Justina glanced at him with a smile that was, and this was the detail that almost undid Ciana’s composure, fond. Familiar. The smile of a woman who knew him, or thought she did, and liked what she knew. “He never talks about the people who work for him, but I can tell. This operation is—” She gestured at the cabin, the crystal, the immaculate service. “Seamless.”
“Thank you,” Ciana said. “That’s very kind.”
She didn’t look at Andrei. She didn’t need to. She could feel him the way she always felt him, like a change in pressure, like weather on the other side of a wall. He hadn’t spoken since the champagne. He sat in his displaced seat beside a beautiful woman and he was watching Ciana, and she knew this because his gaze had weight, had always had weight, and she could feel it on the side of her face like sunlight through glass.
She didn’t give him the satisfaction of turning.
It happened in the fourth hour.
Justina was talking. She talked easily, about a charity gala in Monte Carlo, about a mutual friend of theirs (hers and Andrei’s, because apparently they had mutual friends, apparently he had a life outside the jet that included women who smiled at him with fondness and touched his arm when they made a point). She was mid-sentence, describing something about a venue, when she reached over and placed her hand on Andrei’s.
Casual. Light. The thoughtless, affectionate gesture of a woman who was comfortable with the man beside her and saw nothing extraordinary in touching him.
Her fingers rested on his scarred hand.
The hand that had gripped the counter last night while Ciana took him apart. The same one that had framed her face in the rain on the Istanbul tarmac, grazed her cheekbone in Geneva, caught her waist in turbulence and held for three seconds, one, two, three, and released at the exact moment she began to think it wouldn’t. She had spent weeks learning the topography of that hand from a distance, cataloguing its scars and its terrifying gentleness, until she knew it better than her own.
Another woman’s fingers were on it.
Ciana was in the aisle. She had been clearing the bread service. She saw the gesture from three feet away, saw Justina’s smooth, manicured fingers settle on the ridged, scarred knuckles, and something inside her went quiet.
Not peace. Not acceptance. Not even pain, which would have been manageable, which would have been a feeling she could count through and survive. This was different. This was the sound of a door closing in a room she hadn’t known she was standing in: a soft, final click, like a lock engaging, like the last tumbler falling into place. He didn’t pull away.
He didn’t pull away.
That was the part she’d remember. Not Justina’s hand, Justina was innocent, Justina was warm, Justina was a woman who touched people because she liked them and had no idea that the hand she was touching had been on Ciana’s skin twelve hoursago. What Ciana would remember was that Andrei didn’t pull away. He let another woman’s hand rest on his and he didn’t flinch and he didn’t withdraw and the exclusion zone, the sacred, electric, agonising perimeter he had maintained around Ciana for weeks, didn’t exist for Justina Karpov.
Ciana picked up the bread basket. Returned to the galley. Set it on the counter with the white-knuckle exactness of a woman who would come apart if she let one motion go loose.
She stood there for a long time.
She thought about the first night. The champagne flute. His scarred hands around it, the knuckles catching the reading light. She had noticed. She had been furious with herself for noticing.
Then the turbulence. Three seconds. His palm against her waist, hot through fabric. She had counted every one.
Geneva came back next: the strand of hair, the knuckle on her cheekbone, the burn.
The rain. His mouth opening against hers. The sound.
And the galley at two in the morning: the scars under her hands. His heart slamming against her palms. His fist on the wall. The wrecked, honest, devastating sound he made when his walls came down.
And twelve hours later, another woman’s hand on his, and he didn’t pull away.
She had offered him her first everything. Her first kiss. Her first touch. The first time she had reached for another person instead of letting them go. And his response was to bring Justina Karpovonto the jet and sit beside her and let her touch the hand that Ciana had held against his own heart.
She believed, with the absolute conviction of someone who had never been intimate before, that a man who could do this didn’t love her.
She was wrong.
But he wasn’t going to tell her.
She served the remaining courses with a perfection that was, to anyone watching, indistinguishable from contentment.
She brought the entrée. She poured the wine. She cleared the plates with the smooth, unhurried rhythm of a woman who loved her work and took pride in doing it well and wasn’t, at any point, dying inside. She smiled at Justina. She refilled Andrei’s water at the twenty-two-minute interval she had established on the first flight and hadn’t deviated from since, because if she changed even one detail of her service he’d know that something had broken, and she wouldn’t give him that.
