Page 35 of Hold On to Me
Not to serve. Not to pour or clear or retreat to the galley. She stood because this was her cabin now, hers and his, and she wanted to be standing when it began. She wanted him to see her choose this. Not stumble into it. Not be carried by turbulence or proximity or the narrow geography of an aisle that had been pushing them together for months. She wanted to stand in front of him in a white dress at forty thousand feet and let him watch her decide.
He looked up at her from his seat. The reading light was off. The only illumination was the blue accent lighting along the floor panels, the same blue light that had lit the galley the night she had put her hands on his skin, and in that light his face was all planes and shadows and the scar was a silver line from temple to jaw and his eyes were dark and open and terrified in a way she had never seen them.
Not terrified of her. Terrified of deserving this.
“Let me,” he said. Barely a whisper.
She stepped into him. His hands rose, slowly, as though the air between them had thickened into something he had to push through, and came to rest at her waist. His breath touched her skin, uneven and warm: the breath of a man who had spent three months building a perimeter around this moment and was now standing inside it with shaking hands.
“Ciana.” Her name, the way he always said it, low, like it cost him something. But softer now. The sound of a man saying hiswife’s name for the first time and discovering that the word had changed, that the two syllables now held a vow and a promise and a future he had spent months believing he didn’t deserve.
His hold gentled, contradicting everything about his size and his scars and the world he came from. She understood that this was the man beneath the stone: someone who touched the thing he wanted as though it might shatter if he held it wrong.
She laid her hand flat over his heart, the way she had that night in the galley, and this time he let her. Through the linen of his shirt she could feel it slam, then steady. One question at a time, his breathing came apart and then settled, as though her palm were the only thing in the world holding him together. There were scars under that shirt, she knew them now, the topography of a life that had been violent and hard, raised white lines she had been trusted to read, and there would be time, all the time in the world, to know every one.
She rose on her toes and kissed the scar at his temple.
The silver line she had watched rain run down on the tarmac in Istanbul, the fault line from temple to jaw that she had wanted to touch since the first night and had never been allowed to. Her lips brushed it, soft, and his skin was warm and the sound he made above her was something she’d hear in her sleep for the rest of her life.
It might have been her name. It might have been a prayer. It might have been Russian, the same low, anguished Russian he had murmured against her mouth in the dark cabin, the words she had never asked him to translate because some things were more honest in a language you couldn’t decode. Whatever it was, it came from the place below language, below thought, from theplace where a man keeps the things he’s never said to anyone and will only ever say to her.
She kissed the scar again, and the corner of his jaw, and the place below his ear where his pulse was hammering. She gentled him the way he was gentling her, with patience, with steadiness, with the unhurried attention of a woman who had spent twenty-four years refusing to be vulnerable and had decided, at forty thousand feet, in a cabin that smelled like leather and altitude and him, that vulnerability wasn’t the same as weakness. Vulnerability was this: his hands in her hair, shaking, holding her against him while she traced the history of his violence and didn’t flinch.
He lifted her face. Both hands, the scarred one and the unscarred one, framing her jaw. The same way he had held her in the dark cabin. The same trembling. But the expression was different. The dark cabin had been surrender, a man giving in to something he was still trying to fight. This wasn’t surrender. This was arrival. The face of a man who had stopped fighting and was standing, for the first time, in the place he was supposed to be.
“Are you sure?”
Raw. Reverent. The question he had asked over coffee that morning, but different now, stripped of everything except the real question underneath, which wasn’t are you sure about the act but are you sure about me, are you sure about the scar and the scars and the brothers and the kingdom and the man who built a cage because he didn’t know how to build a home.
She drew him closer, her arms around him and his around her, and the weight of him, warm, enormous, careful, was the opposite of every cage he had ever built around her. This wasn’tcontainment. This was shelter. The difference between a man holding a woman because he was afraid she’d leave and a man holding a woman because she had asked him to stay.
No more words.
Only warmth, and his forehead against hers, and the engines humming their single sustained note. The cabin was dark. The world outside was black and forty thousand feet below and it didn’t exist. He was here, and he was hers, and the trembling hadn’t stopped, and she didn’t want it to, because the trembling was the truth of him, and she loved the truth of him more than she had ever loved his composure.
The cabin held them. The sky held the cabin. The night held everything.
Morning.
Sunlight on white sheets. His scarred arm across her waist. Her face against his chest. The engines had changed pitch, they were descending, somewhere, it didn’t matter where.
She was counting again.
Not exits. Not seconds. Not the distance between his hand and her skin.
Heartbeats. His. Steady, slow, sure.
She lost count.
She didn’t mind.
The End
