Page 51 of Hold On to Me
I face the porthole. The sea is the same grey it was thirty seconds ago but somehow it's different, how a room is different after someone has been in it, how air is different after it's been breathed.
I press my knuckles to my mouth one more time. Then I go back to work.
Artem
THE GIRL HAS A CRUSHon me.
I know this because Mila told me, and because I have eyes, and because I spent fifteen years reading people's bodies for a living, and Star Thornton's body announces itself every single time I walk into a room. The flush that starts at her collarbone and climbs. Her hands hesitating for a fraction of a second when they first touch my skin, every session, before training overrides instinct. The fact that she still hasn't used my name to my face even though I asked her to use it a week ago and she's been calling me "Mr. Almazov" ever since with a stubbornness that would be infuriating if it weren't so transparent.
"The little masseuse turns pink every time you walk past," Mila mentioned yesterday, leaning against the gallery desk, amused, having identified something small and harmless and slightly entertaining. "It's rather adorable. Like a schoolgirl."
Mila has known me for eleven years. She reads me better than most people, though not as well as she thinks she does. She saw the girl's face and thought it was sweet. A crush. Harmless. She thought I'd find it funny.
I didn't find it funny.
I didn't find it funny because the girl with the crush is twenty years old and has hands that read my body like a confession, and she calls me Mr. Almazov in a voice that makes me want to hear her say my actual name so badly it's become a physical need, andshe told Mila her hands are the only valuable thing about her and I wanted to put my fist through the gallery wall.
Her hands. Only her hands. Never mind the girl who spent fifteen minutes helping an old woman choose a scarf. Never mind the girl who laughs so rarely that when she finally does it in a staff mess it carries across a room and stops a man in a doorway, that girl doesn't count. Only the hands count. Only the work.
She's twenty. I'm thirty-four. She works on my ship. She earns in a month what I spend on a Tuesday. The distance between us isn't a gap. It's a geography.
And I keep requesting sessions.
I told her she has value beyond her hands. I told her in the middle of a massage, which was wrong, which broke every boundary that exists between a client and a therapist, and she stepped away from the table and left the room and I lay there with cedarwood on my skin and the absence of her hands like a cold spot and I thought:you idiot. You absolute idiot.
Then I got dressed and went to find her and offered the wrong words again, because apparently I'm incapable of standing near Star Thornton without saying things I haven't authorised my mouth to say, and she turned to me with eyes so full they were about to spill, and I told her goodnight at seven in the morning like a man who's lost his grip on the concept of time, and she didn't laugh.
She should've laughed. Anyone else would've laughed. Anyone with sense would've told me I was being ridiculous, that the owner of the ship shouldn't be standing in spa corridors at dawntelling his massage therapist she's worth more than her hands while she's trying not to cry.
She didn't tell me any of that. She just turned those eyes on me, and the flush was there, and her knuckles were pressed white against her mouth, and she didn't laugh and she didn't turn away and she didn't tell me to stop.
I'm the Almazov who makes problems disappear. I don't create them. I'm the one Alexei calls when something needs to be handled, contained, ended. I've spent three years on this ship doing exactly that: making things clean and controlled and invisible.
And I keep showing up at her spa with coffee that has the wrong amount of sugar because I haven't learned yet how she takes it, because I've been too busy learning the sound of her laugh and the geography of her hands and the particular shade of pink her face turns when I say her name, and I haven't had time for sugar.
I'll get it right next time. That's what I told her, and I meant it, and the fact that I meant it, the fact that I'm standing on my balcony at eight in the morning thinking about the correct ratio of sugar for a twenty-year-old masseuse from Nice instead of thinking about the man who killed my father, tells me everything I need to know about how far gone I am.
I face the sea. I don't think about her hands.
I am also a terrible liar.
Star
THE SEA AT NIGHT ISblack.
Not dark blue, not navy, not the deep romantic indigo that postcards promise. Black. A living, moving absence of colour that stretches in every direction until it meets the sky, and the sky is only marginally better because at least the sky has stars, ha ha, like me, except the stars up there are doing a much better job of looking calm and distant and unbothered than the Star down here, who is leaning against the railing on Deck 14 pretending she came up here for fresh air and not because she's been lying in her bunk for an hour thinking about a man's hands and needed to put an entire ship between herself and the thought.
Fresh air. That's the official reason. My last client ran an hour over because she wanted to talk about her divorce while I worked her calves, and the treatment room smelled like lavender and tears by the end, and I needed wind on my face and sky above me and the feeling of being very small next to something very large. So I came up here, to the highest open deck, the one the crew calls the crow's nest, and I leaned against the railing, and I faced the water, and I've been here twenty minutes and I haven't thought about Artem once.
Twice. Three times. Maximum four.
Twelve. It's been twelve.
Add to planner: 23:00, fail to not think about Artem Almazov. Duration: indefinite. Status: pathological.
"You shouldn't be up here alone."
I don't jump. I should, probably. A voice behind me at eleven o'clock at night on an empty deck should produce a jump. But I know his voice now, I've been listening to it ask me questions in dim rooms for three weeks, learning its registers like my thumbs learn the topography of a scar, and I know what it sounds like when it's giving an instruction versus asking a real question, and this is neither. This is just him, offering a fact without expectation, standing somewhere behind me in the dark, and my body recognised him before my ears finished processing the sentence.
