Page 52 of Hold On to Me
"I'm not alone now," I point out, without turning around.
He comes to the railing. Not close, because he never stands close, because the exclusion zone exists even on an empty deck at eleven at night under a billion stars. A foot and a half of space between us, which on this ship might as well be a continent. He leans his forearms on the rail and his sleeves are pushed up because apparently he's decided that rolled sleeves are his entire personality and he's RIGHT, it's WORKING, it's been working since the corridor encounter and it's going to keep working until the end of time and there's nothing I or my cardiovascular system can do about it. I can see the scars on his hands and wrists in the low deck lighting, silver against brown, and I don't look away from them because I've traced them with my thumbs, I've mapped every ridge and line through oil, and looking away now would feel dishonest.
We stand there. The wind is cool, coming off the water, carrying salt and engine exhaust and the faintest trace of whatever the kitchens are cooking twelve decks below us. The ship moves. We move with it. The railing hums under my forearms and the skyis enormous and I'm standing next to the man who tracks my laughter and brought me coffee with the wrong amount of sugar and told me I'm worth more than my hands, and I should go to bed.
I don't go to bed.
"I come up here most nights," he offers.
"I know." I don't know. I've never been up here at night before. But it feels true, feels right, feels like something that's been waiting to be spoken, and when he glances at me I add: "You don't seem like someone who sleeps much."
"No."
I wait. He doesn't explain. The water hisses against the hull far below.
"Why not?" I ask, because I want to know, and because up here, in the dark, with a foot and a half of railing between us and the whole Mediterranean spread out beneath like a secret we're sharing, asking feels possible. Everything feels possible up here. Maybe it's the sky. Maybe it's the fact that I can't see his face well enough to blush. Maybe it's the fact that he's standing here at all, on the highest deck on his own ship, in the dark, and he told me I shouldn't be up here alone but he was already up here alone himself, which means he's either a hypocrite or a man who comes to the dark to put down the thing he carries and wasn't expecting company.
He faces the sea. His jaw works once, and I can see the muscle bunching even in the low light. Then: "I did things, in another life, that don't let me."
I hold still. Not because I'm afraid. Because I can feel how much that sentence cost him, the weight of it, how he delivered it face-forward to the ocean as if the water might accept it without judgement in a way that a person might not.
"Military?" I ask. He's never confirmed it. But his body told me the first time I touched him. The trained posture, the braced muscles, the scars that aren't from accidents or clumsiness or anything domestic. His body told me his history in the first four minutes and I've been carrying it since, alongside the cedarwood and the almost-smiles and the sound of him saying my name.
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Long enough."
I want to push. I don't push. I lean on the railing and face the water and let the silence sit between us, not empty, just inhabited, and after a minute he says, like he's surprised at himself for continuing, like the words are coming out of him how his body yields to my hands, one degree at a time:
"Eleven years. I left when I was twenty-nine."
Twenty-nine. Five years ago. Whatever he did, whatever keeps him staring at black water at eleven at night, it was recent enough to still live in his shoulders and old enough that the scars have gone white.
"Do you miss it?"
He turns to me then. Not the glance from before. Full attention. His eyes in the deck light are dark, and his face is doing something I haven't seen before. The guarded blankness ofsessions is gone. The careful almost-smiles are gone. Something open. Like the railing and the dark and the fact that I asked without flinching cracked a window in him that he usually keeps painted shut.
"No," he says. "I miss who I thought I'd be when it was over."
The wind moves through the silence, carrying salt and the hum of the engines below us, and I don't know what to say to that because it's the saddest sentence I've ever heard from a mouth that isn't trying to be sad. He's not asking for sympathy. He's stating a fact. A geographical fact, like the distance between us, like the depth of the water beneath the hull: this is where I am and I didn't expect to be here.
"Who did you think you'd be?" I ask.
"Someone who sleeps."
I almost laugh. Almost. But his face is serious and the joke is real and the gap between those two things makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with a crush. This is something else. Something older and quieter, the feeling you get when someone shows you where they're broken and you want to put your hands on it, not to fix it because it isn't yours to fix, just to let them know you can see it and you're not leaving.
"I don't sleep much either," I confess. "But that's because my bunkmate snores."
Now he does something I've never seen.
The corner of his mouth lifts. Not a twitch, not the ghost I've been cataloguing for three weeks. An actual lift, one side, lopsided, there for two full seconds before it goes. An honest-to-goodness, visible-in-low-lighting smile.
I made him smile.
I made Artem Almazov SMILE at eleven o'clock at night on the top deck of a cruise ship in the middle of the Mediterranean and I want to throw a parade, I want to call Curtis and tell him, I want to add it to my planner in gold letters with exclamation marks: ACTUAL SMILE ACHIEVED. DATE: TONIGHT. CONTEXT: SNORING JOKE. DURATION: TWO SECONDS. THE LONGEST YET. ALMOST-SMILE COLLECTION OFFICIALLY UPGRADED TO SMILE COLLECTION. CABINET STATUS: OVERFLOWING.
