Page 54 of Hold On to Me
The case is open.
Not all the way. An inch, maybe. The glass lid slightly raised. Mila must have been rearranging the displays and forgot to lock it. I should close it. I should absolutely close it and walk away and go back to my cabin and go to sleep like a normal person who doesn't break into galleries at night to have emotional crises over antique textiles.
I lift the lid. And I reach in. And I pick up the handkerchief.
It weighs nothing. Less than nothing. It sits in my palm like a prayer, and the lace is cool and impossibly fine and I can feel the individual threads against my skin, each one placed by someone's fingers four hundred years before mine. And I'm standing there, perfectly still, feeling the centuries between my palm and the woman who made this, and my eyes are stinging because this is what I mean when I say my hands are the only valuable thing about me. Not because I think I'm worthless. Because I think hands are everything. Because I think the most important thing a person can do is make something, touch something, hold something with care, and this woman did that four hundred years ago and I'm holding the proof of it in my palm and I will never, ever get tired of how that feels.
I'm standing there, perfectly still, when I hear footsteps behind me.
I know them. I know his footsteps, which is absurd because he walks so softly for someone his size, but I know them like I know his scars, by feel, by instinct, by how his weight falls, and my body has already turned toward the sound before my brain authorises the movement.
"You shouldn't touch that," Artem tells me from the doorway.
"I know."
"It's four hundred years old."
"I know."
"If you damage it, it's worth more than you'll earn in a lifetime."
"I know that too." I don't turn around. I'm cradling the lace in my palm, and my voice comes out softer than I intend, hushed by the weight of what I'm holding and the nearness of what's standing behind me. "But someone made it. With their hands. And I think things that were made by hand should be held by hands sometimes, or what was the point?"
He doesn't answer.
His footsteps come closer. Soft, careful, the footsteps of a man who learned a long time ago to move through rooms without disturbing them, and he stops behind me, close, closer than the railing, closer than the corridor, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him along the entire length of my back without a single point of contact, and the hair on my arms rises and my skin is aware of every millimetre of space between his chest and my shoulders, cataloguing the distance like my thumbs catalogue his scars, precisely, compulsively, because my body has decided that his proximity is data and it wants all of it.
He reaches over my shoulder. His hand comes down into my field of vision, palm up, beside mine.
"Show me."
Two words. And how he says them, low and close, his mouth near my hair, turns them into something that has nothing to do with a handkerchief and everything to do with the fact that he's offering me his hand. The hand he pulled away. The hand he wouldn't let me touch. Palm up, open, waiting.
I lift the handkerchief from my palm and place it in his. My fingers brush his skin during the transfer, the pad of my index finger dragging across the centre of his palm, and the contact lasts two seconds and I feel every fraction of every one, the warmth and the roughness and the scar that runs across his lifeline, and something catches in my throat and I don't let it go because letting it go would make a sound and the silence right now is holy.
He holds the lace up. The spotlight catches the pattern and throws tiny shadows across his hand, across the scars on his knuckles, and he turns it, examining it, and I crane my neck to see his face in profile. The focused expression. The one I glimpsed through the gallery glass when he was working with Mila. Except this is different. Softer. He's holding the handkerchief exactly as I was holding it. Like it matters. Like hands matter. Like four hundred years of surviving means something to him too.
"You're right," he admits. "It should be held."
He lowers his hand. The handkerchief rests on his open palm, and I reach for it to put it back and my fingers close on his instead.
Neither of us moves.
My fingers on his palm. The lace between us. The gallery is silent except for the hum of the display lights, and I can feel his pulse through the pad of my ring finger where it's resting against his wrist, and it's fast, faster than his body would ever admit, faster than his face would ever show, and I know this because I've spent three weeks learning the difference between what Artem Almazov's body reveals and what his face conceals and his pulse is telling me everything his expression won't.
He turns his hand over. Closes his fingers around mine.
His hand. The one he pulled away from me that first session, the one he tucked against his body before I could touch it and murmurednot the handsin a voice that drew a line he expected me to stay behind. And now his fingers are closing around mine over a four-hundred-year-old handkerchief, and his grip is firm and warm and his scarred knuckles press against my fingers, and the lace threads are caught between our palms, and I tip my head back to see his face.
He's already there. Already looking down at me with those eyes that are iron in daylight and something darker at night, and his jaw is tight and his breathing has changed, gone ragged at the edges, and he's holding my hand and the lace and his own restraint all at once and I can see them fighting in his face, the want and the wall, and the wall is losing.
"Star," he breathes.
And then he kisses me.
His free hand comes up to my face, my jaw, the same spot, always the same spot, because he decided weeks ago that this is the part of me he's claiming first and he's never wavered, and he tilts my head back and his mouth finds mine and it isn't soft and it isn't tentative and it isn't the careful testing kiss of a man who's unsure. He kisses me like a lock breaking, like something that's been held shut too long finally giving way, and his hand tightens on mine and the lace crushes between our palms and his other hand slides from my jaw into my hair and I'm not thinking about anything, I'm not thinking about the gallery or the handkerchief or the four-hundred-year-old English bobbin lace that is currently being destroyed between the interlocked fingers of a massage therapist and a billionaire and is probablyvery upset about it and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but his mouth is hot and sure and tastes like coffee and salt and the sound he makes against my lips, low, barely there, a vibration more than a voice, is a sound I'm going to carry inside me for the rest of my life and possibly into the next one.
I kiss him back. I don't know what I'm doing. I've been kissed before, twice, badly, by boys who didn't know what they wanted and definitely didn't know what I wanted and I didn't know either until right now, this second, with his hand in my hair and his mouth on mine and his scarred fingers holding mine so tight the lace threads are pressing patterns into my skin. THIS is what I wanted. This. Him. A man who knows exactly what he wants and has been not-wanting it for weeks and has run out of room not to, and the way he's kissing me right now, thorough and devastating and slightly desperate, tells me that the room ran out a while ago and he's been standing in the doorway trying to talk himself back inside and he can't, he just can't, and neither can I.
