Page 69 of Hold On to Me
Nothing commanding about it. Nothing alpha. None of the gallery kiss or the private deck kiss or any of the kisses where I knew what I was doing. This is blind and desperate and my hands are shaking on her face and her tears are on my mouth and I'm kissing a girl who tastes like salt and coffee and two weeks of standing at empty counters and I can feel her sob against my lips, a sound that comes from somewhere so deep it vibrates through her whole body and into mine, and I pull her against me and hold on.
Her fists. My shirt. Both hands, twisted in the fabric the way they were in the gallery except there's no lace between us this time, nothing delicate, nothing four hundred years old and breakable. Just her fists and my shirt and the desperate, graceless, shaking grip of two people who have run out of walls.
"You left me," she cries into my mouth, between kisses, between breaths. "You LEFT—-"
"I know—-"
"I knocked on your door and you told me REASSIGNED—-"
"I know, I know—-"
"I stopped humming, Artem. I stopped humming in the supply closet and Curtis noticed and he didn't say anything and I ate bread rolls standing up and I was FINE, I kept telling everyone I was fine, and I wasn't—-"
"I know you weren't. I saw. I was on the mezzanine above the staff mess and I saw your face and it broke me—-"
"You were WATCHING me?"
"I've been watching you since the corridor. I've never stopped watching you. There is nowhere on this ship I can go where you aren't and I tried, Star, I tried every deck and every room and you're in all of them—-"
She pulls back. Enough to see my face. Her eyes are swollen and her cheeks are soaked and her nose is running and she's looking at me with an expression that has fury and love and devastation and bewilderment all happening at the same time, and her mouth is open and she's breathing hard and her fists are still in my shirt and she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and I'm not going to survive this girl.
"You spied on me from a mezzanine." Her voice is thick and wet and there's something under the tears, something that in any other context would be the beginning of a laugh. "Like a... like a creepy surveillance..."
"Yes."
"That's INSANE."
"Yes."
"That's the most insane thing anyone has ever—-" A hiccup. A sound that's half sob and half something else, something lighter, something cracking through the grief like a green shoot through concrete. "You could have just TALKED to me. You could have come down from the mezzanine and walked to my table and SAT DOWN—-"
"I know."
"Instead you LURKED on a WALKWAY—-"
"I know."
"—-like some kind of enormous sad GARGOYLE—-"
A sound comes out of me. Nothing almost about it. No architecture. An actual sound, raw and cracked and wrenched out of me against my will, and it shocks us both, because I'm crying and laughing at the same time and I didn't know that was possible and apparently it is, apparently that's what happens when a girl who's falling apart calls you a gargoyle and she's right.
"I'm not a gargoyle," I manage, and my voice is destroyed.
"You LURKED. You lurked on a GRATE and observed me eat CHICKEN—-"
"I was making a decision—-"
"You were being a GARGOYLE. There's no dignified version of watching someone through a floor grate, Artem, that's just lurking, that's textbook lurking—-"
I kiss her again because she's calling me a gargoyle and she's crying and laughing and her fists are still in my shirt and her nose is still running and she is the most alive thing on this ship,more alive than the engines, more alive than the sixty-two hertz, more alive than anything I've touched in thirty-four years, and I kiss her and she kisses me back and she's still crying and I'm still crying and the kiss is a mess, wet and graceless and tasting like salt and coffee and the specific flavour of two people who have been shattered and are trying to find the pieces in each other's mouths.
She pulls back. Presses her face into my chest. I wrap my arms around her and hold on and I can feel her shaking against me, the sobs coming in waves now, big shuddering things that move through her whole body.
"You don't get to do that again," she tells my chest, muffled and raw. "The door. You don't ever get to do the door again."
"No."
"If your world is dangerous you tell me. If you're scared you tell me. You don't just—-you don't cancel a recurring appointment and call it PROTECTION—-"
