Page 73 of Hold On to Me
His chest shakes against my side. The almost-laugh. Closer to real sound than I've ever heard, a rumble that vibrates through my ribs. "No."
"You're terrible at massage. Zero technique. Madame Gilles would be APPALLED. She would revoke your... you don't even HAVE a license, you're practising without a license, I should REPORT you—-"
The shaking grows. His fingers trace a circle on my hip, absent, idle, and I commit the shape of it to memory because I'm committing everything to memory, every second of this, every place his mouth has been, every sound I made that I'm going to be mortified about tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.
"I'm keeping this room," I inform him, and my voice is wobbly and blissed out and I don't recognise it. "You're not allowed in here during business hours. Professional boundary."
"Professional boundary," he repeats against my stomach, and his voice is warm and ruined and the vibration of it against my skin makes me shiver. I run my fingers through his hair and he turns his head and presses his cheek against me and I can feel his heartbeat through his chest, still fast, still hammering, and I think: this man. This man who owns a ship and carries a sealed military record and has a brother named Alexei who runs a casino empire. This man is lying with his head on my stomach and his heart going at a hundred miles an hour because I let him touch me.
I love him so much I can't see straight. I love him so much the room is blurry and I can't tell if that's tears or aftershock or just how the world looks now, rearranged, reorganised, every surface carrying a different charge than it did an hour ago.
"I love you," I tell the dark room. The cedarwood. His hair. I say it because I can, because the words are new and enormous and still slightly terrifying and I want to keep saying them until they stop feeling borrowed and start feeling mine. "I love you and you're terrible at massage and I love you."
He lifts his head. His eyes find mine. In the amber glow they're not iron, they're not brown, they're just his, and they're wet.
"I love you, Star."
I pull him up to me and kiss him, long and slow and thorough, and his arms wrap around me on the narrow table and we're tangled together on a massage table in a spa on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and my life is so far from the forty-two euros and the bus from Nice-Ville that I can't even see that girl from here.
She's still me. She'll always be me. But she's lying in the arms of a man who loves her and her body is humming and her heart is full and she's not afraid.
HE WALKS ME TO MY CABINat one AM.
Same route. Service stairs, staff corridor on Deck 2, amber lights, thin carpet. He holds my hand. His scarred fingers laced through mine, our arms swinging slightly between us, and I'm wearing my uniform tunic buttoned wrong because my fingers were shaking when I put it back on and he noticed and his mouth did the lopsided thing and he didn't say a word and I am NOT going to fix it. The mis-buttoning stays. It's a trophy. It's proof.
We stop at my door. The corridor is still. My bunkmate's snoring is audible through the wall, which is both mortifying and comforting and exactly the detail my planner would normally catalogue except my planner is still rebooting and has been since approximately the moment he gave the order.
"Goodnight, Star."
"Goodnight, Artem."
He lifts my hand. Presses his mouth to my knuckles. Not brief this time. He stays there, his lips warm against the bones of my hand, and I can feel the kiss sinking through my skin and into the joints and the tendons and the muscle, all the machinery that Madame Gilles trained and Mr. Green hired and that I've spent my whole life believing was the only valuable part of me, and he's kissing it. He's pressing his mouth to my working hands like they're the Mayflower lace.
Then he turns my hand over. Presses his mouth to my palm.
I feel that kiss down to the soles of my feet. My toes curl against the thin carpet. My heart does something that is definitely not on the planner.
"That was my working hand," I inform him, and my voice is a ruin. "I have clients tomorrow. I'm going to feel that kiss on every single person I touch."
"Good." He walks away.
I go inside. Close the door. Lean against it.
My bunkmate is snoring. The ship rocks. The hum fills the cabin. I press my hand, the kissed one, against my chest and feel my heartbeat under my palm and his kiss on the other side and I stand there in the dark, smiling so wide my face aches, and I don't care.
I am undone and remade and I am never going back.
Planner status: rebooting. New entry: love Artem Almazov. Schedule: always. Priority: the highest one. Higher than that.
OUTSIDE THE SPA, ONthe mezzanine above Deck 7, a cigarette burns in the dark.
Mila is leaning against the railing. She wasn't there when they went in. She arrived twenty minutes ago, walking the upper corridors as she does when she can't sleep, and she stopped when she saw the spa lights off and the corridor empty and the faint amber glow seeping under the treatment room door.
Her watch read twelve fifty-three when Star came out. Hair loose. Tunic buttoned wrong. Face carrying an expression that didn't need translation.
Artem followed thirty seconds later, his shirt untucked, his hair disordered, and on his face an expression Mila has never seen in eleven years. The guarded blankness gone. The operational focus gone. Even the grief she saw at his father's funeral, gone. Something open. Something ruined and rebuilt. Something that resembled, from the mezzanine, a man who has stopped hiding.
She checked the time. Twelve fifty-four.
