Page 22 of Hold On to Me
His hands found the edges, gripped them. Knuckles white. Every muscle in his arms locked, the tendons standing out like cables under his skin. He was holding the counter the way a man holds a lifeline, because his hands were the last part of him still under his control, and he would not let them reach for her until she had said, in a language he couldn’t pretend not to understand, that she wanted them to.
She knew this. She could see it in his face: the anguish, the want, the desperate, failing architecture of a man who had decided he wasn’t allowed to have this and was watching the decision come apart under the weight of two hands on his chest.
She looked him in the eye. She didn’t look away.
She had never done this. Not with anyone. She had spent twenty-four years building a life in which vulnerability was a door she kept locked, and now she was unlocking it, not for the clean, safe, civilian man Alexei had found, not for the someone good Andrei believed she deserved, but for him. The scarred one. The silent one. The one who had built a three-hundred-million-euro cage around her life because the alternative was admitting he loved her.
She held his gaze, and she let him see all of it: everything he had been refusing, everything he was planning to give away.
His head dropped back.
His fist slammed the bulkhead, once, hard, the impact swallowed by the engine hum so that the only people who heard it were the two of them. The sound of his knuckles against the wall was the sound of a man surrendering a war he had been fighting for months, and it was the most honest thing he had done since she’d met him.
His breathing came apart. She watched it happen the way you watch a structure fail, the controlled, measured rhythm dissolving into something ragged and involuntary, his chest rising under her hands. His jaw clenched. His eyes closed. The cords of his neck went taut, the scar a white line against skin that had flushed, and she could feel him shaking, not his hands, all of him, the entire geography of his body trembling against the counter as though the effort of not reaching for her had exceeded every system he had built to contain it.
And the sound he made.
Low. Broken. Wrecked. A sound that wasn’t a word in any language but was more honest than any word he had ever spoken to her, more honest than the promise, more honest than the you deserve someone, more honest than the Russian he had murmured against her mouth in the dark cabin. It was the sound of Andrei Almazov without walls. Without armour. Without the distance he had maintained since the night he first sat in 1A and watched a woman pour champagne and fell in love so completely that he had spent three hundred million euros building an excuse not to admit it.
She’d hear that sound for the rest of her life. In the silence between heartbeats. In the space between one breath and the next. She’d hear it and she’d know what it meant: that shehad broken through, that she had reached the man beneath the stone, that for one impossible, annihilating moment, he had been hers.
Then he mastered it. She watched that too, the slow, brutal reassembly, the breathing dragged back under guard, the hands that stayed locked on the counter because he didn’t trust them anywhere else. The silence afterward was enormous.
The galley. The blue light. The hum of the engines. His hands still on the counter, his head still back, his breathing still ragged. She lowered her own hands and felt them shaking and didn’t try to stop it, because this wasn’t a moment for steadiness. This was a moment for truth, and the truth was that she was trembling too.
He wouldn’t look at her.
She waited. She gave him time, time to breathe, time to come back to himself, time for the man she had just undone to reassemble whatever he needed to reassemble in order to stand in the same room as what had almost happened. She didn’t touch him again. She stood close enough to feel the heat still coming off his skin, and she waited.
When he spoke, his voice was destroyed.
“That shouldn’t have happened.”
She had expected it. She had known, even as she reached for him, even as his fist hit the wall and his head went back and the sound came out of him like something being born, that this would be what followed. The wall. The retreat. The careful, anguished reassembly of a man who had beenbriefly, devastatingly honest and was now going to spend every remaining minute of his life pretending he hadn’t been.
“Why?” It was the hardest thing she had ever done, keeping her voice from breaking. “Because of your promise? Or because it was me?”
“Because you deserve someone who won’t ruin you.”
She looked at him. At the scar. At the hands still gripping the counter. At the eyes that were telling her everything his mouth refused to.
“You keep saying that.” Her voice didn’t break. She wouldn’t let it. “And you keep ruining me anyway.”
She left the galley.
He let her go.
She walked to the rear of the cabin and sat in the last seat and pressed her forehead against the window and the glass was cold against her skin and the world outside was black and featureless and she didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried since she was sixteen, since the hospital in Marseille, since the day she had learned that the people who are supposed to stay never do. She wasn’t going to cry now. Not for a man who had just shattered in her hands and was still, even shattered, going to give her away.
She pressed her palms against her eyes. Breathed.
The engine hum was steady. The aircraft moved through the dark. Somewhere forward, in the galley that smelled like coffee and him, a man was standing at the counter, alone, in the wreckage of the thing he had just refused to keep.
Morning.
A different morning. The Atlantic crossing was behind them. They had landed, separated, spent a day in rooms she didn’t want to think about doing things she didn’t want to imagine, and now it was the next flight and she was boarding the jet at the Nice airfield with her crew bag over her shoulder and her chignon perfect and her face a mask of professionalism so complete it could have been painted on.
She climbed the stairs. The cabin door was open. She stepped inside.
