Page 39 of Hold On to Me
I stand at the porthole and let Monaco get small. Then smaller. Then a smudge of light against the darkening hills, and then gone.
I'm at sea. For the first time in my life, the ground beneath me isn't ground.
The vibration of the engines runs through my feet, and the girl who counted forty-two euros, who trained for two years and assisted for six months and applied to fourteen ships before this one let her aboard, that girl is pressing her forehead against the cool glass of a porthole and smiling so wide it hurts her face and she doesn't have to pay a single euro to be here because someone decided her hands were worth four hundred an hour.
I let myself have this. Just for a minute. Just the smile and the violet water and the hum.
MY FIRST EVENING ENDSat nine. I've spent it prepping the treatment rooms, checking supplies, calibrating the tables, running through the sound system options until I find a setting that isn't rain-and-piano but something lower, warmer, a frequency I can feel in my wrists when I press my hands to the speakers. I test the oils. Lavender, eucalyptus, a cedarwood blend that I open and hold to my nose and breathe in until my shoulders settle.
I practise on the empty table. Just my hands on the leather, working through the sequences I know so well my muscles remember them when my brain is somewhere else entirely. Long effleurage strokes, petrissage kneading, the trigger-point compression that Madame Gilles drilled into me until I could do it in my sleep.
I'm good at this. I know I'm good at this. It's the one thing I've never doubted.
The staff corridor on Deck 2 is hushed at this hour. Most of the crew are either on their shifts or asleep, and the amber LED strips throw long, warm pools on the thin carpet. I'm heading toward the staff mess, because I skipped dinner and my stomach's making increasingly pointed suggestions about this, when I turn the corner and walk straight into a wall.
Except the wall is a person.
Except the person is...
Oh.
Oh chops.
He's tall. That registers first, before anything else, just the sheer physical fact of him rearranging the corridor around his own body. Shoulders wide under a dark shirt, untucked, sleeves pushed to the forearms. And those forearms, good grief, mapped with veins and scars that I catalogue in the half-second before I nearly plant my face in his chest, because my hands have their own brain and my hand-brain is already doing a professional assessment (military posture, trained spine, corded neck, tension pattern suggests chronic hypervigilance) while my actual brain is doing something much less professional, which is screaming.
I stop. Close enough to smell him. Not cologne, not the manufactured freshness of the guest corridors, but soap and clean skin and underneath it something warm and specific that belongs only to him, and I'm not going to think about what it isbecause I've known this man for exactly one and a half seconds and my pulse is already staging a full-scale revolt.
Six-thirty prep. Seven o'clock first client. Restock the oils. Fold the towels. Do NOT smell the enormous man in the corridor.
He glances down at me.
Dark eyes. Not brown, something cooler, with an almost metallic quality, like iron that's been heated and cooled too many times. His face... I don't have a word for it. Not handsome the way magazines mean. Not pretty. Strong nose, heavy brow, a mouth that's set in a line suggesting it hasn't smiled recently and doesn't intend to. There's a scar on his left hand, the one hanging at his side closest to me. Short, raised, white against brown skin. And another at his wrist, disappearing under the cuff of his rolled sleeve, and I want to trace it with my thumb the way I'd trace a scar during intake assessment, purely professional, completely clinical, not at all because his forearms are making me forget my own name.
He holds my gaze for one beat too long.
Not the way guests notice staff, through us, past us, the glance that registers function without registering person. He's looking at me the way someone finds a thing they didn't expect in a corridor at nine o'clock at night. Direct. Unhurried. His eyes on my face with a weight I can feel on my skin, and I swear the temperature in this corridor just went up three degrees, and I need to move, I need to say something professional like "excuse me" or "good evening" or literally anything at all except standing here with my lips parted and my brain completely offline and oh no, is that a flush crawling up my neck? It is. It absolutely is.
Restock the oils. Fold the towels. Don't think about his eyes. Schedule an emergency meeting with yourself about why you're thinking about his eyes. Flag it red. FOLD THE TOWELS.
Then he turns away. Steps past me. His arm doesn't brush mine but the air he displaces does, warmth and soap and the sheer mass of him moving through a space too narrow to hold him, and then he's gone. Down the corridor. Around the corner.
I stand where he left me. My face is on fire. My brain is buffering.
...fold the towels.
I turn, a little too fast, and practically sprint toward the staff mess. One of the other girls, a steward with red hair I've seen at orientation, is coming out with a tray.
"Excuse me." My voice comes out normal, which is frankly a miracle considering my internal organs just rearranged themselves. "The man who just came through here. Tall, dark shirt, looks like he could bench-press the ship. Who is that?"
She glances down the corridor, then back at me. Her eyebrows climb.
"That's the youngest Almazov," she tells me, the way you'd warn someonethat's the deep endat the edge of a pool. "He owns the ship. Well, his family does. He's the one who..." She pauses. Reconsiders. "He's Artem."
Artem.
The name does something behind my ribs. Just... takes up residence there, moves in, unpacks its bags, puts its feet up. Which is ridiculous. It's a name. People have names. This isn'tnew information about how the world works, and yet here I am in a staff corridor on a cruise ship, replaying the way a redheaded steward just pronounced a five-letter word and feeling it echo in places it has absolutely no business echoing.
Highlight this, self: be polite, be professional, don't initiate conversation, don't stare. Mr. Green JUST told me this. Three hours ago. You nodded.
