Page 49 of Hold On to Me
"My name. It's Artem."
I know his name. He knows I know his name. He told me last Thursday and I repeated it back to him exactly zero times because saying his name to his face would require a level of emotional fortitude I haven't achieved yet and frankly might never achieve, and he's standing there with those iron eyes and that unsettling patience, like he's perfectly willing to wait however long it takes for me to say the five letters he just handed me, and Mr. Green is three metres away pretending to check a schedule and my cheeks are doing the thing, the THING, the thing that is rapidly becoming the bane of my professional existence and also my personal existence and also every other kind of existence I have.
"I'll have the room ready in ten minutes," I repeat, which isn't his name, which is a cowardly sidestep and we both know it, and something crosses his face, something that might be amusement or might be frustration or might be the expression of a man who's just realised that the girl he's asking to call him by his firstname is physically incapable of doing so without spontaneously combusting.
He nods. Sits down in the reception chair. Waits.
He has never waited for anything in his life. I'd bet money on it, and I don't have money to bet. But he sits in that chair for ten minutes while I set up the room, and when I come out to get him he stands and follows me and doesn't comment on the fact that my ears are pink.
Small mercies. Very small. I'll take them.
THE EXTRA SESSIONSbecome regular. Tuesdays and Thursdays now instead of just Thursdays, which means my planner, my poor battered planner, which was already struggling with one weekly Artem entry, now has to accommodate two, and then three, because he adds a Friday morning, early, before the spa opens to other clients, which means I'm touching this man's scars on a nearly every-other-day basis and my professional detachment isn't so much eroding as it is crumbling into the sea like a cliff face in a storm.
Friday. I arrive at six-thirty to prep, coffee-less, because the staff mess doesn't open until seven and I don't own a kettle and my cabin is the size of a generous cupboard and has no power outlet near the bed, which means I'm functioning on four hours of sleep and raw determination and the lingering, mortifying memory of him saying "you were laughing at dinner" into a face cradle like it was information he'd been collecting.
He's already in the corridor outside the treatment room. Leaning against the wall. Two coffees in his hands.
He holds one out to me.
"I don't know how you take it," he admits, and this is the longest sentence he's spoken to me that isn't about sessions or schedules or the fact that I hadn't laughed on this ship, and his voice at six-thirty in the morning is lower than usual, rougher, as if even his vocal cords haven't fully woken up yet, and my brain files that information immediately under "Things I Did Not Need to Know But Cannot Unknow" and my hand reaches for the coffee before the rest of me has approved the transaction.
"Black. One sugar," I tell him.
Something crosses his face. Not a smile, not even the ghost of one, more like the architectural blueprint for a smile, the foundation being poured before the structure goes up. A movement at the corner of his mouth that appears and disappears so fast that if I blinked I'd have missed it, and I didn't blink, because I've started collecting these. Almost-smiles. I'm keeping a mental gallery of them, each one catalogued by date and context and the exact degree of mouth-corner involvement, and I know how insane that sounds and I don't care.
Almost-smile #1: when I told him my name. Almost-smile #2: right now, over incorrectly sugared coffee.
"I guessed black," he says. "No sugar." A pause. "I'll get it right next time."
Next time. There's going to be a next time. He's already decided, same as he decided about the extra sessions, same as he decides about everything, without hedging, without asking permission, a man used to the world rearranging itself around his decisions, and I should find that presumptuous. I should find it arrogant and overstepping and all the things that Madame Gilles warnedme about when she warned mesome clients will try to make the relationship personal, Étoile, and your job is to keep it professional.
I don't find it presumptuous. I find it... I don't have a word for what I find it. The closest I can get is: it feels like standing in a warm current. Something large and sure moving in a direction that includes me, not asking whether I want to come along because it already knows, and I should be more alarmed by that than I am but the coffee is good, even without the sugar, and I drink it standing in the corridor three feet from him while the ship hums around us and the sky through the porthole is barely light and neither of us says anything, and it is, absurdly and impossibly, the best coffee I've ever had in my entire life, and it doesn't have the right amount of sugar and I don't care.
Add to planner: Friday 6:30 AM, coffee in corridor with man who tracks my laughter. Recurring. Priority level: the highest one. Higher than that.
DURING SESSIONS, HEtalks.
Not like Curtis, in cheerful generous cascading rivers of anecdote and olive-theft and snoring impersonations. Artem talks like he does everything else: only when it matters, only as much as necessary, in short, low sentences that drop into the middle of whatever I'm thinking and rearrange it. He asks me things. Questions dropped into the silence between my strokes, and I answer before I realise I'm answering, because his silence has this quality to it, this room it makes, and my words just walk right in and sit down like they've been invited and offered tea.
"How long did you train?"
"Two years," I tell him, my thumbs working the tension along his right scapula. "Plus six months assisting before I got my own clients."
"Where?"
"Nice. A small studio. Nothing like this." I press into a knot below his shoulder blade and he doesn't flinch, and I don't know why that makes me proud but it does, the fact that his body has learned to receive my pressure without bracing, the fact that my hands have earned something from him. "The tables were vinyl over foam. The landlord's cat used to sneak in during sessions. Once it fell asleep on a client's back and I had to work around it."
The almost-smile. There and gone. Almost-smile #3: the cat.
"Do you like it?" he asks. "The work."
Nobody has asked me that. Not Mr. Green, who cares whether I'm competent, not whether I'm happy. Not Curtis, who assumes everyone loves the job because he does and because Curtis's default assumption about the world is that it's a generally delightful place full of hidden bread and amusing anecdotes. Not Mila, who asks about my days and my meals and my sleep and my childhood and my feelings about home but has never once asked whether I like putting my hands on strangers for a living.
"Yes," I say. And then, because his silence makes room for more, because the question felt real and warm and worth a real answer: "It's the only thing I've ever been good at."
"That's not true."
I pause. My thumbs are on his lower back, just above the burn scars, and my hands go still because his voice just changed register, dropped into something lower and more certain, andwhen Artem Almazov says something in that voice it doesn't sound like an opinion. It sounds like a fact he's been holding for a while and has decided it's time to set down.
