Page 60 of Hold On to Me
"She's twenty. She's a staff member. She earns less in a year than your bar tab." A pause. Mila doesn't rush. She's never rushed. Eleven years of working beside me and she knows exactly when to let silence carry the weight, when to place a word and when to let the absence of one do the damage. "I like her. I genuinely like her. She's lovely." Another pause. "That's the problem."
The laptop closes under my hands before I've decided to close it.
"If she were harder," Mila continues, leaning back in her chair, her voice low and sad and absolutely certain, "if she were someone who could handle this world, handleyou, handle what Almazov means to the people who aren't on this ship, then fine. But she's not. She's a girl from Nice who puts her hands on people for a living and thinks the most valuable thing about her is her grip strength. She holds handkerchiefs and weeps. She can't button her own uniform. And you're going to let her fall in love with you and then what?"
Around us, the gallery is silent. The jade figure glows in its case.
"Then what, Artem? You bring her into this? She meets your brothers? She learns what we actually do?" Mila's voice is level, kind even, and that's the worst part, because this isn't cruelty. This is a woman who has stood beside me for eleven years and seen what I do and helped me do it, asking me a question I don't have an answer for. "You'll destroy her. Without meaning to, without cruelty. Because you are what you are and she is what she is and those two things don't survive contact."
I can still feel the lace thread pattern pressed into my palm from three nights ago. Star's fingers landing on mine. Her face tilting up. The look in her eyes when I closed my hand around hers, open, terrified, radiant.
"I hear you," I tell her.
"Do you?"
I stand. Push the chair back. "I hear you, Mila."
She doesn't follow. I can feel her eyes on my back as I leave, and her expression will be the same one it always is when she's worried about me: careful, warm, a little sad. The expression ofa woman who has earned the right to say hard things. I've seen it for eleven years. She wore it when I came back from my last deployment with three new scars and a month of silence behind my teeth. She wore it when we buried my father and I didn't speak for two weeks and she sat beside me in the gallery every night and never once asked if I was all right because she already knew the answer.
She's not wrong. That's what I can't get past. She isn't wrong about any of it.
Star is twenty. Star earns four hundred euros an hour and considers that a fortune. Star held a Mayflower handkerchief in her palm and got teary about the woman who made it and she has no idea what I do, what I've done, what the name on the side of this ship actually costs the people who carry it.
Mila isn't wrong.
I just can't make that matter like it should.
I DON'T CANCEL THEsession.
Thursday, eight PM. Star arrives on time, because she always does, because punctuality is part of the scaffolding that holds her together like discipline holds me together, and we are, in this one way, exactly alike. I hear her in the corridor, the soft flat shoes, and then she's in the room and she's looking at me with that face. The one she thinks she's hiding. She's not hiding anything. Star Thornton has never hidden a single thing in her life. Everything she feels is right there, in her hands, in the flush at her throat, in her eyes finding mine and holding on like she's afraid I'll disappear if she blinks.
"Hi," she breathes.
"Hi."
She oils her hands. The cedarwood fills the room. I lie face-down and her palms find my back and I close my eyes and let her work and I don't think about Mila's voice in the gallery sayingyou'll destroy her.
I think about it the entire time.
Her hands find the scar along my left shoulder blade. The long one. She knows it now, knows it like she knows her own treatment room, by touch, by instinct. She doesn't flinch at it, doesn't adjust her pressure, just works the tissue with a patience and competence that got her hired at twenty when therapists twice her age couldn't match her scores. Her thumbs trace the border of the muscle and I feel my body do the thing it does with her, the thing it refuses to do for anyone else: yield. Give ground. Let her through the muscle and the tissue and the bone and into the space underneath where everything I carry goes still for an hour.
One hour. That's what she gives me. One hour of silence in a head that hasn't been silent in five years, and I should sit up right now and saythis was a mistakeand walk out and cancel the remaining sessions and let her hate me for a few weeks until the sting fades and she goes back to laughing with Curtis and humming in supply closets and forgets about the man who kissed her in a gallery over four-hundred-year-old lace.
Her hand crosses the burn scar on my lower back. Her fingers adjust without pausing. She remembers where every scar is. She's mapped me. My body is a territory she's surveyed and shecarries the chart in her hands and she doesn't even know she's the only person in the world who has it.
I don't sit up. I don't say anything. I lie there and I let her touch me.
I am a coward.
FRIDAY. MILA AGAIN.
Gallery after hours, the laptop open between us, satellite feed running. The actual work I'm on this ship to do. The reason I hired Mila three years ago. The thing that should matter more than a girl with cedarwood on her palms who pressed her forehead to a porthole and smiled at the sea.
"I saw you this morning," Mila mentions, not glancing up from the screen. "Bringing her coffee."
"Mila."
"I'm not lecturing. I'm observing." She scrolls through a data table. Her tone is conversational, easy, the tone of someone discussing the weather forecast, not dismantling a man's defences. "You brought her coffee in a guest mug. Not a staff cup. A guest mug."
