Page 62 of Hold On to Me
"She seemed..." He pauses. Reconsiders. Chooses the word of a man who has decided to stay professional when he'd rather say something else. "She's a professional. She'll manage."
Green is a decent man. He chose his words carefully and I heard the ones he didn't say, the ones that lived in the pause betweenseemedandprofessional,and they sounded likeshe seemed guttedandyou caused thatandI hired her because she was the best I'd seen in nine years and you're going to break her.
Wednesday I pass her in the staff corridor on Deck 5. She's coming from the gallery, I'm heading toward the casino, and the corridor is narrow and there's nowhere to go and I see her and she sees me and the flush starts at her throat, the same flush, the one that's been announcing her feelings since the corridor encounter, and her step falters for a quarter-second and then she straightens and her chin lifts and she walks toward me like she walks into a treatment room: shoulders square, hands at her sides, professional.
"Mr. Almazov."
Mr. Almazov. Not Artem. She's handed me back the formality like a key she's returning, and it cuts exactly as it should. Surgically. The same clean line as the scar on my shoulder blade, which her thumbs have traced forty times and will never trace again.
"Star."
I should keep walking. I keep walking.
"Is everything all right?" she asks.
Behind me. To my back. And I can hear what it costs her, the careful tone that isn't quite careful enough, the fracture running through it that she thinks she's concealing and she's not, she has never been able to conceal anything from me, and I keep walking because if I stop and turn around and see her face I'll cross the corridor and take her jaw in my hand, the same spot, always the same spot, and I'll say her name and she'll say mine and every wall I've rebuilt in the last five days will come down and I'll be visible again. I'll be visible and she'll be standing next to me and visible men get killed and the people standing next to them get killed too.
"Fine," I manage. "Thank you."
My feet keep moving. Down the corridor, up the stairs, into the suite, onto the balcony. The water is grey and calm and I sit in the chair and I think:this is the right thing. This is the only thing. You're protecting her from yourself and that's the most decent thing you've done in years.
It doesn't feel decent.
It feels like closing a door on someone who was standing in the light.
THURSDAY. NO SESSION. I cancelled the full recurring block Monday.A. Almazov, Thursday 8:00 PM, Series cancelled.
The evening goes to the gallery. Mila, the laptop, the work. Shipping logs, port manifests, the trail of paper that might lead us to the witness who can identify the man who ordered my father's death. It requires focus and I don't have focus, because my focus is six decks below me restocking oils and folding towels and wondering what she did wrong.
She didn't do anything wrong. She didn't do a single thing wrong and I'm letting her believe she did and I know it and that knowledge sits in my chest like a coal.
"You're doing the right thing," Mila tells me, not glancing up from the screen.
I say nothing.
"It hurts now. It won't always." She scrolls. "Give it time."
I don't want time. I want Thursday at eight PM and cedarwood in a dim room and the sound of her flat shoes in the corridor and the way her hands read my body like a language she was born speaking. I want the coffee calculation and the engine room and her shoulder against my arm at midnight and the lopsided smile she kept a gallery of, yes I knew about the gallery, I knew she was cataloguing them, I could see her filing each one away like a jeweller with a stone, and I didn't stop her because being collected by Star Thornton was the first time in five years I'd felt like something worth keeping.
"I know," I tell Mila.
She reaches across the desk and squeezes my hand. "She'll be fine. She's young. She'll recover. Give it a few weeks and she'll be laughing with Curtis again and you'll be a story she tells her friends."
A story.
I pull my hand back. "Let's focus."
The manifests blur.
SATURDAY NIGHT. ELEVENPM. A knock on the door of Suite 12.
I know who it is before I open it. I know because no one knocks on this door. Mila has a key. Green calls ahead. The staff don't come to the guest suites uninvited. Only one person on this ship would knock.
Only one person on this ship would cross six decks in flat shoes and rolled trousers at eleven o'clock at night to stand outside a door she has no business approaching and knock, because Star Thornton doesn't perform and she doesn't build up to things and she doesn't let questions go unanswered. She just asks.
I open the door.
She's standing in the corridor in her uniform, hair pulled back, flat shoes, trousers rolled at the waist because they're still half an inch too long and she never hemmed them. She's not crying. She's not flushed. She looks like a person who's been assembling courage for days, collecting it piece by piece, same as she collects beautiful things and almost-smiles and old lace, and has finally gathered enough to walk across the ship and up six decks and knock.
