Page 72 of Hold On to Me
"Yes." My voice is ruined and it's been ten minutes and I used to be a professional with dignity and composure and now I'm a puddle on my own treatment table making sounds that would get me banned from polite society.
His hands resume. Lower. Along the muscles of my lower back, where the tension lives that I never let anyone work because the position is too exposed and the vulnerability is too close. His thumbs press into the small of my back and I arch into his touch and this time I don't even try to muffle the sound because what's the point? What is the POINT of pretending I have any composure left? I don't. It's gone. It walked out with my brain and they're both in another time zone.
"Turn over," he says.
My brain reconnects for three seconds. Long enough to register: he's asking me to turn over. Face up. Eyes open. On a table in a dark room with his hands on me and my tunic bunched at my shoulders and I've never done anything like this with anyone, ever, the total sum of my romantic experience prior to this man is two bad kisses from boys who tasted like spearmint gum and didn't know where to put their hands, and my heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth and my ears and the soles of my bare feet against the warm leather.
I turn over.
The ceiling is dim amber. His face is above me. Close. His eyes in this light aren't iron but brown with warmth threaded through, the colour I saw on the private deck the first time he kissed me in daylight, and they're burning, and the expression on his face wipes out every thought I've ever had, every planner entry, every filed sensation, every colour-coded category. The look of a man who decided the moment he gave that order and has been holding himself back with both hands ever since, and the restraint is costing him. I can see it costing him. The tension in his jaw. The tremor in his fingers against my ribcage. The fact that he's breathing harder than he was thirty seconds ago.
"Hi," I whisper, because I don't know what else to say when the man I love is standing over me in a dark room with his hands on my bare waist and I can't feel my legs. What IS the correct greeting for this situation? What would Madame Gilles suggest?When the client positions you on the table and you lose motor function, Étoile, the appropriate response is—-
Actually Madame Gilles would not have suggestions for this situation. This situation is not in the curriculum.
"Hi," he replies, and his voice is low and rough and his mouth does the lopsided thing and I'm going to die, I'm actually going to die on this table, cause of death: lopsided smile administered at close range while shirtless, no known cure.
His hand moves from my waist to my ribcage. Palm spread, fingers wide. I can feel every finger individually, each one a separate point of heat, and his thumb traces the lower edge of my ribs, the same path he traced through my uniform weeks ago in this very room except there's no uniform now. Just skin. His scarred hand on my bare skin. The roughness of his palm, the ridge of the scar on his index finger, the heat of him soaking into me, and I gasp, actually gasp, out loud, because I've imagined this, I've lain in my bunk at three AM with my palm pressed to the vibrating wall and imagined his hands on me without fabric between us, and the reality is so much more than the imagining that my eyes fill.
My back arches off the table. A fraction. Enough for his hand to slide underneath, his palm against the base of my spine, and he lifts me toward him. Not pulling. Lifting. As if I weigh nothing. As if I'm the handkerchief.
His other hand finds the side of my neck, thumb on my jaw, fingers in my hair.
"I've wanted to do this," he tells me, and his voice has gone somewhere deep and ragged, "since the first session. When you found the scar on my shoulder blade and your hands didn't flinch."
"You were face-down," I manage. "You couldn't see my hands."
"I felt them. I felt you not flinching." His thumb traces my jaw and I'm trembling and I can't stop and I don't care. "Every other therapist pauses when they find the scars. Half a second. They recover, but I feel the pause. You didn't pause. You just kept going. As if my scars were just another part of the muscle."
"They are," I breathe. "They're just part of you."
His eyes close. His jaw clenches. And when he opens them again the restraint I saw before is thinner, worn almost transparent, and I can see through it to what's underneath and what's underneath is a man who is barely, barely holding on.
His head dips. His mouth finds my collarbone. Not a kiss. Something slower. His lips tracing the line of bone beneath my skin, and the heat of his mouth on a place that has never been kissed makes my hand fly to his hair and grip hard enough to hurt.
He makes a sound against my skin. Low and raw, the sound from the corridor, from the grovel, the cracked thing that came out of him when I called him a gargoyle except this is deeper, rougher, and the vibration of it moves through my collarbone and into my chest and I am shaking.
His mouth moves. Collarbone to throat. Throat to the hollow between, the place where my pulse hammers. His lips rest there, not kissing, just resting, and I can feel him counting myheartbeats with his mouth and I can't breathe, I actually cannot breathe, because he's pressed against my pulse like he wants to memorise the speed of it and file it away like I file his almost-smiles and this is what I've done to him, I've taught him to collect.
"Fast," he murmurs against my skin.
"Your fault." My voice cracks. "Everything is your fault, every single thing my body does in this room is your fault and you should know that and I'm going to put it in your file, Almazov, I'm going to write it on your CLIENT NOTES: patient causes therapist to lose all motor function, recommend immediate—-"
His mouth moves lower and the sentence evaporates.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT ISN'Ta thing I have language for.
I lose the thread of myself. The planner is gone, the filing cabinet is empty, the running narration that has accompanied every moment of my life since I was old enough to form sentences simply stops, and there's nothing in its place but the dark room and the warm leather and the certainty of his hands. I trust them completely. My hands know his. His hands know mine. There is nothing in this room to be afraid of.
And then there's no room at all. There's only the gathering, the building, tightening thing that starts low at the base of my spine and rises. His hand finds it and doesn't rush, and I stop holding on. I stop. I become just a body held by his body, just nerve and heat and the sound of his name, and somewhere in the dark I say it. "Artem, Artem." I sound like someone I'venever met, someone who doesn't schedule her feelings, and the sound of it undoes us both.
The wave takes me. Enormous. And I let it.
He holds me. His face pressed against my stomach. My hand in his hair. My chest heaving. The ceiling swimming above me, amber and gold.
He presses his lips to my stomach. Once. Tender. The touch of a man who has just felt me fall apart in his hands and is grateful.
"That," I announce, when I can form words, when my voice comes back from whatever country it emigrated to along with my brain, "was not a massage."
