Star #2
He lets me take it. His scarred fingers close around mine and we stand on the steel walkway with the engines beating around us and I can feel the vibration in his palm, or maybe that's his pulse, or maybe it's both, the ship's heartbeat and his heartbeat running at the same frequency, indistinguishable.
"My apartment in Nice had a boiler," I tell him, leaning my shoulder against the railing.
The metal vibrates under my arm. "Old building.
The pipes ran through the walls and at night they'd rattle and tick.
I hated it the first week. Couldn't sleep.
" I glance at him. "By the second week I couldn't sleep without it. "
He turns to me. That focused expression, warm and close, and I can see the light from the engine gauges reflected in his eyes, amber points floating in dark water.
"The ship's engines run at sixty-two hertz," he offers. "Healthy human heart rate is about the same."
I stare at him. "You know the frequency of the engines."
"I own the ship."
"You memorised the frequency of the engines because it matches a heartbeat."
His mouth does nothing. His eyes do everything.
And his hand tightens on mine, just once, the touch-once thing he does, testing whether something will hold, and we stand there listening to the ship's heart beat around us until my work-tired body sags against his arm and he walks me back to Deck 2 without being asked, matching his stride to mine, same as always, shortening his steps to meet me where I am.
"Goodnight, Star."
"Goodnight, Artem."
Our ritual. I close my cabin door. Press my back to it. The pipes in the wall behind my bunk tick and rattle and I fall asleep in forty seconds, still smiling, still feeling the vibration of the engines in my ribs like a second pulse laid next to my own.
HE KISSES ME IN THE gallery on Tuesday night.
Against the wall between the display cases, his hands pressed to the panels on either side of my head, mine fisted in the front of his shirt.
The jade figure observes from its case, glowing green, completely unbothered by the fact that a four-hundred-year-old gallery is being used as a makeout venue by two people who should really know better.
His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to the place below my ear and I make a sound that bounces off the glass and I don't care, I don't care at all, because his mouth is on my neck and his hands are on the wall and my hands are full of his shirt and the Mayflower handkerchief is six feet away in its case, properly closed this time, and I think about our fingers tangled around it and his hand turning over and closing around mine and I pull him closer by his shirt and his forehead drops to my shoulder and he says my name into my collarbone.
Just once. Just Star. Like he's confirming something.
Like he needed to say it into my skin to make it real.
We stand there. His forehead on my shoulder, my hands in his shirt, the gallery dim and warm around us. I can feel his heart through the fabric. Hammering. Always faster than his face would ever admit.
"You're going to wrinkle your shirt," I inform him.
"I have other shirts."
"Rich people," I sigh.
His chest moves against mine. Not a laugh.
The architecture of one, the vibration without the sound, a rumble that travels through his ribs and into mine, and it's the closest I've gotten and I want more.
I want to make him actually laugh out loud.
It's on the list now. Below making him smile. Above getting him to sleep.
The list is getting long. I don't care.
WEDNESDAY. THE SPA after hours. I'm putting away oils and he appears in the doorway and then he's not in the doorway anymore, he's crossing the room in three long strides, and his hands are on my waist and he lifts me onto the treatment table and steps between my knees and kisses me until my hands are shaking and the lavender oil I was holding has rolled off the table edge and shattered on the heated floor and neither of us picks it up.
"This is where I work," I gasp when I can talk, which takes a while, because his mouth is very distracting and his hands are on my ribs, warm through my uniform, his thumbs tracing the lower edge like he's mapping a new set of bones.
"This is my professional space. I'm going to think about this every time I—-"
"Yes," he agrees, and the lopsided thing happens again, and I want to put my mouth on it but he's already kissing me and every thought I have dissolves, just evaporates, my planner goes blank, my filing system crashes, and for the first time in my organised, colour-coded, schedule-dependent life my brain has nothing to offer me and I don't miss it.
The heated floor is warm under my bare feet.
His shirt smells like soap and salt and him, just him, and I've memorised the scent of this man's skin and that should alarm me and it doesn't. Nothing alarms me right now.
I'm sitting on my own treatment table with his hands on my ribs and the cedarwood in the air and I'm the happiest I've ever been in my entire life and the fact that it's happening HERE, in the room where I first touched his scars and discovered what it felt like to care about someone through my palms, feels right.
Like the room was always going to end up meaning this.
Every time. That's what keeps hitting me.
Every single time he touches me, there's a half-second where his hands pause.
Not uncertainty. Attention. He touches me like I touched the Mayflower handkerchief.
Like I might be the most valuable thing he's ever held and he wants to make sure his hands are worthy first.
I don't tell him this. I don't have the words for it yet, and if I tried I'd cry, and I've made it five weeks on this ship without crying and I'm not starting now.
CURTIS KNOWS.
I don't tell him. I don't change anything about how I act at meals or during shifts or in the staff corridor, or at least I don't think I change anything, but apparently I've become one of those people who radiates happiness from my pores like a human-shaped glow stick, because on Thursday morning Curtis sets a coffee on the counter next to me in the staff mess and sits down and says, "So. "
"So?" I respond, in the voice of a woman with absolutely nothing to hide.
"You're different."
"I'm not different."
"Star." He props his chin on his hand. "You hummed yesterday. In the supply closet. You were restocking towels and you were humming."
I was humming. I was. I don't even know what I was humming, some fragment of the song playing through the spa sound system, I didn't realise I was doing it until it was done, and then I'd stood there with a stack of towels in my arms and thought, with a kind of bewildered wonder: huh.
So this is what happy sounds like when it leaks out.
"People hum," I argue.
"You don't." He picks up his coffee, drinks, studies me over the rim.
"You've been here five weeks. I've had dinner with you probably twenty times.
You don't hum, you don't whistle, you don't sing in the shower, yes the walls are that thin.
" His eyebrows climb. "You're the most silent person on this ship and now you're humming in the supply closet while folding towels and smiling at nothing.
Something is either very right or very wrong and based on the glow you're putting out I'm guessing it's very right. "
"Maybe I'm in a good mood," I try, and it comes out defensive, which is the opposite of convincing, and Curtis's face changes.
Not his usual grin. Something underneath it, older than his twenty-one years, the expression of a person who's seen a friend walk toward something hard and wishes he could say something useful before she gets there.
"Be careful," he tells me. "Okay?"
"Curtis—-"
"I'm not asking who. I don't need to know who." He picks up his tray, stands, and his grin comes back, easy and warm, the Curtis grin that makes every room brighter and every dinner less lonely, but his eyes stay on me a beat too long. "Just be careful."
He leaves. I sit with my coffee cooling between my palms and the staff mess clattering around me and I think about the fact that Curtis didn't ask who and what that means, whether it means he already knows or whether it means he knows enough not to want confirmation, and either way there's a heaviness in his "be careful" that I can't shake because Curtis doesn't do heavy.
Curtis does light. Curtis does stolen olives and snoring impressions and Uncle-Curtis Christmas cards.
If Curtis is doing heavy, it's because he sees something I don't.
I pick up my tray. I go to work. The humming doesn't stop but I do it quieter now, with the supply closet door closed.
MILA TAKES ME SHOPPING.
"It's criminal," she declares, steering me through the boutique on the promenade deck with one hand on my elbow and the other gesturing at racks of clothes I could never afford, her voice bright with the performative outrage of a woman who considers underdressing a moral failing.
"You've been on this ship for five weeks and you haven't bought yourself a single thing.
Not a scarf, not a pair of earrings. Nothing. Criminal, darling."
"I send my money home." This is true, sort of.
There's no home to send it to, exactly. There's a savings account in Nice that I feed like a stray cat, small amounts deposited regularly, hoping it'll grow into something that can sustain me if this job ends.
But "I send my money home" sounds better than "I'm saving every euro because I've been broke my entire life and the terror of going back to nothing keeps me up almost as much as my bunkmate's snoring," so I say the better thing and Mila accepts it with a sympathetic tilt of her head.
"Well, today you're not sending it anywhere. Today we're spending it."
"Mila, I can't—-"