Chapter 30
Star
HIS HANDS ARE ON MY back.
I can't think. That should concern me. I'm a person who thinks constantly, compulsively, recreationally, who narrates her own life in real time and files every sensation in a colour-coded internal cabinet and maintains a running planner that covers everything from restock schedules to the exact number of times Artem Almazov's mouth has twitched in my presence (seventeen, the answer is seventeen, I was keeping count, the count is suspended on account of his hands being on my bare skin and my counting brain has emigrated to a country with no extradition policy).
His palms are pressed against my shoulder blades. His thumbs are digging into the muscles along my spine. My brain has packed a suitcase and left the building without a forwarding address.
Planner status: offline. Reason: hands. ETA for reboot: unknown. Possibly never.
The spa is dark. After hours, locked, the sound system off, the water wall silent behind its glass partition.
The only light is the heated floor, amber glow turning the treatment room into something warm and subterranean, a cave made of cedarwood and low gold light.
The only sound is the ship. The hum. Sixty-two hertz, filling the room like it fills the engine room twelve decks below.
"Lie down," he said, ten minutes ago, standing in the doorway of treatment room two with his sleeves pushed to his forearms and his eyes on mine and a look on his face that made my knees forget they were load-bearing joints. And I managed "What?" and he repeated "Lie down, Star."
No request, no suggestion, no careful hedging tone of a man who's testing the water.
A command, from a man whose hands shook in a corridor three days ago and whose voice cracked on the word "afraid" and who cried into my hair while I called him a gargoyle, and who is now standing in my treatment room doorway telling me to lie down with the full returned authority of someone who has decided what's happening next and the decision is final.
I should have argued. I should have protested excuse me, this is MY treatment room, I give the orders here, I'm the licensed professional and you're the man who admitted to lurking on a mezzanine like an enormous sad gargoyle, you don't get to come in here and—-
Except his voice when he spoke my name did something to my spine that disabled the arguing function, and I lay down.
Face-down. On my own table. The leather warm from the heated pad underneath, smelling like cedarwood because I used it on my last client six hours ago and the scent hasn't faded, and oh chops, the cedarwood, the oil I put at the back of the shelf with the label turned away for two weeks, and now I'm lying face-down in a room that reeks of it with his hands finding the hem of my tunic and pushing it up, gathering the fabric at my shoulders, and his palms are on my bare skin and I am trying to remember how breathing works and I am failing spectacularly.
He knows what he's doing.
That's the terrifying part. The intimacy doesn't scare me.
The after-hours spa doesn't scare me. The fact that I'm lying face-down on a massage table while a man who told me he loved me three days ago in a corridor while crying puts his hands on me.
The terrifying part is that his hands know anatomy.
Eleven years of military training, field medicine, whatever classified chapter of his life produced those scars on his knuckles.
His hands carry all of it. He finds the tension in my trapezius without searching.
His thumb traces the border of the muscle, follows the grain, applies pressure that isn't tentative and isn't aggressive but exact, and my body responds to it before my mind can intervene, how my body responded to eucalyptus on my first day, a surrender that happens below the level of choice.
My shoulders drop. Involuntary. Complete.
"You're holding here," he notes, his thumb on the ridge between my neck and my right shoulder. "This side is worse."
"I carry my bag on that shoulder."
"Stop."
"It's the only shoulder I have."
"Use the other one." His thumb digs in. Past gentle, short of painful.
Right. Exactly, infuriatingly right, like Madame Gilles correcting my grip during training, the authority of someone who knows what the body needs better than the body does, and I want to inform him that I have two years of professional certification and six months of supervised practice and he has NO BUSINESS being this good at this, this is RUDE, this is an act of aggression against my professional identity—-
I make a sound into the face cradle.
It's involuntary and mortifying and I hope the leather absorbed it but based on how his hands pause for half a second I'm guessing it did not. I'm guessing the entire Mediterranean heard it. I'm guessing fish are looking at each other right now going what was that.
"Good?" he asks, and there's something in his voice, something warm and low and cracked at the edges, and oh no, he LIKED the sound, he liked it and he's going to try to make me do it again and I have no defences left, none, I used them all up in the corridor three days ago when I called him a gargoyle and cried into his shirt.
"Don't fish for compliments," I warn him, and my voice comes out breathy and ruined and not at all like a warning.
His chest moves. The vibration without the sound.
I can feel it through his hands, the almost-laugh I've been chasing since the gallery, and I want to be indignant about the fact that he's laughing at me while I'm face-down and defenceless on a table but my face is burning against the cradle and his hands are moving again and indignation requires a functioning brain and mine is in another country.
HE WORKS MY SHOULDERS. My upper back. His hands are enormous and scarred and warm and they map me the way mine mapped him in this room weeks ago, except he doesn't have the clinical distance I trained for.
What he has is something else. Intention.
The same fierce attention he gives the antiques in the gallery, the same touch-once-and-mean-it quality, except he's touching more than once.
He's touching again and again, his palms returning to the places where my muscles release, memorising them, and every time he comes back to a spot that made me respond his fingers press deeper and my body arches toward him and I can't stop it and I've stopped trying.
I've been touched by professionals. I traded sessions with classmates in Nice for two years. I know what competent hands feel like.
These aren't competent hands. These are hands that are claiming me.
Inch by inch. And I'm letting them because I've spent weeks touching this man's body and learning his secrets through his skin and now he's doing it BACK, he's reading ME, and the reversal is so intimate it makes my eyes sting because this is what I do to other people.
This is what my hands do to strangers on tables and I never understood what it felt like from the other side, the total vulnerability of being known through touch, and now I understand and it's terrifying and I don't want him to stop.
His knuckles graze the curve of my lower back.
The skin there is thinner, more sensitive, and when his scarred fingers trace the ridge of my hip my whole body tightens and a sound comes out of me that I will be reliving with mortification at three AM for approximately the rest of my natural life and possibly into the afterlife.
His hands pause. One second. Waiting.
"Still good?" he asks.
"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.