Chapter 30 #2
"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 my heartbeats 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'T a 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've never 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."
His chest shakes against my side. The almost-laugh. Closer to real sound than I've ever heard, a rumble that vibrates through my ribs. "No."
"You're terrible at massage. Zero technique. Madame Gilles would be APPALLED. She would revoke your... you don't even HAVE a license, you're practising without a license, I should REPORT you—-"
The shaking grows. His fingers trace a circle on my hip, absent, idle, and I commit the shape of it to memory because I'm committing everything to memory, every second of this, every place his mouth has been, every sound I made that I'm going to be mortified about tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.
"I'm keeping this room," I inform him, and my voice is wobbly and blissed out and I don't recognise it. "You're not allowed in here during business hours. Professional boundary."
"Professional boundary," he repeats against my stomach, and his voice is warm and ruined and the vibration of it against my skin makes me shiver.
I run my fingers through his hair and he turns his head and presses his cheek against me and I can feel his heartbeat through his chest, still fast, still hammering, and I think: this man.
This man who owns a ship and carries a sealed military record and has a brother named Alexei who runs a casino empire.
This man is lying with his head on my stomach and his heart going at a hundred miles an hour because I let him touch me.
I love him so much I can't see straight. I love him so much the room is blurry and I can't tell if that's tears or aftershock or just how the world looks now, rearranged, reorganised, every surface carrying a different charge than it did an hour ago.
"I love you," I tell the dark room. The cedarwood.
His hair. I say it because I can, because the words are new and enormous and still slightly terrifying and I want to keep saying them until they stop feeling borrowed and start feeling mine.
"I love you and you're terrible at massage and I love you. "
He lifts his head. His eyes find mine. In the amber glow they're not iron, they're not brown, they're just his, and they're wet.
"I love you, Star."
I pull him up to me and kiss him, long and slow and thorough, and his arms wrap around me on the narrow table and we're tangled together on a massage table in a spa on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and my life is so far from the forty-two euros and the bus from Nice-Ville that I can't even see that girl from here.
She's still me. She'll always be me. But she's lying in the arms of a man who loves her and her body is humming and her heart is full and she's not afraid.
HE WALKS ME TO MY CABIN at one AM.
Same route. Service stairs, staff corridor on Deck 2, amber lights, thin carpet.
He holds my hand. His scarred fingers laced through mine, our arms swinging slightly between us, and I'm wearing my uniform tunic buttoned wrong because my fingers were shaking when I put it back on and he noticed and his mouth did the lopsided thing and he didn't say a word and I am NOT going to fix it.
The mis-buttoning stays. It's a trophy. It's proof.
We stop at my door. The corridor is still. My bunkmate's snoring is audible through the wall, which is both mortifying and comforting and exactly the detail my planner would normally catalogue except my planner is still rebooting and has been since approximately the moment he gave the order.
"Goodnight, Star."
"Goodnight, Artem."
He lifts my hand. Presses his mouth to my knuckles.
Not brief this time. He stays there, his lips warm against the bones of my hand, and I can feel the kiss sinking through my skin and into the joints and the tendons and the muscle, all the machinery that Madame Gilles trained and Mr. Green hired and that I've spent my whole life believing was the only valuable part of me, and he's kissing it.
He's pressing his mouth to my working hands like they're the Mayflower lace.
Then he turns my hand over. Presses his mouth to my palm.
I feel that kiss down to the soles of my feet. My toes curl against the thin carpet. My heart does something that is definitely not on the planner.
"That was my working hand," I inform him, and my voice is a ruin. "I have clients tomorrow. I'm going to feel that kiss on every single person I touch."
"Good." He walks away.
I go inside. Close the door. Lean against it.
My bunkmate is snoring. The ship rocks. The hum fills the cabin. I press my hand, the kissed one, against my chest and feel my heartbeat under my palm and his kiss on the other side and I stand there in the dark, smiling so wide my face aches, and I don't care.
I am undone and remade and I am never going back.
Planner status: rebooting. New entry: love Artem Almazov. Schedule: always. Priority: the highest one. Higher than that.
OUTSIDE THE SPA, ON the mezzanine above Deck 7, a cigarette burns in the dark.
Mila is leaning against the railing. She wasn't there when they went in.
She arrived twenty minutes ago, walking the upper corridors as she does when she can't sleep, and she stopped when she saw the spa lights off and the corridor empty and the faint amber glow seeping under the treatment room door.
Her watch read twelve fifty-three when Star came out. Hair loose. Tunic buttoned wrong. Face carrying an expression that didn't need translation.
Artem followed thirty seconds later, his shirt untucked, his hair disordered, and on his face an expression Mila has never seen in eleven years.
The guarded blankness gone. The operational focus gone.
Even the grief she saw at his father's funeral, gone.
Something open. Something ruined and rebuilt.
Something that resembled, from the mezzanine, a man who has stopped hiding.
She checked the time. Twelve fifty-four.
The cigarette burns to the filter. She grinds it out on the railing and drops it into the sea.
In her cabin, the laptop is waiting. The satellite window opens in forty minutes.
There are things to report.