Chapter 2 #2
"Almazov operation," Mr. Green informs me. His tone has the careful neutrality of a man who works for people he's decided not to have opinions about.
"Almazov," I repeat, because I've never heard the name and it sits strangely in my mouth, all consonants and authority.
"The family that owns the ship. Four brothers. You'll almost certainly never interact with any of them, but in the unlikely event that you do: be polite, be professional, don't initiate conversation, don't stare."
"Do they stare?"
He levels me with the managerial equivalent of that was a stupid question, Thornton.
"They own the ship," he points out. "They can do what they like."
Right. Action item: don't stare at the people who own everything. Should be easy. I don't stare at people. I'm a professional. Professionals don't stare.
THE REST OF THE TOUR passes in a blur of regulations and prohibited areas. Staff dining on Deck 2, staggered meals, no eating in uniform. Laundry service on Deck 1. Emergency protocols. The medical bay.
"Dr. Hernandez. She's good. Don't bother her unless you're bleeding."
And then, finally, my treatment rooms. Two of them, adjoining, with adjustable tables, heated floors, and a sound system built into the walls that's currently murmuring something with rain and piano and no discernible melody.
I run my palm across the leather of the treatment table.
Cool. Smooth. High quality. I can feel it in the give, the density, the way the surface accepts pressure without crinkling.
The tables at my training studio in Nice were vinyl over foam, and you could feel the metal frame through the padding if you pressed hard enough.
This table is the Rolls-Royce of massage tables.
This table has probably never met a vinyl cover in its life.
And the leather is warm under my palm, and the heated floor is warm under my feet, and I want to stand here forever just touching this, just being in this room that's mine, that I earned.
My hands. Four hundred euros an hour.
The thought is so absurd I almost laugh out loud.
Four hundred euros. Per hour. That's nine and a half bus tickets from Nice-Ville per hour.
That's almost ten entire Stars'-monthly-account-balances per hour.
My brain is trying to do the maths and also trying to accept that the maths is real and also slightly failing at both.
Mr. Green, who's been patiently allowing me to fondle his furniture, clears his throat. "Your schedule's loaded on the staff portal. First clients begin tomorrow. Supplies are in the cabinet. Questions?"
"No, Mr. Green."
"Good." He turns to leave. Pauses. "One more thing, Thornton."
"Sir... Mr. Green."
"You're the youngest therapist on this ship.
The other three have a decade on you, minimum.
I hired you because your practical scores were the highest I've seen in nine years of staffing this spa, and because Madame Gilles's recommendation was specific enough that I suspect she'd have flown here herself if I'd turned you down. "
I don't know what to say to that. My throat does something tight and warm and I blink fast and say nothing.
"Don't make me regret it."
"I won't," I promise, and I mean it with every cell in my body, with every tendon in my overtrained, cocoa-buttered, bus-fare-counting hands.
He nods once. Leaves.
I stand in the empty treatment room. Press both palms to the leather and close my eyes.
The ship hums, a low vibration I can feel through the soles of my shoes, through the table, through the floor and walls.
The engines, warming up. Monaco is still outside.
Still glittering. Still the most expensive postcard I've ever stood inside.
I'm here. I earned this. My hands earned this.
Deep breath. Open eyes. Get to work.
THE SHIP SAILS AT SIX.
I feel it before the announcement. A deepening of the hum, a change in the floor beneath my feet, and then through the porthole at the end of the staff corridor, Monaco begins to slide.
The white buildings and the packed harbour and the casino district separating from us like a scene being pulled gently offstage.
The water widens. The coast recedes. And the Mediterranean opens up, enormous and darkening, and the ship turns its bow toward open sea, and the horizon is nothing but water and the first colours of sunset bleeding into it, peach and copper and a violet so deep it aches.
I stand at the porthole and let Monaco get small. Then smaller. Then a smudge of light against the darkening hills, and then gone.
I'm at sea. For the first time in my life, the ground beneath me isn't ground.
The vibration of the engines runs through my feet, and the girl who counted forty-two euros, who trained for two years and assisted for six months and applied to fourteen ships before this one let her aboard, that girl is pressing her forehead against the cool glass of a porthole and smiling so wide it hurts her face and she doesn't have to pay a single euro to be here because someone decided her hands were worth four hundred an hour.
I let myself have this. Just for a minute. Just the smile and the violet water and the hum.
MY FIRST EVENING ENDS at nine. I've spent it prepping the treatment rooms, checking supplies, calibrating the tables, running through the sound system options until I find a setting that isn't rain-and-piano but something lower, warmer, a frequency I can feel in my wrists when I press my hands to the speakers.
I test the oils. Lavender, eucalyptus, a cedarwood blend that I open and hold to my nose and breathe in until my shoulders settle.
I practise on the empty table. Just my hands on the leather, working through the sequences I know so well my muscles remember them when my brain is somewhere else entirely.
Long effleurage strokes, petrissage kneading, the trigger-point compression that Madame Gilles drilled into me until I could do it in my sleep.
I'm good at this. I know I'm good at this. It's the one thing I've never doubted.
The staff corridor on Deck 2 is hushed at this hour.
Most of the crew are either on their shifts or asleep, and the amber LED strips throw long, warm pools on the thin carpet.
I'm heading toward the staff mess, because I skipped dinner and my stomach's making increasingly pointed suggestions about this, when I turn the corner and walk straight into a wall.
Except the wall is a person.
Except the person is...
Oh.
Oh chops.
He's tall. That registers first, before anything else, just the sheer physical fact of him rearranging the corridor around his own body.
Shoulders wide under a dark shirt, untucked, sleeves pushed to the forearms. And those forearms, good grief, mapped with veins and scars that I catalogue in the half-second before I nearly plant my face in his chest, because my hands have their own brain and my hand-brain is already doing a professional assessment (military posture, trained spine, corded neck, tension pattern suggests chronic hypervigilance) while my actual brain is doing something much less professional, which is screaming.
I stop. Close enough to smell him. Not cologne, not the manufactured freshness of the guest corridors, but soap and clean skin and underneath it something warm and specific that belongs only to him, and I'm not going to think about what it is because I've known this man for exactly one and a half seconds and my pulse is already staging a full-scale revolt.
Six-thirty prep. Seven o'clock first client. Restock the oils. Fold the towels. Do NOT smell the enormous man in the corridor.
He glances down at me.
Dark eyes. Not brown, something cooler, with an almost metallic quality, like iron that's been heated and cooled too many times.
His face... I don't have a word for it. Not handsome the way magazines mean.
Not pretty. Strong nose, heavy brow, a mouth that's set in a line suggesting it hasn't smiled recently and doesn't intend to.
There's a scar on his left hand, the one hanging at his side closest to me.
Short, raised, white against brown skin.
And another at his wrist, disappearing under the cuff of his rolled sleeve, and I want to trace it with my thumb the way I'd trace a scar during intake assessment, purely professional, completely clinical, not at all because his forearms are making me forget my own name.
He holds my gaze for one beat too long.
Not the way guests notice staff, through us, past us, the glance that registers function without registering person.
He's looking at me the way someone finds a thing they didn't expect in a corridor at nine o'clock at night.
Direct. Unhurried. His eyes on my face with a weight I can feel on my skin, and I swear the temperature in this corridor just went up three degrees, and I need to move, I need to say something professional like "excuse me" or "good evening" or literally anything at all except standing here with my lips parted and my brain completely offline and oh no, is that a flush crawling up my neck? It is. It absolutely is.
Restock the oils. Fold the towels. Don't think about his eyes. Schedule an emergency meeting with yourself about why you're thinking about his eyes. Flag it red. FOLD THE TOWELS.
Then he turns away. Steps past me. His arm doesn't brush mine but the air he displaces does, warmth and soap and the sheer mass of him moving through a space too narrow to hold him, and then he's gone. Down the corridor. Around the corner.
I stand where he left me. My face is on fire. My brain is buffering.
...fold the towels.
I turn, a little too fast, and practically sprint toward the staff mess. One of the other girls, a steward with red hair I've seen at orientation, is coming out with a tray.
"Excuse me." My voice comes out normal, which is frankly a miracle considering my internal organs just rearranged themselves. "The man who just came through here. Tall, dark shirt, looks like he could bench-press the ship. Who is that?"
She glances down the corridor, then back at me. Her eyebrows climb.
"That's the youngest Almazov," she tells me, the way you'd warn someone that's the deep end at the edge of a pool. "He owns the ship. Well, his family does. He's the one who..." She pauses. Reconsiders. "He's Artem."
Artem.
The name does something behind my ribs. Just..
. takes up residence there, moves in, unpacks its bags, puts its feet up.
Which is ridiculous. It's a name. People have names.
This isn't new information about how the world works, and yet here I am in a staff corridor on a cruise ship, replaying the way a redheaded steward just pronounced a five-letter word and feeling it echo in places it has absolutely no business echoing.
Highlight this, self: be polite, be professional, don't initiate conversation, don't stare. Mr. Green JUST told me this. Three hours ago. You nodded.
"Right," I manage. "Thanks."
I go to the staff mess. I eat leftover pasta standing at the counter because all the tables are taken and I don't mind, I've eaten standing up most of my life.
The pasta is good. The bread is better. I eat two rolls and drink a glass of water and I absolutely, categorically, one hundred percent don't think about dark eyes in a corridor or the smell of clean skin or the scar on his left hand or the fact that my professional hand-brain has already mapped his tension patterns from a 1.
5-second encounter and would very much like a longer session please.
Nope. Not thinking about any of it. Thinking about tomorrow. First clients. Four hundred euros an hour. My hands, which have never failed me, which carried me from a nothing flat in Nice to a floating palace in the Mediterranean.
I wash my plate. I go to my cabin, small, shared with another therapist who's already asleep behind the curtain that divides our bunks. I change into a T-shirt. Lie down. The ship rocks, gentle, almost imperceptible, and the engines hum through the hull and into the mattress and into my bones.
Close my eyes.
MY PHONE BUZZES ON the shelf beside my pillow.
I crack one eye open. The screen glows blue in the dark cabin. Staff portal notification. I tap it, expecting a welcome memo, an orientation reminder, the usual first-day noise that clogs every inbox.
It's my schedule. Updated. Tomorrow's client list.
The first slot is blank, admin time, setup. The second is a guest I don't recognise. The third, fourth, and fifth are open.
The sixth slot. Thursday, 8:00 PM. Ninety-minute session. Has a note attached.
Recurring. Weekly. Private. Suite 12.
I read the client name and every drop of blood in my body relocates to my face.
A. ALMAZOV.
I sit up in the dark. My bunkmate snores on. The phone screen glows.
Recurring. Every Thursday. Every week. His skin under my hands for ninety minutes in a dim room, and I can still feel the heat of him from three feet away in a corridor and I'm supposed to touch him.
Professionally. With composure. While making polite conversation about pressure preferences.
For ninety minutes. Every. Single. Thursday.
Okay. Okay. Let me just check my planner. Six-thirty prep. Seven o'clock first client. Restock the oils. Fold the towels. Thursday 8 PM: professionally caress the most overwhelming man I've ever encountered without spontaneously combusting.
...add to planner: research whether spontaneous combustion is covered by maritime employee insurance.
Delete that. That's insane.
Keep it. I might need it.
I pull the sheet over my head. The ship hums. The notification sits on my phone three inches from my face, and the word recurring burns behind my eyelids, and my traitorous hand-brain is already calculating optimal pressure sequences for someone with his tension patterns, and the rest of my brain is telling my hand-brain to shut up and go to sleep, and nobody is listening to anybody, and I am in so much trouble.
Thursday. Oh chops. Thursday.