Chapter 5
Star
MY FACE IS ON FIRE.
I'm standing in the spa corridor outside treatment room two, holding a stack of fresh towels, and I can feel the heat crawling up my neck and blooming across my cheeks like a rash, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it because the man lying face-down on my table just said, without preamble, without lifting his head from the face cradle, without any of the conversational warm-up that normal human beings employ before dropping an incendiary comment into a professional setting: "You were laughing at dinner last night. "
He heard me. He saw me. He was standing in the doorway of the staff mess and he tracked my laugh across a crowded room and now he's MENTIONING it, face-down, voice muffled by leather, in a tone so casual it almost sounds like he doesn't care, except Artem Almazov doesn't make conversation.
In three sessions he's spoken maybe twenty words to me, and fifteen of those were "not the hands" and "what is your name" and "goodnight, Star," and the remaining five were confirmations of his Thursday appointment.
He doesn't chat. He doesn't comment on things.
He doesn't observe the social habits of his massage therapist and then bring them up at his next session as if that's a normal thing to do.
He mentioned this.
He mentioned my LAUGH.
Emergency planner entry: session three, minute zero, client has made unsolicited reference to my laughter. Facial temperature: volcanic. Professional composure: hanging by a thread. Action required: WALK BACK INTO THE ROOM AND ACT LIKE A PERSON WHO HAS BEEN LAUGHED BEFORE.
I walk back into the room. Set the towels down.
My face is doing its absolute worst and I'm savagely grateful that he's face-down and can't see it, because if he could see what his voice just did to my complexion he'd probably request a different therapist on the grounds that his current one appears to be having an allergic reaction.
"I was having dinner," I tell him, aiming for casual and landing somewhere around strangled. "People laugh at dinner sometimes."
"You hadn't before. On the ship."
How does he know that? How does he POSSIBLY know whether I've laughed on this ship?
I've been here two weeks. He's seen me, what, four times?
The corridor, two sessions, the doorway last night.
That's not enough data to track someone's laugh patterns.
That's not a statistically significant sample size.
Normal people don't catalogue whether the new masseuse has laughed yet.
Normal people don't stand in staff mess doorways at nine-thirty at night and compile databases on which crew members have or haven't expressed joy in the common dining area.
And my face is so hot I could fry an egg on it and I'm supposed to put my hands on his bare skin in approximately fifteen seconds and pretend I'm a professional with a working nervous system.
"I laugh," I declare, which is a stupid thing to say.
Who says that? I laugh. Like I'm issuing a formal press release.
Star Thornton, licensed massage therapist, would like to confirm that she does, in fact, laugh, and any reports to the contrary are inaccurate and should be disregarded.
"I just... it takes me a while. New places. "
He says nothing. Because of course he doesn't. He drops a bomb and then goes silent and leaves me standing here marinating in my own mortification while he lies there breathing in that trained, even way of his, like he hasn't just revealed that he's been monitoring my emotional state from doorways like some kind of unreasonably attractive surveillance system.
I oil my hands. Begin.
His back. His scars. The map I've been reading for two weeks now, every ridge and valley memorised, and my thumbs press into the trapezius and he lets me in (reduced guarding, Madame Gilles would say, excellent therapeutic progress, is what she'd call it, and she'd be wrong because what's actually happening is that his body is learning to trust my hands and that is NOT the same thing and I need to stop thinking about it).
Neither of us speaks. The room fills with cedarwood and silence and I try very hard to think about muscle fibres and pressure points and fascial release patterns and not about the fact that this man, this silent, scarred, devastating man, tracked my laughter.
Eight-thirty restock. Ten o'clock, Mr. Fournier, deep tissue. Eleven-fifteen, open. He tracked my laughter. Twelve o'clock—-
He tracked my LAUGHTER.
Cancel twelve o'clock. Cancel everything. Lie down on the floor. Stare at the ceiling. Reconsider all life choices.
IT GETS WORSE.
On Monday he shows up at the spa at two in the afternoon, which isn't his scheduled time, because his scheduled time is Thursday at eight, a fact I know because it's branded into my brain with a hot iron and I've been counting the days between sessions with the same mathematical precision I used to reserve for calculating whether I could afford both bread and bus fare in the same week.
But here he is. In the reception area. Speaking to Mr. Green in a low voice, and Mr. Green is nodding, and then Mr. Green is walking over to me with the carefully neutral expression of a man who has decided not to have opinions about why the owner of the ship is requesting unscheduled appointments with his youngest therapist.
"Thornton. Mr. Almazov would like an additional session. You have an opening at two-thirty."
I have an opening at two-thirty because my two o'clock cancelled.
I know this. Mr. Green knows this. Artem Almazov, who somehow knows when I laugh and when I don't, almost certainly also knows this, because at this point I'm fairly convinced he has access to my schedule and possibly also my thoughts.
"Of course," I chirp, professional and composed and totally normal and not at all affected by the fact that he requested ME, specifically, when there are three other therapists on this ship with a decade more experience and presumably much lower face temperatures in his presence.
Artem doesn't glance at me during this exchange.
He's focused on the water wall behind the reception desk with the concentrated attention of a man who finds cascading water absolutely riveting and is definitely not avoiding eye contact with anyone.
But when Mr. Green walks away and I say, "I'll have the room ready in ten minutes, Mr. Almazov," he turns his head.
Just enough. His eyes find mine and hold.
"Artem," he corrects.
"Sorry?"
"My name. It's Artem."
I know his name. He knows I know his name.
He told me last Thursday and I repeated it back to him exactly zero times because saying his name to his face would require a level of emotional fortitude I haven't achieved yet and frankly might never achieve, and he's standing there with those iron eyes and that unsettling patience, like he's perfectly willing to wait however long it takes for me to say the five letters he just handed me, and Mr. Green is three metres away pretending to check a schedule and my cheeks are doing the thing, the THING, the thing that is rapidly becoming the bane of my professional existence and also my personal existence and also every other kind of existence I have.
"I'll have the room ready in ten minutes," I repeat, which isn't his name, which is a cowardly sidestep and we both know it, and something crosses his face, something that might be amusement or might be frustration or might be the expression of a man who's just realised that the girl he's asking to call him by his first name is physically incapable of doing so without spontaneously combusting.
He nods. Sits down in the reception chair. Waits.
He has never waited for anything in his life. I'd bet money on it, and I don't have money to bet. But he sits in that chair for ten minutes while I set up the room, and when I come out to get him he stands and follows me and doesn't comment on the fact that my ears are pink.
Small mercies. Very small. I'll take them.
THE EXTRA SESSIONS become regular. Tuesdays and Thursdays now instead of just Thursdays, which means my planner, my poor battered planner, which was already struggling with one weekly Artem entry, now has to accommodate two, and then three, because he adds a Friday morning, early, before the spa opens to other clients, which means I'm touching this man's scars on a nearly every-other-day basis and my professional detachment isn't so much eroding as it is crumbling into the sea like a cliff face in a storm.
Friday. I arrive at six-thirty to prep, coffee-less, because the staff mess doesn't open until seven and I don't own a kettle and my cabin is the size of a generous cupboard and has no power outlet near the bed, which means I'm functioning on four hours of sleep and raw determination and the lingering, mortifying memory of him saying "you were laughing at dinner" into a face cradle like it was information he'd been collecting.
He's already in the corridor outside the treatment room. Leaning against the wall. Two coffees in his hands.
He holds one out to me.
"I don't know how you take it," he admits, and this is the longest sentence he's spoken to me that isn't about sessions or schedules or the fact that I hadn't laughed on this ship, and his voice at six-thirty in the morning is lower than usual, rougher, as if even his vocal cords haven't fully woken up yet, and my brain files that information immediately under "Things I Did Not Need to Know But Cannot Unknow" and my hand reaches for the coffee before the rest of me has approved the transaction.
"Black. One sugar," I tell him.