Star #2
His fingers touch my jaw. Not my cheek, not my hair.
My jaw. The hard line of bone beneath skin, the place where my face becomes my neck.
And his thumb traces up. Along my cheekbone.
One pass. His hand is warm and enormous and the roughness of his scarred palm against my skin makes my eyes fall shut without permission and I stop breathing, just stop, because his thumb is on my cheekbone and it's the same hand he wouldn't let me touch during our first session, the hand he pulled away from me and whispered not the hands in a voice that meant don't, and now that hand is on my face and I can feel every callus and every scar-ridge and every year of whatever he did for eleven years that won't let him sleep, and if I move I'll make a sound and I don't trust what kind of sound it will be.
One touch. That's all. His hand drops. He steps back.
"Goodnight, Star," he repeats, quieter, and the repetition turns it into something else, not a farewell but a frame, two goodnights with a touch between them, a before and an after, and I'm standing in an amber-lit corridor with his fingerprint still burning on my cheekbone and everything is different now.
"Goodnight, Artem."
His name. I said his name. First time out loud, to his face, and it comes out low and uneven and full of everything I've been holding since the corridor encounter, and I can hear what it does to him because he goes still.
Completely. Every muscle locking at once, same as on my table when my thumbs find a scar he wasn't ready for, except this time the scar is my voice saying his name and the flinch is full-body and unmistakable.
Then he turns and walks away and I open my cabin door and go inside and sit on my bunk in the dark and press my fingers to the place on my jaw where his thumb was.
My bunkmate is snoring. I don't hear her. I don't hear anything except the echo of his name in my own mouth and the memory of his rough palm on my cheekbone and I sit there in the dark with my fingers on my jaw and I think:
I'm in so much trouble.
And then I think:
I don't care.
THREE DAYS LATER, I'M in the Tranquil Antique Gallery at ten o'clock at night.
I shouldn't be here. The gallery closed at eight.
But Mila gave me the access code last week ("For emergencies, darling, or if you just want to look at beautiful things after hours, I won't tell") and I've been thinking about the necklace, the Russian one, the gold chain with the pale green stone.
Not just the necklace. All of it. The silence, the warm spotlights, the feeling of standing alone in a room full of things that were made by someone's hands centuries ago and have survived.
I want that feeling tonight. I want to stand in this room and let the good ache take over, the one about craftsmanship and permanence and the miracle of hands, because the other ache, the Artem ache, the one that lives on my jaw where his thumb traced my cheekbone three nights ago, that ache is getting harder to manage and I need to put my attention somewhere safe.
Beautiful old objects are safe. Beautiful old objects don't touch your face outside your cabin door at midnight and tell you they miss who they thought they'd be. Beautiful old objects don't make you say their name in a voice you didn't know you had.
Note to self: stop comparing the man you're falling for to museum artefacts. It's not a healthy coping mechanism. Also you just used the phrase "falling for" and you need to sit with that for a minute.
...sat with it. Verdict: accurate. Oh chops.
The gallery is dark except for the display lights, each piece glowing in its own circle of gold.
I walk past the porcelain, the lacquerwork, the jade figure that drew me in on the first tour.
At the back, past the writing desk, there's a case I haven't noticed before.
Smaller than the others. Low, almost waist-height, with a single object inside.
A handkerchief.
I lean down. The placard reads: Lace handkerchief, c. 1620. English bobbin lace, linen thread. Believed to have travelled aboard the Mayflower.
Four hundred years old.
The lace is cream-coloured, finer than anything I've ever seen, the pattern so intricate that my eyes can't follow a single thread from start to finish.
The edges are slightly frayed. The fabric is fragile, translucent in places, worn thin by time and touch and four centuries of surviving, and my throat goes tight, same as it always does when I see what hands can do, what hands can leave behind, and I know that makes me ridiculous and I've long since stopped apologising for it.
Someone made this with their hands. Someone sat in a room in England four hundred years ago and worked thread through pins and created something so beautiful that it crossed an ocean and outlasted empires and ended up on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, under glass, still whole, still here.
The case is open.
Not all the way. An inch, maybe. The glass lid slightly raised.
Mila must have been rearranging the displays and forgot to lock it.
I should close it. I should absolutely close it and walk away and go back to my cabin and go to sleep like a normal person who doesn't break into galleries at night to have emotional crises over antique textiles.
I lift the lid. And I reach in. And I pick up the handkerchief.
It weighs nothing. Less than nothing. It sits in my palm like a prayer, and the lace is cool and impossibly fine and I can feel the individual threads against my skin, each one placed by someone's fingers four hundred years before mine.
And I'm standing there, perfectly still, feeling the centuries between my palm and the woman who made this, and my eyes are stinging because this is what I mean when I say my hands are the only valuable thing about me.
Not because I think I'm worthless. Because I think hands are everything.
Because I think the most important thing a person can do is make something, touch something, hold something with care, and this woman did that four hundred years ago and I'm holding the proof of it in my palm and I will never, ever get tired of how that feels.
I'm standing there, perfectly still, when I hear footsteps behind me.
I know them. I know his footsteps, which is absurd because he walks so softly for someone his size, but I know them like I know his scars, by feel, by instinct, by how his weight falls, and my body has already turned toward the sound before my brain authorises the movement.
"You shouldn't touch that," Artem tells me from the doorway.
"I know."
"It's four hundred years old."
"I know."
"If you damage it, it's worth more than you'll earn in a lifetime."
"I know that too." I don't turn around. I'm cradling the lace in my palm, and my voice comes out softer than I intend, hushed by the weight of what I'm holding and the nearness of what's standing behind me.
"But someone made it. With their hands. And I think things that were made by hand should be held by hands sometimes, or what was the point? "
He doesn't answer.
His footsteps come closer. Soft, careful, the footsteps of a man who learned a long time ago to move through rooms without disturbing them, and he stops behind me, close, closer than the railing, closer than the corridor, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him along the entire length of my back without a single point of contact, and the hair on my arms rises and my skin is aware of every millimetre of space between his chest and my shoulders, cataloguing the distance like my thumbs catalogue his scars, precisely, compulsively, because my body has decided that his proximity is data and it wants all of it.
He reaches over my shoulder. His hand comes down into my field of vision, palm up, beside mine.
"Show me."
Two words. And how he says them, low and close, his mouth near my hair, turns them into something that has nothing to do with a handkerchief and everything to do with the fact that he's offering me his hand. The hand he pulled away. The hand he wouldn't let me touch. Palm up, open, waiting.
I lift the handkerchief from my palm and place it in his.
My fingers brush his skin during the transfer, the pad of my index finger dragging across the centre of his palm, and the contact lasts two seconds and I feel every fraction of every one, the warmth and the roughness and the scar that runs across his lifeline, and something catches in my throat and I don't let it go because letting it go would make a sound and the silence right now is holy.
He holds the lace up. The spotlight catches the pattern and throws tiny shadows across his hand, across the scars on his knuckles, and he turns it, examining it, and I crane my neck to see his face in profile.
The focused expression. The one I glimpsed through the gallery glass when he was working with Mila.
Except this is different. Softer. He's holding the handkerchief exactly as I was holding it.
Like it matters. Like hands matter. Like four hundred years of surviving means something to him too.
"You're right," he admits. "It should be held."
He lowers his hand. The handkerchief rests on his open palm, and I reach for it to put it back and my fingers close on his instead.
Neither of us moves.
My fingers on his palm. The lace between us.
The gallery is silent except for the hum of the display lights, and I can feel his pulse through the pad of my ring finger where it's resting against his wrist, and it's fast, faster than his body would ever admit, faster than his face would ever show, and I know this because I've spent three weeks learning the difference between what Artem Almazov's body reveals and what his face conceals and his pulse is telling me everything his expression won't.
He turns his hand over. Closes his fingers around mine.