Star #3
His hand. The one he pulled away from me that first session, the one he tucked against his body before I could touch it and murmured not the hands in a voice that drew a line he expected me to stay behind.
And now his fingers are closing around mine over a four-hundred-year-old handkerchief, and his grip is firm and warm and his scarred knuckles press against my fingers, and the lace threads are caught between our palms, and I tip my head back to see his face.
He's already there. Already looking down at me with those eyes that are iron in daylight and something darker at night, and his jaw is tight and his breathing has changed, gone ragged at the edges, and he's holding my hand and the lace and his own restraint all at once and I can see them fighting in his face, the want and the wall, and the wall is losing.
"Star," he breathes.
And then he kisses me.
His free hand comes up to my face, my jaw, the same spot, always the same spot, because he decided weeks ago that this is the part of me he's claiming first and he's never wavered, and he tilts my head back and his mouth finds mine and it isn't soft and it isn't tentative and it isn't the careful testing kiss of a man who's unsure.
He kisses me like a lock breaking, like something that's been held shut too long finally giving way, and his hand tightens on mine and the lace crushes between our palms and his other hand slides from my jaw into my hair and I'm not thinking about anything, I'm not thinking about the gallery or the handkerchief or the four-hundred-year-old English bobbin lace that is currently being destroyed between the interlocked fingers of a massage therapist and a billionaire and is probably very upset about it and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but his mouth is hot and sure and tastes like coffee and salt and the sound he makes against my lips, low, barely there, a vibration more than a voice, is a sound I'm going to carry inside me for the rest of my life and possibly into the next one.
I kiss him back. I don't know what I'm doing.
I've been kissed before, twice, badly, by boys who didn't know what they wanted and definitely didn't know what I wanted and I didn't know either until right now, this second, with his hand in my hair and his mouth on mine and his scarred fingers holding mine so tight the lace threads are pressing patterns into my skin.
THIS is what I wanted. This. Him. A man who knows exactly what he wants and has been not-wanting it for weeks and has run out of room not to, and the way he's kissing me right now, thorough and devastating and slightly desperate, tells me that the room ran out a while ago and he's been standing in the doorway trying to talk himself back inside and he can't, he just can't, and neither can I.
His mouth opens against mine and I let him in and his hand in my hair tightens and I make a sound I've never made before, something between a gasp and a whimper that I'd be mortified about in literally any other context except that I FEEL him react to it, a shudder that moves through his chest and transfers into mine because we're pressed together now, my back against the display case, his body against the front of mine, and the heat of him is everywhere.
His chest, his hands, his mouth. I can feel his heart through his shirt.
Hammering. Hammering like his body never, ever lets on, like his face would never admit, and that knowledge, that he's as undone as I am, that his composure is a lie and his pulse is telling the truth, does something to me that is beyond crushes and beyond planner entries and beyond anything I've filed in any cabinet.
I pull back. Not far. An inch. His forehead against mine, his hand still in my hair, our fingers still tangled together with the handkerchief crushed between them.
"You're holding my hand," I whisper, and it's a stupid thing to say and a true thing to say and my voice is shaking.
"Yes."
"You wouldn't let me touch your hands."
"No."
"What changed?"
He pulls back enough to find my eyes. His are dark and his mouth is red from mine and he's looking at me exactly as I was looking at the handkerchief. Like I'm the thing that crossed an ocean and survived four hundred years and deserves to be held with careful, reverent, slightly-trembling hands.
"You did," he tells me.
I close my eyes. His thumb moves across my cheekbone, the same path as three nights ago at my cabin door, and I lean into it like his body leans into my hands during sessions, the reluctant yielding, the muscles that want to soften and have forgotten how, except I haven't forgotten, I'm softening right now, I'm dissolving against his palm, and I think: I want to stay in this room forever.
I want time to stop. I want to live in this gallery with this man and this handkerchief and never go back to the real world where he owns this ship and I work on it and the distance between us is a geography.
But time doesn't stop. And over his shoulder, past him, through the glass partition at the front of the gallery, someone is standing in the corridor.
Mila.
I see her for one second, maybe two, before Artem's head dips and his mouth grazes my temple and my eyes almost close again. But in that second I see her face.
She's smiling. The same warm, generous smile she gives me over coffee, over lunch, over gallery necklaces and breakfast croissants and all the small kindnesses she's wrapped around me like a blanket for the past three weeks.
Her mouth is smiling.
Her knuckles, wrapped around the gallery keys, are white.