Star
HIS MOUTH IS ON MINE and the sun is in my eyes.
That's what I keep thinking, stupidly, giddily, while he kisses me against the railing on the owner's private deck, a place I didn't know existed until forty minutes ago when he took my hand in the service corridor and told me "Come with me" and I asked "Where" and he answered "Up" and I followed him, because apparently all this man has to do is say a single directional word in that low rough voice of his and my feet just go, no questions, no consultation with the planner, no risk assessment, just blind obedient locomotion toward whatever monosyllabic destination he's decided on.
He told me "up" and I went up. Through a door marked NO ACCESS that opened to his thumbprint and up a narrow staircase and onto a deck that is, apparently, his.
Just his. No loungers, no bar, no guests.
A strip of teak with a railing and the whole Mediterranean spread out below, blue-green and glittering, and the morning sun hitting the water so hard the light bounces up and turns everything gold.
He kissed me before I finished looking at the view, which I'm going to bring up later in my formal complaint about his time management because I was enjoying the view, that was a VERY GOOD view, I hadn't finished appreciating it, but his hand found my jaw (the same spot, always the same spot, like he has a favourite coordinate on my face and he's never going to pick a new one and I don't want him to) and his mouth found mine and I made a sound against his lips that I should probably be embarrassed about except I've used up all my embarrassment.
I've exceeded my lifetime allotment. I exceeded it somewhere around the gallery kiss and there's been no restocking since, so here we are: embarrassment-free, sun-drunk, being kissed on a private deck at ten in the morning by a man with rolled sleeves and a jaw I could write poetry about if I wrote poetry, which I don't, because I'm a massage therapist and my art form is knots not sonnets, but if I DID write poetry it would all be about his jaw. Every poem. Just jaw.
The gallery was dark. The gallery was midnight and spotlights and the plausible deniability of shadows.
This is ten in the morning and the sun is everywhere and he is kissing me in it and I can see his face when he pulls back, really see it, and his eyes aren't iron in this light.
They're warm. Brown with grey threaded through, or grey with brown bleeding in, and his lashes are dark and his mouth is red and he's looking at me the way he held the Mayflower lace.
Like I crossed an ocean. Like I survived four hundred years. Like I'm worth holding with both hands.
I'm going to die on this deck and they'll find my body and the cause of death will be listed as a thirty-four-year-old man who looks at a twenty-year-old masseuse like she's the most valuable thing on his ship.
"You brought me to your secret deck," I murmur against his mouth.
"Private deck."
"That's what I called it."
"You called it secret. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"A private deck is on the ship's blueprints. A secret deck would mean I'm hiding something." His thumb traces the line of my jaw. "I'm not hiding anything."
"You're hiding me," I point out, because I can't help it, because even inside the joy there's a splinter of reality that won't stop pressing. "From the guests. From Mr. Green. From anyone with functioning eyes who could see you kissing the twenty-year-old masseuse and—-"
He kisses me again. Which is, I'm learning, his preferred method of ending conversations he doesn't want to have, and it's ruthlessly effective.
His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck and his fingers spread against my scalp and I stop talking because there's no point, because his mouth is warm and he tastes like the coffee he brought me this morning (black, one sugar, he got it right, he got it RIGHT) and arguing with a man who kisses like this is a waste of a perfectly good argument.
The sun is on my closed eyelids, red-gold. The wind off the water lifts my hair. His chest is warm against mine through his shirt and my uniform and all the layers that exist between us that have nothing to do with fabric.
He pulls back. Forehead to mine. I can feel his pulse in his throat where my fingers have found their way without authorisation, and it's fast, his and mine and both, tangled together in the small space between our bodies.
"Okay," I concede. "The deck is nice."
That lopsided lift. One side. Gone in two seconds but I caught it.
Almost-smile #5. No, wait, this is past almost-smiles now.
This is the smile collection, upgraded, expanded, curated by Star Thornton, Keeper of the Gallery of Artem Almazov's Mouth-Corner Movements.
I take them out and admire them when I'm alone in my bunk at night, turning each one over like a jeweller examining a stone, and I know how insane that sounds and I don't care.
I'm standing on a private deck in the Mediterranean sun being kissed by a man who memorised how I take my coffee and I am so, so fine.
THREE DAYS PASS. THREE days of joy, which is a word I've never used about my own life because it always sounded like something that belonged to other people.
People with savings accounts and matching furniture and parents who stayed and kitchens where you could sit down to eat.
Joy was for them. What I had was satisfaction, determination, the specific pride of hands that worked and didn't quit.
Those were good things. Enough things. I didn't need joy.
I was wrong. I needed it so badly that now it's here I don't know how to hold it. It fills my hands like the Mayflower lace filled them: delicate, precious, too fragile to grip.
He brings me coffee every morning now. Black, one sugar.
He leaves it on the counter outside treatment room two before the spa opens, in one of the heavy ceramic mugs from the guest lounge, not the thin paper cups from the staff mess, and that distinction feels intentional because everything about Artem Almazov is intentional, and I pick it up and it's still hot, which means he timed it, which means he knows my schedule down to the minute, which means this man who owns a cruise ship and probably has nine hundred things to do before breakfast is calculating the thermal dynamics of a coffee mug so it's the right temperature when a twenty-year-old masseuse picks it up at six forty-five.
On the mug: no note, no name. Just the coffee.
But the sugar is exactly right and the mug is warm in my hands and every morning I stand in the corridor holding it and feeling ridiculous because it's just coffee, it's just a mug, a grown woman should not be undone by the correct ratio of sugar, and yet here I am.
Undone. Thoroughly and irreparably undone by a sugar cube placed with the same exactness this man brings to everything, the same touch-once-and-mean-it energy that lives in his hands and his kisses and how he told me "I'll get it right next time" and then did.
Planner entry: 6:45 AM, daily: stand in corridor. Hold coffee. Feel things. Duration: 3-4 minutes. Notes: becoming concerning. Do not seek treatment. The therapist is the problem.
HE TAKES ME TO THE engine room.
We go at midnight, after my schedule ends and the guest corridors empty out.
Down past Deck 1, past staff quarters, past the laundry and the kitchens and into the belly of the ship where the air gets warmer and the hum I've felt in my bones since the first night becomes a sound, a real sound, not a vibration but a voice, deep and rhythmic and enormous, and when Artem opens the bulkhead door and we step through, it fills me.
The engines are massive. The room is three storeys tall, steel walkways and catwalks and pipes running in every direction, and the machines themselves are vast, green-painted, humming with a power I can feel in my teeth and my ribs and the soles of my feet.
The light is industrial, overhead fluorescents mixed with the amber glow of gauges and indicators.
The air smells like oil and hot metal and something sweet I can't name.
And I'm staring up at it all with my mouth open, again, the same mouth-open awe I did with the Tiffany glass and the spa reception and the gallery, because I can't help it, because this ship keeps showing me rooms that make me feel small in the best possible way, and this one, this enormous thundering cathedral of machinery, is the most incredible yet.
It's like standing inside a living thing.
Like the ship has a chest and I'm inside it and the heart is right here, beating.
Artem stands beside me. He doesn't explain, doesn't tour-guide it.
He just watches me listen, and I love that about him, that he brings me to places and then lets me meet them on my own terms, as if introducing me to his ship is the same as introducing me to a person and he wants to let us get acquainted without interference.
"It sounds like a heartbeat," I breathe.
He nods. Once.
"You come here too. Like the upper deck."
"Different reason." He faces the engines, not me. "Up there, it's still. Down here, it's loud enough to fill the space."
The space where sleep should be. He doesn't say it.
He doesn't need to, because I know now, I know the shape of the hole he carries, and he's just told me that when the silence at the top of the ship isn't enough to drown out whatever keeps him awake, he comes down here and lets the engines do it instead.
Two coping mechanisms. Two ends of the same insomnia.
And he's put me in both of them now, walked me into the high place and the low place, the stillness and the noise, and I don't know what that means except that it means something enormous and I'm not ready to name it, so instead I reach for his hand.