Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
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.
Star
HIS SKIN IS HOTTER than it should be.
My palms register it the moment I make contact, both hands on the opening stroke down the length of his spine, and the warmth travels through the oil and into my fingers and up through my wrists and suddenly every professional thought I've had in the last four days, every single one of those very calm, very rational, very adult thoughts about how this is just another client and his back is just another back and I'm just going to be completely normal about this, every single one of those thoughts packs its bags and leaves the building.