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)
"Her MARRIAGE," he repeats, waving his fork for emphasis. "From a FOOT massage. I still don't know what I did. I just rubbed her feet. But apparently, that was the thing that was missing from her life, and now she sends me a Christmas card every year. With a family photo. The kids call me Uncle Curtis."
I'm laughing so hard I nearly choke on my pasta, and the staff mess is loud and garlic-scented and Curtis is stealing my third olive and his smile is open and uncomplicated and I like him. I like him instantly, warm kitchen on a cold day, no questions, no analysis, no splinters to find later. He's kind without trying. Warm without agenda. He makes a crowded room feel like a kitchen table, and I haven't had that in... I don't know. A long time. Maybe ever, since arriving on this ship.
He's twenty-one and he's exactly who I should be having dinner with.
I'm laughing at something he's told me about Mr. Green's obsession with towel-folding ("he measured one with an ACTUAL RULER, Star, a RULER, I thought he was going to write me up for a centimetre of asymmetry") when I feel it.
Not a sound. Not a movement. A weight.
The particular pressure of being seen by someone who does it like he does everything else: with absolute, focused, bone-dissolving attention.
I glance up.
Artem is standing in the doorway of the staff mess.
He shouldn't be here. This is Deck 2, staff territory, the part of the ship where the carpet is thin and the food is free and the owners don't come. But he's here, in his dark shirt, filling the doorway like he fills every space he enters, and he isn't scanning the room or looking for someone.
He's already found me.
And then his eyes move. To Curtis. To Curtis's easy grin, to Curtis's hand resting on the table six inches from mine, to the space between us that's small and comfortable and full of stolen olives and laughter and everything uncomplicated.
Artem's face doesn't change. Those iron eyes travel from Curtis back to me and stay, and the weight of his attention presses on my skin from across an entire crowded room, warm and unmistakable, and my laugh dies in my throat and every nerve in my body swings toward him like a compass finding north and I can't stop it, I can't redirect it, I can't tell my nervous system to please continue paying attention to the lovely normal man sitting across from me telling a lovely normal story because the man in the doorway just spoke my name for the first time an hour ago and my body has apparently decided that he is north now, he is the direction everything points, and oh chops, I'm in so much trouble, because he's looking at me across a crowded staff mess and I've forgotten where I am and what I'm eating and who I'm eating with and probably my own name, the same name he held in his mouth like he was tasting it, and if he keeps looking at me like that I'm going to—-
He turns. And he's gone.
Curtis is saying something about the bread on Deck 1. I pick up my fork. I eat. I nod in the right places and I make the right sounds and my face does what faces do during normal conversations.
But the laughter is gone. And the easy warmth has a crack in it now that runs from the doorway to my chair, because a man stood in that doorway for three seconds and found me across a room and the world rearranged itself around his attention and I couldn't stop it and I didn't want to.
He knows my name. And I know what his skin feels like under my hands. And on Thursday he'll be on my table again, and the Thursday after that, and after that, and he'll say "Goodnight, Star" and I'll say "Goodnight, Mr. Almazov" and I'll walk to the corridor and press my back to the wall and the planner will have nothing for me and the cedarwood will be on my hands and I'll be standing there, always standing there, at the edge of something I can't name and can't stop walking toward.
Curtis reaches across the table and steals my last olive.
I let him have it.
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."