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)
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Long enough."
I want to push. I don't push. I lean on the railing and face the water and let the silence sit between us, not empty, just inhabited, and after a minute he says, like he's surprised at himself for continuing, like the words are coming out of him how his body yields to my hands, one degree at a time:
"Eleven years. I left when I was twenty-nine."
Twenty-nine. Five years ago. Whatever he did, whatever keeps him staring at black water at eleven at night, it was recent enough to still live in his shoulders and old enough that the scars have gone white.
"Do you miss it?"
He turns to me then. Not the glance from before. Full attention. His eyes in the deck light are dark, and his face is doing something I haven't seen before. The guarded blankness of sessions is gone. The careful almost-smiles are gone. Something open. Like the railing and the dark and the fact that I asked without flinching cracked a window in him that he usually keeps painted shut.
"No," he says. "I miss who I thought I'd be when it was over."
The wind moves through the silence, carrying salt and the hum of the engines below us, and I don't know what to say to that because it's the saddest sentence I've ever heard from a mouth that isn't trying to be sad. He's not asking for sympathy. He's stating a fact. A geographical fact, like the distance between us, like the depth of the water beneath the hull: this is where I am and I didn't expect to be here.
"Who did you think you'd be?" I ask.
"Someone who sleeps."
I almost laugh. Almost. But his face is serious and the joke is real and the gap between those two things makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with a crush. This is something else. Something older and quieter, the feeling you get when someone shows you where they're broken and you want to put your hands on it, not to fix it because it isn't yours to fix, just to let them know you can see it and you're not leaving.
"I don't sleep much either," I confess. "But that's because my bunkmate snores."
Now he does something I've never seen.
The corner of his mouth lifts. Not a twitch, not the ghost I've been cataloguing for three weeks. An actual lift, one side, lopsided, there for two full seconds before it goes. An honest-to-goodness, visible-in-low-lighting smile.
I made him smile.
I made Artem Almazov SMILE at eleven o'clock at night on the top deck of a cruise ship in the middle of the Mediterranean and I want to throw a parade, I want to call Curtis and tell him, I want to add it to my planner in gold letters with exclamation marks: ACTUAL SMILE ACHIEVED. DATE: TONIGHT. CONTEXT: SNORING JOKE. DURATION: TWO SECONDS. THE LONGEST YET. ALMOST-SMILE COLLECTION OFFICIALLY UPGRADED TO SMILE COLLECTION. CABINET STATUS: OVERFLOWING.
HE WALKS ME BACK TO my cabin.
I don't ask him to. I say "I should go, early start" and push off the railing, and he pushes off too, and then he's just... walking beside me. Down the stairs from Deck 14, through the guest corridor on 8, down the service elevator to 2. He doesn't explain. He doesn't ask. He just walks, and I walk, and our footsteps fall into a rhythm without trying, and I'm not going to read anything into the synchronised footsteps because that way lies madness and I'm already operating at maximum madness capacity.
But I will note, for the planner, that his stride is naturally about twice the length of mine and he's shortened it. Without being asked. Without making it obvious. He's just... matching me. And I don't know when he started doing that or whether he knows he's doing it but I know, because I notice everything about how this man moves, because it's my job and also because it's my obsession and at this point I've given up pretending those are different things.
The staff corridor on Deck 2 is dim. Amber lights. Thin carpet. We stop outside my cabin door and the corridor is narrow and he is large and the space between us has been shrinking all evening, from a foot and a half on the railing to a foot in the elevator to something less than a foot right now, and I can smell him. Not cedarwood tonight. Just him. Soap and skin and the salt from the wind, and I'm very aware of my own pulse and the fact that my cabin door is right there and my hand should be reaching for the handle and it's not reaching for the handle because the rest of me is busy being aware of every inch of air between his body and mine and how warm that air is and how it keeps getting warmer.