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'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.