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)
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.
He lets me take it. His scarred fingers close around mine and we stand on the steel walkway with the engines beating around us and I can feel the vibration in his palm, or maybe that's his pulse, or maybe it's both, the ship's heartbeat and his heartbeat running at the same frequency, indistinguishable.
"My apartment in Nice had a boiler," I tell him, leaning my shoulder against the railing. The metal vibrates under my arm. "Old building. The pipes ran through the walls and at night they'd rattle and tick. I hated it the first week. Couldn't sleep." I glance at him. "By the second week I couldn't sleep without it."
He turns to me. That focused expression, warm and close, and I can see the light from the engine gauges reflected in his eyes, amber points floating in dark water.
"The ship's engines run at sixty-two hertz," he offers. "Healthy human heart rate is about the same."
I stare at him. "You know the frequency of the engines."
"I own the ship."
"You memorised the frequency of the engines because it matches a heartbeat."
His mouth does nothing. His eyes do everything. And his hand tightens on mine, just once, the touch-once thing he does, testing whether something will hold, and we stand there listening to the ship's heart beat around us until my work-tired body sags against his arm and he walks me back to Deck 2 without being asked, matching his stride to mine, same as always, shortening his steps to meet me where I am.
"Goodnight, Star."
"Goodnight, Artem."
Our ritual. I close my cabin door. Press my back to it. The pipes in the wall behind my bunk tick and rattle and I fall asleep in forty seconds, still smiling, still feeling the vibration of the engines in my ribs like a second pulse laid next to my own.
HE KISSES ME IN THE gallery on Tuesday night.
Against the wall between the display cases, his hands pressed to the panels on either side of my head, mine fisted in the front of his shirt. The jade figure observes from its case, glowing green, completely unbothered by the fact that a four-hundred-year-old gallery is being used as a makeout venue by two people who should really know better. His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to the place below my ear and I make a sound that bounces off the glass and I don't care, I don't care at all, because his mouth is on my neck and his hands are on the wall and my hands are full of his shirt and the Mayflower handkerchief is six feet away in its case, properly closed this time, and I think about our fingers tangled around it and his hand turning over and closing around mine and I pull him closer by his shirt and his forehead drops to my shoulder and he says my name into my collarbone. Just once. Just Star. Like he's confirming something. Like he needed to say it into my skin to make it real.