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)
We stand there. His forehead on my shoulder, my hands in his shirt, the gallery dim and warm around us. I can feel his heart through the fabric. Hammering. Always faster than his face would ever admit.
"You're going to wrinkle your shirt," I inform him.
"I have other shirts."
"Rich people," I sigh.
His chest moves against mine. Not a laugh. The architecture of one, the vibration without the sound, a rumble that travels through his ribs and into mine, and it's the closest I've gotten and I want more. I want to make him actually laugh out loud. It's on the list now. Below making him smile. Above getting him to sleep.
The list is getting long. I don't care.
WEDNESDAY. THE SPA after hours. I'm putting away oils and he appears in the doorway and then he's not in the doorway anymore, he's crossing the room in three long strides, and his hands are on my waist and he lifts me onto the treatment table and steps between my knees and kisses me until my hands are shaking and the lavender oil I was holding has rolled off the table edge and shattered on the heated floor and neither of us picks it up.
"This is where I work," I gasp when I can talk, which takes a while, because his mouth is very distracting and his hands are on my ribs, warm through my uniform, his thumbs tracing the lower edge like he's mapping a new set of bones. "This is my professional space. I'm going to think about this every time I—-"
"Yes," he agrees, and the lopsided thing happens again, and I want to put my mouth on it but he's already kissing me and every thought I have dissolves, just evaporates, my planner goes blank, my filing system crashes, and for the first time in my organised, colour-coded, schedule-dependent life my brain has nothing to offer me and I don't miss it.
The heated floor is warm under my bare feet. His shirt smells like soap and salt and him, just him, and I've memorised the scent of this man's skin and that should alarm me and it doesn't. Nothing alarms me right now. I'm sitting on my own treatment table with his hands on my ribs and the cedarwood in the air and I'm the happiest I've ever been in my entire life and the fact that it's happening HERE, in the room where I first touched his scars and discovered what it felt like to care about someone through my palms, feels right. Like the room was always going to end up meaning this.
Every time. That's what keeps hitting me. Every single time he touches me, there's a half-second where his hands pause. Not uncertainty. Attention. He touches me like I touched the Mayflower handkerchief. Like I might be the most valuable thing he's ever held and he wants to make sure his hands are worthy first.
I don't tell him this. I don't have the words for it yet, and if I tried I'd cry, and I've made it five weeks on this ship without crying and I'm not starting now.
CURTIS KNOWS.
I don't tell him. I don't change anything about how I act at meals or during shifts or in the staff corridor, or at least I don't think I change anything, but apparently I've become one of those people who radiates happiness from my pores like a human-shaped glow stick, because on Thursday morning Curtis sets a coffee on the counter next to me in the staff mess and sits down and says, "So."
"So?" I respond, in the voice of a woman with absolutely nothing to hide.
"You're different."
"I'm not different."
"Star." He props his chin on his hand. "You hummed yesterday. In the supply closet. You were restocking towels and you were humming."
I was humming. I was. I don't even know what I was humming, some fragment of the song playing through the spa sound system, I didn't realise I was doing it until it was done, and then I'd stood there with a stack of towels in my arms and thought, with a kind of bewildered wonder: huh. So this is what happy sounds like when it leaks out.
"People hum," I argue.
"You don't." He picks up his coffee, drinks, studies me over the rim. "You've been here five weeks. I've had dinner with you probably twenty times. You don't hum, you don't whistle, you don't sing in the shower, yes the walls are that thin." His eyebrows climb. "You're the most silent person on this ship and now you're humming in the supply closet while folding towels and smiling at nothing. Something is either very right or very wrong and based on the glow you're putting out I'm guessing it's very right."
"Maybe I'm in a good mood," I try, and it comes out defensive, which is the opposite of convincing, and Curtis's face changes. Not his usual grin. Something underneath it, older than his twenty-one years, the expression of a person who's seen a friend walk toward something hard and wishes he could say something useful before she gets there.