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)
"No."
"If your world is dangerous you tell me. If you're scared you tell me. You don't just—-you don't cancel a recurring appointment and call it PROTECTION—-"
"I won't."
"And you tell Mila—-" Her voice catches. A fresh wave. "You tell Mila that I'm not fragile. You tell her I'm not a child. You tell her I walked six decks at eleven at night and knocked on your door and ASKED and that's not fragile, that's not—-"
"That's the bravest thing anyone has ever done for me."
She makes a sound against my chest. Small and wet and broken and it cracks my ribs from the inside.
"Say it again," she whispers.
"You're the bravest person I know."
"Not that." She tilts her face up. Swollen eyes. Wet cheeks. Running nose. The face of a girl who counted forty-two euros and ate standing up and applied to fourteen ships and she's looking at me with everything she has and everything she is and her mouth is trembling. "The other thing."
"I love you."
Her eyes close. Her whole face crumples. Not with sadness. With the specific overwhelm of hearing something you needed so badly you forgot you needed it, and her hands release my shirt and slide up my chest and wrap around my neck and she pulls herself up and presses her face into the side of my throat and holds on with the grip of a girl who's been trained to hold things carefully and is choosing, right now, to hold me with everything she's got.
"I love you," she whispers into my neck. Small and muffled and raw. "And I'm still angry at you."
"I know."
"And I'm going to be angry at you for a while."
"I know."
"And you owe me so many coffees. SO many. An insane number. An operationally significant number of coffees."
"I'll start tomorrow."
"You'll start tonight." Her arms tighten around my neck. "And you'll use the good mugs."
"The guest mugs."
"The GOOD mugs."
I hold her. The ship hums at sixty-two hertz beneath us. The corridor is amber and thin-carpeted and completely empty and she's in my arms and she's crying and she's angry and she loves me and she called me a gargoyle and I'm going to hear that word in her voice for the rest of my life and I'm going to deserve it every time.
Her body stills against my throat. Her grip doesn't loosen.
"Artem?"
"Yes."
"Was Curtis using the right pressure on your lower back?"
A crack runs through my chest. Not pain. Something warmer. Something that feels like the first time she put her hands on my scars and didn't flinch and my body decided to let her in.
"No," I admit. "He goes too deep too fast."
"I KNEW it." She pulls back enough to glare at me through swollen, tear-soaked eyes, and the glare is so fierce and so ridiculous and so perfectly, completely Star that the sound comes out of me again, the raw cracked thing that's almost a laugh, and her face does something extraordinary.
She smiles.
Small. Wobbly. Still wet. The smile of a girl who's been broken and is choosing to start putting herself back together right here, right now, in a corridor on Deck 2 with her arms around the man who broke her.
I press my mouth to her forehead. Hold it there. Feel her breathe.
We stand in the corridor. We don't move. We don't need to be anywhere else.
Star
HIS HANDS ARE ON MY back.
I can't think. That should concern me. I'm a person who thinks constantly, compulsively, recreationally, who narrates her own life in real time and files every sensation in a colour-coded internal cabinet and maintains a running planner that covers everything from restock schedules to the exact number of times Artem Almazov's mouth has twitched in my presence (seventeen, the answer is seventeen, I was keeping count, the count is suspended on account of his hands being on my bare skin and my counting brain has emigrated to a country with no extradition policy).
His palms are pressed against my shoulder blades. His thumbs are digging into the muscles along my spine. My brain has packed a suitcase and left the building without a forwarding address.
Planner status: offline. Reason: hands. ETA for reboot: unknown. Possibly never.
The spa is dark. After hours, locked, the sound system off, the water wall silent behind its glass partition. The only light is the heated floor, amber glow turning the treatment room into something warm and subterranean, a cave made of cedarwood and low gold light. The only sound is the ship. The hum. Sixty-two hertz, filling the room like it fills the engine room twelve decks below.
"Lie down," he said, ten minutes ago, standing in the doorway of treatment room two with his sleeves pushed to his forearms and his eyes on mine and a look on his face that made my knees forget they were load-bearing joints. And I managed "What?" and he repeated "Lie down, Star."