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)
My back arches off the table. A fraction. Enough for his hand to slide underneath, his palm against the base of my spine, and he lifts me toward him. Not pulling. Lifting. As if I weigh nothing. As if I'm the handkerchief.
His other hand finds the side of my neck, thumb on my jaw, fingers in my hair.
"I've wanted to do this," he tells me, and his voice has gone somewhere deep and ragged, "since the first session. When you found the scar on my shoulder blade and your hands didn't flinch."
"You were face-down," I manage. "You couldn't see my hands."
"I felt them. I felt you not flinching." His thumb traces my jaw and I'm trembling and I can't stop and I don't care. "Every other therapist pauses when they find the scars. Half a second. They recover, but I feel the pause. You didn't pause. You just kept going. As if my scars were just another part of the muscle."
"They are," I breathe. "They're just part of you."
His eyes close. His jaw clenches. And when he opens them again the restraint I saw before is thinner, worn almost transparent, and I can see through it to what's underneath and what's underneath is a man who is barely, barely holding on.
His head dips. His mouth finds my collarbone. Not a kiss. Something slower. His lips tracing the line of bone beneath my skin, and the heat of his mouth on a place that has never been kissed makes my hand fly to his hair and grip hard enough to hurt.
He makes a sound against my skin. Low and raw, the sound from the corridor, from the grovel, the cracked thing that came out of him when I called him a gargoyle except this is deeper, rougher, and the vibration of it moves through my collarbone and into my chest and I am shaking.
His mouth moves. Collarbone to throat. Throat to the hollow between, the place where my pulse hammers. His lips rest there, not kissing, just resting, and I can feel him counting my heartbeats with his mouth and I can't breathe, I actually cannot breathe, because he's pressed against my pulse like he wants to memorise the speed of it and file it away like I file his almost-smiles and this is what I've done to him, I've taught him to collect.
"Fast," he murmurs against my skin.
"Your fault." My voice cracks. "Everything is your fault, every single thing my body does in this room is your fault and you should know that and I'm going to put it in your file, Almazov, I'm going to write it on your CLIENT NOTES: patient causes therapist to lose all motor function, recommend immediate—-"
His mouth moves lower and the sentence evaporates.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT ISN'T a thing I have language for.
I lose the thread of myself. The planner is gone, the filing cabinet is empty, the running narration that has accompanied every moment of my life since I was old enough to form sentences simply stops, and there's nothing in its place but the dark room and the warm leather and the certainty of his hands. I trust them completely. My hands know his. His hands know mine. There is nothing in this room to be afraid of.
And then there's no room at all. There's only the gathering, the building, tightening thing that starts low at the base of my spine and rises. His hand finds it and doesn't rush, and I stop holding on. I stop. I become just a body held by his body, just nerve and heat and the sound of his name, and somewhere in the dark I say it. "Artem, Artem." I sound like someone I've never met, someone who doesn't schedule her feelings, and the sound of it undoes us both.
The wave takes me. Enormous. And I let it.
He holds me. His face pressed against my stomach. My hand in his hair. My chest heaving. The ceiling swimming above me, amber and gold.
He presses his lips to my stomach. Once. Tender. The touch of a man who has just felt me fall apart in his hands and is grateful.
"That," I announce, when I can form words, when my voice comes back from whatever country it emigrated to along with my brain, "was not a massage."
His chest shakes against my side. The almost-laugh. Closer to real sound than I've ever heard, a rumble that vibrates through my ribs. "No."
"You're terrible at massage. Zero technique. Madame Gilles would be APPALLED. She would revoke your... you don't even HAVE a license, you're practising without a license, I should REPORT you—-"
The shaking grows. His fingers trace a circle on my hip, absent, idle, and I commit the shape of it to memory because I'm committing everything to memory, every second of this, every place his mouth has been, every sound I made that I'm going to be mortified about tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.