"Right," I manage. "Thanks."
I go to the staff mess. I eat leftover pasta standing at the counter because all the tables are taken and I don't mind, I've eaten standing up most of my life. The pasta is good. The bread is better. I eat two rolls and drink a glass of water and I absolutely, categorically, one hundred percent don't think about dark eyes in a corridor or the smell of clean skin or the scar on his left hand or the fact that my professional hand-brain has already mapped his tension patterns from a 1.5-second encounter and would very much like a longer session please.
Nope. Not thinking about any of it.Thinking about tomorrow. First clients. Four hundred euros an hour. My hands, which have never failed me, which carried me from a nothing flat in Nice to a floating palace in the Mediterranean.
I wash my plate. I go to my cabin, small, shared with another therapist who's already asleep behind the curtain that divides our bunks. I change into a T-shirt. Lie down. The ship rocks, gentle, almost imperceptible, and the engines hum through the hull and into the mattress and into my bones.
Close my eyes.
MY PHONE BUZZES ONthe shelf beside my pillow.
I crack one eye open. The screen glows blue in the dark cabin. Staff portal notification. I tap it, expecting a welcome memo, an orientation reminder, the usual first-day noise that clogs every inbox.
It's my schedule. Updated. Tomorrow's client list.
The first slot is blank, admin time, setup. The second is a guest I don't recognise. The third, fourth, and fifth are open.
The sixth slot. Thursday, 8:00 PM. Ninety-minute session. Has a note attached.
Recurring. Weekly. Private. Suite 12.
I read the client name and every drop of blood in my body relocates to my face.
A. ALMAZOV.
I sit up in the dark. My bunkmate snores on. The phone screen glows.
Recurring. Every Thursday. Every week. His skin under my hands for ninety minutes in a dim room, and I can still feel the heat of him from three feet away in a corridor and I'm supposed to touch him. Professionally. With composure. While making polite conversation about pressure preferences. For ninety minutes. Every. Single. Thursday.
Okay. Okay. Let me just check my planner. Six-thirty prep. Seven o'clock first client. Restock the oils. Fold the towels. Thursday 8 PM: professionally caress the most overwhelming man I've ever encountered without spontaneously combusting.
...add to planner: research whether spontaneous combustion is covered by maritime employee insurance.
Delete that. That's insane.
Keep it. I might need it.
I pull the sheet over my head. The ship hums. The notification sits on my phone three inches from my face, and the wordrecurringburns behind my eyelids, and my traitorous hand-brain is already calculating optimal pressure sequences for someone with his tension patterns, and the rest of my brain is telling my hand-brain to shut up and go to sleep, and nobody is listening to anybody, and I am in so much trouble.
Thursday. Oh chops.Thursday.
Star
HIS SKIN IS HOTTERthan it should be.
My palms register it the moment I make contact, both hands on the opening stroke down the length of his spine, and the warmth travels through the oil and into my fingers and up through my wrists and suddenly every professional thought I've had in the last four days, every single one of those very calm, very rational, very adult thoughts about how this is just another client and his back is just another back and I'm just going to be completely normal about this, every single one of those thoughts packs its bags and leaves the building.
Because his back is not just another back.
His back is a landscape. His back is a whole situation. His back is warm enough to fry my remaining brain cells on, and I've been touching it for four minutes and I'm already in catastrophic trouble.
The cedarwood blend. I chose it without thinking about why, which is a lie, I chose it because it's what I smelled on him in the corridor four days ago and my subconscious is apparently running a covert operation to surround me with his scent in a small, dim, heated room, and if I ever meet my subconscious in person I'm going to have words with her.
He's face-down on my table. Shoulders bare. A white towel folded low across his hips. The room is dim, the heated floor warm under my bare feet, and I have been touching Artem Almazov for four minutes.
I know this because I've been counting. My hands have their own clock, built from two years of training and eighteen months of practice at the studio in Nice, where Madame Gilles would stand behind me with her arms crossed and saylisten to the tissue, Étoile, your hands will tell you what the client won't.Four minutes in, and what my hands are telling me is: this man carries everything in his shoulders, his muscles haven't properly relaxed in what feels like years, and his skin runs so hot that my palms are tingling and my face is already doing that thing and I need to stop because he's face-down, Star, he can't even see your face, there is literally no reason for you to be blushing right now, get a grip.
Seven AM restock. Eight-thirty, Mrs. Dumont, Swedish. Ten o'clock, open. Eleven-fifteen, don't think about the way his shoulder blades move when he breathes, twelve o'clock—-
