"What happened to the bag?"
"We don't talk about the bag." He steals an olive off my plate without asking, pops it in his mouth, grins. "So. How's the first week? Green giving you the death stare? He does that. It's his love language."
"He's fine," I tell him, diplomatically. "He's fair."
"He's terrifying and you're being diplomatic. I respect that." He takes another olive. I let him, because his complete lack of ceremony is so refreshing after a week of spa protocol and Mila's elegant warmth and Artem's obliterating silences that I want to hand him my entire plate just for being uncomplicated. "The clients are mostly great. Lots of older ladies who want someoneto talk to while you work their shoulders. Couple of finance guys who fall asleep in five minutes. One Russian dude who doesn't say a single word the entire session."
My fork pauses over my pasta. "Russian?"
"Yeah. Almazov. The youngest one. Have you had him yet?"
There is a version of me that answers this question smoothly and casually and doesn't feel her face heat up and doesn't grip her fork slightly too hard and doesn't think about his skin burning through her palms forty-five minutes ago. That version of me is a fiction. She doesn't exist. What exists is me, sitting here with tomato sauce on my chin probably, trying to sound like a normal human.
"Once," I manage. Twice, actually, as of tonight, but who's counting? My voice comes out normal. Small miracle. "Last Thursday."
"Wild, right?" Curtis shakes his head with genuine marvel. "Like working on a brick wall. The guy's so tense I'm surprised he can turn his head. I had him twice before they switched him to your schedule. Never uttered a word. Not hello, not goodbye, not even a grunt when I went deep on his traps. Just lay there like a statue."
I think about the fist that didn't close tonight. His fingers staying open. Him turning his head on the face cradle and askedwhat is your namelike the answer actually mattered.
"Yeah," I agree. "Barely a word."
And I hate myself a little for the lie, for the casual tone, for sitting here with Curtis's stolen olives and Curtis's easy grin and pretending that the man we're discussing is just another silentclient, when the truth is that he spoke my name twenty minutes ago and the sound of it is still ricocheting around inside my ribcage like a pinball and I can't make it stop.
Curtis launches into a story about a client who fell asleep and snored so loudly the woman in the next room complained, and his snoring impersonation is so accurate and so ridiculous that I laugh, actually laugh, a real one, surprised right out of me, and the sound is so unexpected that I almost clap my hand over my mouth. I don't think I've laughed out loud since I boarded this ship, and Curtis grins like he's won a trophy, wide and delighted, and tells me another one, about a woman who cried during a foot massage and then tipped him two hundred euros and told him he'd saved her marriage.
"Her MARRIAGE," he repeats, waving his fork for emphasis. "From a FOOT massage. I still don't know what I did. I just rubbed her feet. But apparently, that was the thing that was missing from her life, and now she sends me a Christmas card every year. With a family photo. The kids call me Uncle Curtis."
I'm laughing so hard I nearly choke on my pasta, and the staff mess is loud and garlic-scented and Curtis is stealing my third olive and his smile is open and uncomplicated and I like him. I like him instantly, warm kitchen on a cold day, no questions, no analysis, no splinters to find later. He's kind without trying. Warm without agenda. He makes a crowded room feel like a kitchen table, and I haven't had that in... I don't know. A long time. Maybe ever, since arriving on this ship.
He's twenty-one and he's exactly who I should be having dinner with.
I'm laughing at something he's told me about Mr. Green's obsession with towel-folding ("he measured one with anACTUAL RULER, Star, a RULER, I thought he was going to write me up for a centimetre of asymmetry") when I feel it.
Not a sound. Not a movement. A weight.
The particular pressure of being seen by someone who does it like he does everything else: with absolute, focused, bone-dissolving attention.
I glance up.
Artem is standing in the doorway of the staff mess.
He shouldn't be here. This is Deck 2, staff territory, the part of the ship where the carpet is thin and the food is free and the owners don't come. But he's here, in his dark shirt, filling the doorway like he fills every space he enters, and he isn't scanning the room or looking for someone.
He's already found me.
And then his eyes move. To Curtis. To Curtis's easy grin, to Curtis's hand resting on the table six inches from mine, to the space between us that's small and comfortable and full of stolen olives and laughter and everything uncomplicated.
Artem's face doesn't change. Those iron eyes travel from Curtis back to me and stay, and the weight of his attention presses on my skin from across an entire crowded room, warm and unmistakable, and my laugh dies in my throat and every nerve in my body swings toward him like a compass finding north and I can't stop it, I can't redirect it, I can't tell my nervous system to please continue paying attention to the lovely normal man sitting across from me telling a lovely normal story because the man in the doorway just spoke my name for the first time an hour ago and my body has apparently decided that he is northnow, he is the direction everything points, and oh chops, I'm in so much trouble, because he's looking at me across a crowded staff mess and I've forgotten where I am and what I'm eating and who I'm eating with and probably my own name, the same name he held in his mouth like he was tasting it, and if he keeps looking at me like that I'm going to—-
He turns. And he's gone.
Curtis is saying something about the bread on Deck 1. I pick up my fork. I eat. I nod in the right places and I make the right sounds and my face does what faces do during normal conversations.
But the laughter is gone. And the easy warmth has a crack in it now that runs from the doorway to my chair, because a man stood in that doorway for three seconds and found me across a room and the world rearranged itself around his attention and I couldn't stop it and I didn't want to.
He knows my name. And I know what his skin feels like under my hands. And on Thursday he'll be on my table again, and the Thursday after that, and after that, and he'll say "Goodnight, Star" and I'll say "Goodnight, Mr. Almazov" and I'll walk to the corridor and press my back to the wall and the planner will have nothing for me and the cedarwood will be on my hands and I'll be standing there, always standing there, at the edge of something I can't name and can't stop walking toward.
Curtis reaches across the table and steals my last olive.
