HE WALKS ME BACK TOmy cabin.
I don't ask him to. I say "I should go, early start" and push off the railing, and he pushes off too, and then he's just... walking beside me. Down the stairs from Deck 14, through the guest corridor on 8, down the service elevator to 2. He doesn't explain. He doesn't ask. He just walks, and I walk, and our footsteps fall into a rhythm without trying, and I'm not going to read anything into the synchronised footsteps because that way lies madness and I'm already operating at maximum madness capacity.
But I will note, for the planner, that his stride is naturally about twice the length of mine and he's shortened it. Without being asked. Without making it obvious. He's just... matching me. And I don't know when he started doing that or whether he knows he's doing it but I know, because I notice everything about how this man moves, because it's my job and also because it's my obsession and at this point I've given up pretending those are different things.
The staff corridor on Deck 2 is dim. Amber lights. Thin carpet. We stop outside my cabin door and the corridor is narrow and he is large and the space between us has been shrinking all evening, from a foot and a half on the railing to a foot in the elevator to something less than a foot right now, and I can smell him. Not cedarwood tonight. Just him. Soap and skin and the salt from the wind, and I'm very aware of my own pulse and the fact that my cabin door is right there and my hand should be reaching for the handle and it's not reaching for the handle because the rest of me is busy being aware of every inch of air between his body and mine and how warm that air is and how it keeps getting warmer.
"Goodnight, Star," he murmurs.
Our word. Our ending. Except he doesn't walk away.
He lifts his hand.
I see it coming. I see it like I see everything about him now, with this terrible heightened attention that tracks the smallest movements of his body as if my survival depends on it, and his hand rises and comes toward my face and I could step back and I don't, because I want to know what happens next, I want to know what his hand is going to do more than I want to protect myself from it, and the air between his fingers and my skin feels like it has a charge, like the last millimetre before contact is the loudest thing in this corridor.
His fingers touch my jaw. Not my cheek, not my hair. My jaw. The hard line of bone beneath skin, the place where my face becomes my neck. And his thumb traces up. Along my cheekbone. One pass. His hand is warm and enormous and the roughness of his scarred palm against my skin makes my eyes fall shut without permission and I stop breathing, just stop,because his thumb is on my cheekbone and it's the same hand he wouldn't let me touch during our first session, the hand he pulled away from me and whisperednot the handsin a voice that meantdon't,and now that hand is on my face and I can feel every callus and every scar-ridge and every year of whatever he did for eleven years that won't let him sleep, and if I move I'll make a sound and I don't trust what kind of sound it will be.
One touch. That's all. His hand drops. He steps back.
"Goodnight, Star," he repeats, quieter, and the repetition turns it into something else, not a farewell but a frame, two goodnights with a touch between them, a before and an after, and I'm standing in an amber-lit corridor with his fingerprint still burning on my cheekbone and everything is different now.
"Goodnight, Artem."
His name. I said his name. First time out loud, to his face, and it comes out low and uneven and full of everything I've been holding since the corridor encounter, and I can hear what it does to him because he goes still. Completely. Every muscle locking at once, same as on my table when my thumbs find a scar he wasn't ready for, except this time the scar is my voice saying his name and the flinch is full-body and unmistakable.
Then he turns and walks away and I open my cabin door and go inside and sit on my bunk in the dark and press my fingers to the place on my jaw where his thumb was.
My bunkmate is snoring. I don't hear her. I don't hear anything except the echo of his name in my own mouth and the memory of his rough palm on my cheekbone and I sit there in the dark with my fingers on my jaw and I think:
I'm in so much trouble.
And then I think:
I don't care.
THREE DAYS LATER, I'Min the Tranquil Antique Gallery at ten o'clock at night.
I shouldn't be here. The gallery closed at eight. But Mila gave me the access code last week ("For emergencies, darling, or if you just want to look at beautiful things after hours, I won't tell") and I've been thinking about the necklace, the Russian one, the gold chain with the pale green stone. Not just the necklace. All of it. The silence, the warm spotlights, the feeling of standing alone in a room full of things that were made by someone's hands centuries ago and have survived.
I want that feeling tonight. I want to stand in this room and let the good ache take over, the one about craftsmanship and permanence and the miracle of hands, because the other ache, the Artem ache, the one that lives on my jaw where his thumb traced my cheekbone three nights ago, that ache is getting harder to manage and I need to put my attention somewhere safe.
Beautiful old objects are safe. Beautiful old objects don't touch your face outside your cabin door at midnight and tell you they miss who they thought they'd be. Beautiful old objects don't make you say their name in a voice you didn't know you had.
Note to self: stop comparing the man you're falling for to museum artefacts. It's not a healthy coping mechanism. Alsoyou just used the phrase "falling for" and you need to sit with that for a minute.
...sat with it. Verdict: accurate. Oh chops.
The gallery is dark except for the display lights, each piece glowing in its own circle of gold. I walk past the porcelain, the lacquerwork, the jade figure that drew me in on the first tour. At the back, past the writing desk, there's a case I haven't noticed before. Smaller than the others. Low, almost waist-height, with a single object inside.
A handkerchief.
I lean down. The placard reads:Lace handkerchief, c. 1620. English bobbin lace, linen thread. Believed to have travelled aboard the Mayflower.
Four hundred years old.
The lace is cream-coloured, finer than anything I've ever seen, the pattern so intricate that my eyes can't follow a single thread from start to finish. The edges are slightly frayed. The fabric is fragile, translucent in places, worn thin by time and touch and four centuries of surviving, and my throat goes tight, same as it always does when I see what hands can do, what hands can leave behind, and I know that makes me ridiculous and I've long since stopped apologising for it.
Someone made this with their hands. Someone sat in a room in England four hundred years ago and worked thread through pins and created something so beautiful that it crossed an ocean and outlasted empires and ended up on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, under glass, still whole, still here.
