"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.
