Brightly Burning(29)
“Good night.” I retreated to my room before he could see how wide my smile was.
Chapter Ten
I kept my word, returning the next night to finish my book, which turned out to be a riveting account of a mountaineering disaster that happened on the world’s tallest peak at the tail end of the twentieth century. As I became immersed in a pursuit as unfathomable to me as breathing in space, my nightly reading sessions with Hugo turned routine. When I finished that book, I found another on the shelf, this one a tense drama about Old-World British and Russian spies.
We read together every night, allotting the last half-hour before bed for Hugo’s chatter, by which point he was always more than a little drunk. It became second nature to parry his too-personal questions with lighter fare, usually updates on Jessa or recounting the book I was reading. Still, too often Hugo got past my defenses, disarming me with a well-timed question. Like: “Stella, are you lonely?”
All the sound was sucked out of the room, leaving nothing but the loud timpani of my panicking heart in my ears.
“Of course not,” I replied, well-practiced in answering dishonestly to put others at ease. “I see you every day. Jessa, Xiao. Everyone else.” Of course, I didn’t feel close to any of them. Not truly. Jessa was a child, and everyone else was either my employer or too wrapped up in their own life. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
“Hmm,” Hugo hummed. “But you don’t seem really connected to anyone. Close.”
His keen gaze, his on-the-nose assessment, rendered me naked; hot from collar to boots, fighting a squirm that tempted me to flee the room.
“I might throw the same accusation back at you,” I said, my cool rapidly slipping. And then he smiled! As if I’d pleased him.
“That’s fair,” he replied. “Everyone on board this ship is a bit like a solitary planet. We orbit the same sun, but on lonely tracks. At least we all have that in common.”
“Wouldn’t you say we orbit the moon?”
“Was that a joke?” He laughed. “I’m impressed.”
A new warmth overcame me, like when my parents used to envelop me in their arms, whispering comforts into my hair. I felt acceptance and the freedom to be myself. And a hint of something else, not familial at all. A flame of desire, which I tamped down but feared I could not extinguish, now that it had been lit.
I found myself counting down the hours of each day until I could join Hugo in the evening. I even started allowing myself a drink occasionally, liking the way it made me all floaty and warm and comfortable during our conversations.
“You know you’ve been here two months,” Hugo said one night.
“Are you in on the betting pool?” Hugo looked at me with confusion, so I elaborated. “For how long I’ll make it on board. Hanada told me about it.”
He rolled his eyes. “Mari was messing with you. She has a strange sense of humor.”
“So it’s not true that there were a bunch of governesses before me, most of whom didn’t stay long?”
“Perhaps it was a mistake to let you drink.” Hugo played as if to take away my glass. I couldn’t miss the edge to his voice. “Come on, you know this place isn’t for everyone. Isolated from the rest of the fleet and all.”
“True,” I said, thinking perhaps that Sergei had spun a yarn to keep me entertained.
“Anyway, if there was a betting pool, which there isn’t, I’d advise you to stay at least fourteen months.” He winked, and I threw my book at him.
“Ha! Now you can’t read!” he taunted. “So you have no choice but to talk to me for the next two hours.”
“If I can’t read, I’ll draw. So, alas, you’ll have to push through on that Dickens.”
Hugo perked up. “How come I’ve not seen you with a drawing tab?”
I shrugged. “My old tab isn’t in the best of shape. The colors are shot; the stylus has totally lost sensitivity. And mostly I’ve been devouring all your books instead of drawing.”
“Go get your tab, then. I want to see your work.”
I glanced at a masterpiece on the wall behind Hugo’s head, a Degas. “Why would you want to see my scribbling when you have the stuff of the masters at hand?”
“None of the masters live on my ship. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll play the piano for you. I’m completely out of practice, but it’s the closest skill I have that you might consider an artistic talent.”
“I didn’t even know there was a piano on board.”
Hugo nodded. “There’s a drawing room next to the dining quarters. Just give me a week or two to practice. I’m rusty. But you have to show me now.”
I took a swig of drink for courage. “Fine.”
Within five minutes, I’d fetched my drawing tab from my quarters and Hugo was pulling me over to the love seat at the window. My heart sped up as Hugo arranged himself nearly on top of me. My head knew the alcohol made him extra friendly, but my other senses hadn’t gotten the memo. I wiped a sweaty palm on my dress so I wouldn’t smudge the tab screen, and I pulled up an old landscape. He leaned close under the guise of seeing the screen better, settling a hand on top of my thigh in the process, and took it upon himself to swipe and flick through the next few images.