Anders comes first, hard and loud. I can’t really complain since I don’t always come during sex anyway. I love to hear his sounds, to know that I, and only I, am the one to make him feel this way. Feel so good. It’s power, and the only power I have.
He looks up at me, breathing hard, and starts treading water. The strangest, most haunted look comes over his eyes. He doesn’t look sated at all.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
I shake my head for a moment, not understanding. Then I do.
“Oh. Hey, don’t worry about it. It’s been a long time, I get it,” I tell him, pulling my bikini bits back on the right spots. “Just make me come next time and I’ll be good.” I shoot him a grin to let him know it’s cool.
He squints his eyes and spits out water. “Right.”
The sound of a car door slamming makes both of us snap our heads up.
“We should get out of here,” Anders says, quickly pulling himself out of the pool. He extends his hands and hauls me out, just in time for a pair of headlights to flash across the pool area, narrowly missing us. A car has come into the parking lot.
We stick to the shadows and run to the fence, trying to get up and over as quick as we can. I even jump the last bit, into his arms, just as we hear voices and see the beam of a flashlight.
He takes hold of my hand and we quickly run down the road, but he lets go a few moments later as we hurry down another suburban block to where he parked the Mustang.
He doesn’t pick up my hand again for the rest of the night.
And his eyes never stop looking haunted.
12
Anders Now
I never thought I’d say this, but Shay Lavji has turned out to be one hell of a farm girl.
She’s been up every single morning with me at 5 a.m. for the past three days, and even though she’s still a bit squeamish when it comes to feeding the baby cows, she’s right beside me doing everything that I do. We’ve been alternating helping with the cows and the sheep, which means Uncle Per is getting a welcome respite to just stay inside and work on the farm finances and keeping records.
Astrid and Lise have even been pitching in here and there, though they’ve really embraced their roles as the homemakers. Or should I say, drunken homemakers, since they crack open the beers and cider every afternoon. But it’s their vacation and the two rarely get to see each other, so who am I to judge. I would do the exact same, only I can’t remember the last time I actually got to go away. The fishing and farm life keep me tethered, 365 days a year.
But all vacations come to an end, and Lise and Astrid have already left Todalen, Lise going up to Tromso to see Tove for a few days before she goes down to Oslo, and Astrid back to Paris. Every time they leave, a heavy cloud seems to descend over the farm. They bring so much light and life to the place, as annoying as they can be.
This time it won’t be so bad since Shay is still here, even though I don’t know how long she plans on sticking around. I’m not exactly offering her an exciting life here, and I know there’s so much more of the country that she wants to see. I wish I could find a way to take her around myself, but short of Uncle Per hiring someone else, I’m not sure it could work.
Besides, even though I’m catching more and more of these coy, flirtatious looks from Shay, noticing the way she leans in to talk to me, the way she touches me, whether hitting me playfully or just brushing my shoulder when she walks by, I’m not sure if she’d want to see Norway with me at her side. Though she’s much more comfortable around me now, and even starts talking about innocuous events from the past, I know the odds of her leaving with our relationship completely repaired are slim.
Above all, I’m not even sure if we have a relationship. We’re definitely friends more than first loves and ex-lovers, and that’s probably the right way to go about it.
But still, sometimes I want nothing more than to grab her, kiss her, ask her if she remembers what it was like to love me, to want me. It’s pure selfishness on my behalf, but these feelings are really starting to fuck with me.
I’ve even started writing again like I used to, just a few lines before bed. It’s all shit, as usual, but the fire is there, the flames growing. She’s as inspiring as she ever was, and I don’t have to grab for a Bukowski book to find the drive and ideas. Just looking at her causes the clouds to move, the earth to shift beneath my feet, for that electricity that begets creation to seep through my veins.
I feel like I’m a fucking teenager all over again, for better and for worse.
Back then I was such a mess. Sometimes when I feel like my life has disintegrated like the rusted chains on my boat, all I have to do is think back to those days in high school. Shay was the only thing holding me together, a girl that loved me with all her young heart, and yet even she wasn’t enough to keep me from total destruction.
I was an awful person, through and through. The worst part is that was just the start. After I left New York and came back here, my downward spiral became quicker, deeper, until I was a shell of myself.
And yet, through it all, I still wrote. Even on my darkest days, I wrote. The journals that are stacked in shoeboxes under my bed are proof of that,
