This man.
I love this man with all my heart.
And even though he told me those words were from him to me, I never listened before, and I won’t listen now.
“Oh god,” I cry out softly as his pumps quicken, then he’s coming too, with a long, hoarse guttural cry that fills the room. “Anders…Anders I love you. I love you.”
His groan chokes in his throat and he stares down at me, breathing hard, eyes wild.
“I know you told me not to say it,” I tell him, my chest rising as the orgasm has me in its thrall still. “But I mean it. I love you. Maybe I never stopped. Maybe it was just put away until you came back into my life.”
He shakes his head, a bead of sweat falling from his brow, but then he’s smiling. Grinning. Fucking beaming. It steals my breath away.
“You mean it?” he says in awe. “This isn’t all a dream. You love me? All of me? Every part?”
“Every fucking part, Anders,” I say, grinning right back. “I love you and I’m yours. I’m here to stay. I’m home.”
“Home,” he whispers.
Then he leans in and kisses me wild.
Home.
Epilogue Shay
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I whisper, my voice choking in quiet awe.
I’m standing beside Anders down by the water, both our heads tilted up toward the sky, where the northern lights are flashing above the mountain tops. It’s so breathtaking that I’m having a hard time registering that it’s real. It looks like a projection of watercolor, neon greens and purples and blues that compete with the stars.
“Every single winter,” Anders says to me. “But it still stops my heart, every time. Just like you.”
I tear my eyes away from the light show in the sky, and look at him. The purples reflect in his dark eyes, making him look magical. He is magical. His fingers especially.
“You trying to woo me with your poetry again?” I ask him.
He grins and adjusts the knit cap on his head. “If it works, it works.”
Being that it’s winter, we’re both bundled up in our winter clothes, freshly fallen snow all around us. It came early this year, much to Per’s grumbling (for a Norwegian, the man gets cold easily), but I love it. We have quite a bit of the white stuff, and while we’ve been doing a lot of shoveling around the property for our guests, it makes everything extra beautiful.
Our guests love it too. We have these sleds that you stand up on and push with your legs called a spark or kick-sled. Basically it’s like a chair on skis (Norwegians will literally strap skis to anything). The guests take them out during the day, before the sun goes down at three in the afternoon. Luckily, winter also means the beginning of the auroras, something travelers specifically come to Norway for, and tonight I know it’s living up to their expectations.
It’s been about six months since Anders and I decided to turn the farm into a farmstay, and as you can imagine, it hasn’t been easy. We started in late spring, which meant it was busy on the farm and Anders was doing his farm stuff and helping Per as much as he could, which meant a lot of the farmstay business rested on my shoulders. And, let’s be honest here, I’m just a backpacker. I went to college for art. I know nothing about running a business, let alone a hotel.
But I’m also not a quitter. I was determined to make this all work. I pulled up my bootstraps and started working, doing the best I could, day-in and day-out.
First, I learned Norwegian. I mean, I’m still learning, but that was something I needed to know, especially as I started to make friends with people in town. Anders had said that it’s the community that really gives people the support they need, and he was right. I’m so used to being alone that I forgot what it was like to not only ask for help, but welcome help.
So I became friends with the people who run the chamber of commerce. Then I became friends with the couple that run the dumpling hotel. Then the hiking outfitters who take tourists through the park. Through them we made a plan that would benefit all the businesses in town when the tourists came, things like free advertising and discounts and the like.
One of the women who operates the hiking outfitters, Ana, became a fast friend of mine, and she’s also an interior designer. With her help, along with some muscle from Anders and Kolbjorn, we turned the guest cottage into new spaces for our guests, maximizing on that cottage-core hygge farmhouse Nordic chic look that everyone goes crazy for. Now there are four separate rooms, two upstairs and two downstairs, totally self-contained, and each big enough for four travelers. It’s right by the water too, giving them the perfect view of the fjord.
We were then going to turn some of the rooms in the farmhouse into guest rooms as well, but his sisters all complained once they realized their own bedrooms would be transformed. Being that they all visit quite often, we instead set about building yet another guest cottage, which only got finished in October. This cottage has two units, plus one large dorm-style room—a tribute to my backpacking days—since a lot of the people who come here are backpackers, looking to go hiking in the national park.
But even though dealing with guests face-to-face, making sure I’m constantly promoting the place on social media, and running the calendar and bookings takes up all of my time and can be extremely taxing, it helps that I’m good at it. I mean, really good at it. Like, I’ve spent a long time searching for my calling, looking high and low around Europe, hoping to find myself and my purpose, and yet I never thought this would be it.
Anders says I’m a natural. I
