Page 24 of A Copenhagen Snowmance

Chapter Seventeen

Anna’s still pondering Jamie’s words as they near Eckersbergsgade.

He’s been kidding her? How? Which bits? All of it?

The serial killer bit? She really doesn’t think so, but women can never really know, can they?

The walk has been quiet, perhaps both thinking about each other’s words.

She feels out of sorts but isn’t sure why.

And he hasn’t replaced his arm around her shoulder.

Now they walk separately, hands in pockets.

“Shall I get a bottle of gl?gg for home?” he asks. Home. She supposes it is home to both of them but in different ways. Something about that, teamed with the way they are walking, makes her feel … melancholic? What is that about?

She casts him a sideways glance as she says she’d rather have tea.

His profile is determined as he faces the direction of the house, but she scans the rest of him; his unruly hair that could really do with a hat on it, and the knitted scarf wound around his neck.

Her eyes pause at his nape, currently covered by multiple thick layers and she has a raging desire to slide her fingers in and over the skin.

Anna gives herself a mental slap. Jamie is her tenant, not someone she should be having lusty ideas about.

This day has been a flurry of emotions, she must be exhausted and hence unruly in her thoughts.

He might feel her gazing, as his face flicks to her.

“Look, I didn’t mean to upset you. With what I said before,” he says, but not fully contrite. More appeasing. “Everyone’s entitled to live as they see fit, you and your mother included. If moving whenever you like works for you then … as you wish.”

He stops there, but Anna feels he was about to add more.

“But?” she supplies.

“I guess I don’t understand it,” he says, somewhat unwillingly.

He wants to be honest with her, apparently.

“I don’t talk about it much, but I suppose it might inform my thinking and judgements.

My mother left my dad and I, when I was young.

I never got to ask her why or have any kind of explanation that made sense to me or allowed me to make things better or prevent her going.

So, I think I was judging you when I said you run away.

I might still think it’s better to face things, and fix them, or at least try to, but if you feel it’s better for you to remove yourself, then I guess I should see that that might be valid for you. ”

“Not quite an acceptance there,” Anna notes.

“I can’t say I get it, but I can admit to why I don’t get it. Does that make sense?”

“Sure.” It sloughs off any umbrage she’s been carrying. She imagines now a young boy without his mother and with a lonely dad, and it makes sense that he wants some kind of closure for Anna when he’s had none, and why he can’t see that it might not matter to her.

She saw a Charlie Brown cartoon once where Linus says there’s no problem too big or complex that it couldn’t be run away from, and while she’ll stick by her guns that she isn’t running, she’d always understood the message: You can always move on.

However, she suspects Jamie would suggest the cartoon was saying you can always bury your head in the sand. Tom-ay-to tom-ah-to.

“Did you ever find out where your mother went?”

Jamie pulls his mouth together, deliberating.

Does he trust her? That’s what it looks like to Anna.

Turns out he does and Anna feels a glow, but only for a fraction of a second, because he says, “When I said she left us, what I should have said was she took her own life.” He moves into their front yard without waiting for her reaction.

“I am so sorry, Jamie.” It feels so inadequate a response, but it’s all she has in the shock.

She gives him the space to pick up the topic, or let it go.

“She was a good mum, but she suffered from depression. Always had,” he says, head bowed, as he stands on the doorstep.

“And when she fell pregnant when I was nine, she chose to come off her industrial strength anti-depressants without discussing it with my dad, or her doctor. She didn’t want the baby affected by the drugs, I think.

Anyway, it’s all supposition. Gradually, she sank lower and lower, which, being only nine, I thought was due to the pregnancy, and my dad hardly noticed as it was a really busy farming season, and he was rarely home. ”

She wants to tell him it isn’t strange that a little boy wouldn’t have been able to spot signs of an illness he probably didn’t even know she had. But Jamie seems to be working something through, and instinctively she knows to simply let him.

“One morning, she waited until I had left for school, took a cottage pie out of the freezer to defrost for us, then took herself out to a small copse away from the house where she swaddled herself in a blanket and swallowed a shit-ton of sleeping tablets. I came home, put the pie in the oven, ate it, watched some TV, and eventually went to bed. My dad came in, ate the leftovers, and only when he went to bed realised she wasn’t there and woke me.

It took a day before we found her and that was only because the dog tracked her. ”

“Oh, Jamie, that’s awful,” Anna says, putting her hand on his arm. Not touching him right now feels all kinds of wrong.

His voice sounds thicker. “I never thought to look for her around the house. Maybe I could have run for my dad earlier and we could have found her in time.”

“Don’t,” Anna says, her heart bleeding for the little Jamie. “You were only nine, and nothing looked amiss to you.”

“Yeah, logically that makes sense, but I’ll always wonder.

And while some people were judgemental about her having done this to us, I see that even through her illness, which convinced her we would truly be better off without her and that she should take the baby with her, she still cared enough to take herself away from the house and keep it as a safe space for us.

She didn’t take a messy route, and above all …

she left us the bloody cottage pie, so we’d eat. ”

Anna simply doesn’t know what to say to him. This poor man, caught in the crux of his mother making such a devastating decision and yet still doing so in a way that showed she cared about them. How did you square that?

Instead, she throws her arms around him in the biggest hug she can manage.

“She was ill, Jamie, but she was clearly kind.”

He is still for a long time, until she feels him nod against her head.

“She was. But I would give anything to have one minute with her.”

“What would you say?”

“I’m tied,” he says, clearly having thought about it infinite times before. “Do I use the minute to beg her not to go, or do I use it to make her help me understand her need to remove herself?”

The use of the word remove scratches at her, but she lets it. It’s nothing in comparison to the pain he’s experienced.

“Thank you for telling me, Jamie,” she says, releasing him.

He shakes himself and nods towards the door. “I need chocolate. And maybe some cookies. Turns out I crave comfort food when coughing up my past.” And as she casts him yet another sideways glance, she senses she might just be the first person he’s ever voiced this to.

* * *

Anna follows Jamie quietly up the stairs, him with the teapot and mugs, her with the plate of pebern?dder.

She senses he’s a little raw from having bared his history, and she wants to give him the space to come back to them.

The jigsaw seems the perfect way, and without conversation, they each move around the hyggekrog space, lighting the candles, creating a gorgeous glow, both around the room and in the dormer window, the raised sill holding more candles, and Jamie’s mementoes.

The light from the streetlamp outside shows snow beginning again.

The flakes fall leisurely, in time with the piano music Jamie has arranged to play low on the speaker pod.

This, Anna thinks, is what he needs; the comfort and low demand to bring him back.

Each claiming a throw to wrap around themselves, they sit side by side on the little Hans Wegner sofa, perusing the jigsaw in comfortable silence.

Every so often they’ll give each other a “Well done” for having placed a piece, or hand each other another, which might work on their respective sides.

Small as the sofa may be, they aren’t quite touching, but the space between their thighs is close.

Anna can’t help looking at it. She senses the warmth that lies there.

She wonders what would happen if the space were to close.

Would there be sparks? It would be so easy to slide her hand onto his knee, to give him comfort, she tells herself, but really it’s because her fingers are twitching to.

And the flat of her palm wants to slide slowly across the solidity of his thigh and sense the heat of his skin beneath.

“Ah, shit.” Jamie jolts her out of her ruminating and she gives her head a light shake to dispel the thoughts. The cosiness is doing strange things to her. “We’re a piece missing,” he says.

Gradually, they’ve connected all the pieces and just as he says, there is a space just off centre and no corresponding piece.

“Nooo,” she says, disappointed, not least because these jigsaws had been her morfar’s and he was meticulous in putting things away properly, but also as this was a something she and Jamie were working on together.

“We have the victory,” he says. “We completed it. It’s enough.”

But Anna isn’t happy about it. She pushes the throw aside and gets down onto the floor, searching through the pile of the rug.

She looks up to see Jamie watching her on her hands and knees, his pupils huge.

Putting it down to the low lighting, Anna searches on.

Ducking lower, she moves in under the frame of the sofa, its legs raising the seat off the ground enough for her to get in under there.

The light beneath is even worse.

“Jamie? Your phone. Can you shine the torch under here?” She supposes they could just move the sofa away for a better look, but she’s down here now and she doesn’t want to move him out of his comfiness.

Jamie has other ideas it seems, and in the blink of an eye, he’s on the floor next to her, lying on his stomach, like she is.

He shines his phone torch about and Anna tries to keep her eyes on the rug pile, her mind on the task.

It is hard. His measured breathing is loud in her ear, the closeness of him warming the entire length of her side.

Eventually, she admits defeat, dropping her cheek onto the rug, facing him.

“’S’gone.”

Jamie lowers his face to the floor, too, mirroring her. “Doesn’t matter, Anna.” And in their little den, under the sofa, on top of the shaggy rug, it does suddenly feel like nothing really matters. It’s safe and snug and perfect. They gaze at each other in agreement.

His eyes drop to her lips and she can’t help but follow suit. And from there, there is only a synchronised tilt of their bodies, for their faces to come even closer and their lips to touch.

It’s a light kiss – really just a long, slow touch, a sharing of breath almost, no parting of lips, no advancing, no exploring.

A tentative trial, to connect, here in this hidden space, as the rest of the world continues turning, oblivious.

The tenderness of it is exquisite, and when Jamie pulls back, it takes Anna a longer beat to open her eyes, hanging onto the moment.

Neither of them move, but their gazes hold.

“I—” he says, but stops.

“You…?” she prompts lightly.

“I’ve come to understand I can misread things.

Not exterior things, those I’m quite good at, but internal things.

Like thoughts, particularly other people’s.

” He looks embarrassed and Anna wishes he didn’t because his misreading Lajla sounds like a mix of over-enthusiasm, lust and hope, which to her feels simply human.

“So, I prefer people just to say what’s on their minds, blunt and to the point.

It’s one of the things I love about being in Denmark, to be honest, there’s so much less pussyfooting about and softening truths when it’s the truths you need to hear.

” She wonders if he felt the same way when Lajla turned him down flat, but opts not to ask.

“I know we’re fake-dating, but I find I’m wanting it to be real.

” He’s looking her right in the eye with his declaration and she thinks he’s a braver soul than her.

“Like right now,” he goes on, his voice low, making her want to lean closer in again, but resisting, “I want to touch your face and slide my hand into your hair as I kiss you. But there’s no one here to be faking for, it’s simply because I want to.

“But I won’t press it beyond the faking if you aren’t interested. I’m just putting it out there that I’d like to see if this might be something more, because my gut tells me it is.”

Anna says nothing. There are so many thoughts that come to her: that she wants to touch his face and thread her fingers through his hair too; that she finds his kisses intoxicating; that rolling into him, under him, would be so easy; that she’d be starting something she knows she can’t finish; that he’s had enough abrupt endings in his life already; that she’s absolutely not risking “something more” ever again…

but she can’t work out which to put first.

“Ah,” he says, his tone somewhere between disappointment and understanding. “It’s OK. You don’t feel the same. I guess I got that wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” she says low, but suddenly she can’t hold the gaze any longer and her eyes are wanting to look anywhere but at him.

“What?”

Anna shifts, to push herself up onto her knees, away from their cocoon. And still she won’t meet his gaze.

“I said, you aren’t wrong,” she says, feeling that having trusted her with his past, he deserves the truth, but her thoughts are ordering themselves now. She senses his relief, but knows it’s to no good. “But it’s not something I can pursue, Jamie.”