Page 8 of A Curse for the Homesick

THE CROFT

2013

It was entirely possible that Soren and I would have continued to only speak to each other in situations where one of us had not known the other was going to be there if our literature teacher had not decided that he was sick of everyone partnering up with their friends for group projects and that he would be pairing us off alphabetically instead. There was no one between Eriksson and Fell , which was how I ended up with plans to go to Soren’s house on a Thursday evening in October. I had by then increased from two to three swim practices a week, which was progress, but not nearly enough. Thursday was one of my off days.

My dad took the opportunity to invite Anna (from the hospital) over to the house for dinner. When I passed him in the kitchen, he was making ravioli.

“It’s odd to think of that boy in a classroom,” my dad said.

“Soren?”

“In my head, he’s twenty-seven.”

Soren lived on the farthest northern tip of Stenland. Once I’d made it around the mountains, the road turned narrow and gravelly. To my right, the hills sprawled green gold and treeless. To my left, whitecaps frothed across a flinty sea. A single power line heralded the curves of the road. I saw no other cars but sheep in every form: a cluster by a stone fence, a ram on the far side of a creek, a bloodied corpse on the edge of the gravel. It took forty-five minutes to get there, and as someone who had never lived farther than a few hundred feet from wherever I wanted to go, I could not imagine driving all that distance every day.

Soren’s house was bigger than mine. The ground floor was carefully laid gray rock, and the first was black wood. The turf roof had openings for skylights and chimneys. Each of the windows was fitted with a red frame, and from inside, the light glowed gingery gold. Behind the house, a craggy hillside stepped into the clouds. There were old legends that said Stenland had been formed when a giant had been turned to stone, and out here, you could see why.

I got out of my car and swung my feet onto the soggy ground. My breath turned misty in the air. The silence was so profound, I might as well have arrived in another century: no cars, no TVs, no fishing boats clanging their bells. Even the ocean was muffled by fog.

Lukas answered the door when I knocked. It was only five, but he was already wearing flannel pajama bottoms. His dark curls were sticking up at the back, like maybe he’d just been asleep.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s Tess Eriksson.”

It was a normal Stennish introduction—the sort of thing you say to someone with whom you’ve never had a chat but know anyway because everyone knows everyone, because your family has hurt their family, because you are unable to feign casualness when you are already linked together with iron chains. So instead, you just acknowledge: I know exactly who you are. I wondered if he remembered what my mum looked like, if he was thinking how much I resembled her.

“Lukas Fell,” I said.

“Come in, I guess. Soren’s off… I don’t know. You can sit in the kitchen and wait for him or whatever.”

I followed Lukas through the house. From the outside, I’d expected something that felt old, but it was warm and neat. I knew via Kitty that Soren’s grandmother—his dad’s mother, from the Fell side of the family—had moved in with the boys after their parents had died. Among the boots and raincoats by the door, one set was fuchsia.

Lukas flopped across a yellow couch and pressed Play on whatever violent show he was watching. I’d arrived just in time to hear someone’s head get chopped off. Over the kitchen table, there was a window with a view of the ocean, all pewter and steel under the fog. I sat down and examined the vase at the center of the table. Stenland was too far north for most trees and flowers, but the vase was filled with branches of some kind. From a willow bush, maybe. Their leaves were a pale, grayish-blue, and they were lovely in a sparse, delicate sort of way.

“He did that this morning,” Lukas said.

I turned in my seat. Lukas didn’t bother looking away from his show, but he nodded vaguely in my direction.

“The vase. He did it this morning.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I think it looks stupid,” Lukas added.

“Does he…often put out vases?”

Kitty had a signature expression, a kind of disappointed scowl that made you feel like you were the stupidest person on Earth. I’d always thought it was unique to Kitty, but maybe it was inherited after all because Lukas gave me the exact same look.

A back door opened somewhere, and Soren called, “Lukas?” The stamping of wet boots. “Did Tess’s car pull up? Because I just saw—” He came up short on the other side of the room. I had never seen someone so entirely covered in mud. It was across his chest, on his knees, splattered up the side of his face. He looked almost violently startled to see me, and when he did, he touched the mud on his jaw.

“I think you sat in some sheep shit,” I said.

“Touché,” Soren said.

Lukas snorted and turned up the volume.

“Give me a minute,” Soren said. He gestured vaguely at the kitchen. “Grab whatever you want.” On the way past the TV, he turned the volume down again, which made Lukas throw a sock at him.

Once Soren was gone, Lukas said, “Not whatever you want. Like, don’t take anything good.”

“If I get hungry, I’ll be sure to eat something that looks terrible.”

“Thanks.”

Sitting in the Fells’ kitchen, I fidgeted in my chair while I waited, mentally rehearsing what I could say, if I should say anything at all, to explain how I resented my mother, how sorry I was for what happened, how desperate I was for their forgiveness. There were no words good enough.

Soren reappeared a few minutes later in new clothes. His face looked bright pink and freshly scrubbed. He cast his gaze around the room—Lukas pointedly turned up the volume of the TV again—before saying, somewhat grudgingly, “I suppose we can work in my room.”

I followed him up a set of stairs, narrow and steep. I had never been inside a boy’s bedroom before, and there was something about it that felt vaguely illicit. Soren’s room was at the top of the house, with a slanting ceiling and some of the skylights I’d noticed from outside. There was a small wooden desk and a small chest of drawers and a small radiator tucked beneath the window. The only things that were not small were the bookshelves. There were two of them, and the tops seemed to have been cut at custom angles to accommodate the triangular ceiling. He’d stacked the books horizontally and then begun to double-stack them in places, and now the shelves were bowing dangerously. There was another collection beginning on his side table and a few more poking out from beneath his bed.

“No wonder you get offended when I get better essay grades than you,” I said.

“Not offended,” he said. “Merely bemused.”

“I didn’t know you read so much.”

“I don’t. I just like the aesthetic.”

I picked the nearest two books off the shelf. Hamlet and The Hunger Games. “Eclectic,” I said.

“Do you read much?” He said it casually, as if the answer did not matter much, as if a person could possibly own this many books and approve of any answer besides Yes, emphatically.

“I feel like this is a test,” I said.

“Not a test.”

I held up the books. “Both of these have characters named Claudius. Do I pass?”

“It wasn’t a test.”

“They also both have characters named Peeta.”

“There’s no one named Peeta in Hamlet. ”

“Sure. He’s friends with Rosencrantz.”

“Ah, yes,” Soren said. “The iconic trio—Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Peeta.”

“I love the Peeta soliloquy in Act Two.”

Soren took the books out of my hands and put them back on his shelf. “Again,” he said, “I wouldn’t test you.”

As I started pulling textbooks and notes out of my school bag, my eyes kept flicking toward his shelves. I couldn’t say what he read, other than everything. Fat fantasy epics were squished next to thin literary novels. Books had to be shipped to Stenland from the UK and were priced accordingly, so I was aware I was looking at a precious collection. I wanted to go through them, pulling out titles I’d read, but Soren had already turned to our homework, the papers for which he was spreading across the desk. He had long fingers, the nails cut short and scrubbed clean. They might have been elegant, his hands, if not for the patchwork of scars and scrapes across them. I realized I was staring, so I cleared my throat and looked at the assignment.

We’d been tasked with translating a four-hundred-year-old ballad from Stennish to English using a stapled packet of grammar and vocabulary from our teacher. According to my dad, translation didn’t used to be part of the curriculum. It was a new thing the education council wanted high schoolers studying. There was just one university in Stenland, a small campus with six compact buildings, and Stennish Studies was one of their limited number of departments. I wanted to ask Soren if he ever thought about going to the university, with grades like his, or maybe to a university somewhere else, but it felt too personal.

We started translating, moving word by word and line by line. I tried to surreptitiously find an online translator on my phone and discovered only one, which appeared to have been created at the dawn of computers and never subsequently updated. If I was with Kitty, I would’ve made a joke about the pointlessness of studying a language the internet had not even bothered to learn.

I kept looking at the last stanza, which was one from a sailor’s perspective as he left his love behind, and eventually, I said, “I don’t think he’s sailing off.”

“No?”

“I think he’s been turned to stone, and now the sea is erod-ing his body.”

Soren frowned at our paper. “You reckon?”

“That’s why he’s so sad.”

“I think he’s just heartbroken to be leaving her,” he said. “They love each other. That’s the point. Love amplifies normal experiences.”

I sat back in my chair. “Well, I think she killed him.”

Soren looked over at me, smiling slightly, and my stomach did something complicated. We’d shifted our chairs closer together as we worked, and there was a very small corner of my knee that was brushing his thigh. Did he not move because he didn’t feel it? Or because he did and wanted it there?

“You’re a much better partner than Henrik,” Soren said.

“Yes, well, it helps to know how to read.”

The humor vanished from Soren’s face. He shifted his leg away from mine abruptly and started gathering our papers.

“I’m sorry. That was mean. I don’t know why I said that.”

But I did know why I’d said it. I’d said it because we’d been talking about books earlier, and there was a part of me that still felt like I was taking a test. Soren had done all the cleverest bits of translation, and surely he’d noticed that he was better at it than I was, that he could untangle the words and reincarnate them into something beautiful.

Soren said nothing. He slid the papers back into the folder and closed it with an air of finality.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“Henrik isn’t stupid,” Soren said.

“I know. I—wanted you to think I was smart. I didn’t mean it.”

He nodded, but he didn’t say anything more. Linnea would’ve been so hurt if she’d heard me. Linnea, who’d been teased our whole lives about not gliding through school with Kitty’s and my grace or luck. When Soren led the way back downstairs, silent still, I felt a dull flush of embarrassed anger.

Lukas was still watching his show on the couch. Oh, a sex scene—lovely. I was just grabbing my coat from the back of one of the kitchen chairs, where I’d left it, when the door swung open and Soren’s grandmother came in, a sheepdog nipping at her heels. I recognized her vaguely from assorted school functions; she was so tall you couldn’t not notice her, so tall it was difficult not to point it out. Elin, I thought. Elin Fell. Her gray hair was tied back into a ponytail, and her clothes were muddy, though not nearly as muddy as Soren’s had been. I braced myself for her disapproval.

“Ah,” she said, nodding at me like it was no surprise to see me in her kitchen, “Tess Eriksson.” She strode over to me, the dog still trailing her, and shook my hand three times. On the third time, she said, “Your car’s in a state.”

I frowned.

“Go on,” she said, gesturing with her head toward the door. “Have a look.”

Outside, the mist had turned to rain, a drizzle spat from low-slung clouds. I flicked on the flashlight of my phone to make it across the muddy driveway. It wasn’t until I reached my car that I realized Soren had followed me and the dog had followed him.

I crouched by the wheel. The tire was as flat as a tire could be, squished into the earth like it had melted. I thought I saw a gleam of something gray reflecting back the beam of my flashlight, and when I touched it, I found the flat head of a nail pressed against the rubber.

“Do you leave many nails lying around?” I asked Soren.

His hand was on the dog’s head. He was watching me, but he had an absent expression on his face, like his mind had been elsewhere. He blinked and said, “Yes, on purpose. To surprise weary travelers.”

“I have a spare,” I said.

But I never got as far as opening my trunk because my back tire was flat too, and when I dropped into a squat next to it, I found another nail protruding from the rubber.

“Do you really?” I asked.

He frowned at me.

“Leave nails lying around,” I clarified.

His face went very blank. “Is that tire also flat?”

I leaned to the side so he could see.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

The dog trailed him back up the steps to his house, tail wagging. I sent my dad a picture of the tire. He immediately texted back a gif of Sam from Holes saying I can fix that. Then he quickly added the message *you can fix that! There was a series of enthusiastic emojis.

I sent him a picture of the other tire.

He sent me a frowny face.

I looked over my shoulder at the house, and through the kitchen window, I could see Lukas sprawled on the couch while Soren stood over him. Soren had the look of someone tightly controlling their anger. Lukas had the look of someone who didn’t particularly care. In the kitchen, their grandmother was scrubbing potatoes and looking at the boys from under raised eyebrows.

Soren came back outside a moment later. He stopped on the bottom step and put his hands in his pockets.

“It seems,” he said, “my brother put nails in your tires.”

“Ah.”

“I’ll pay for new ones. I’m sorry. About all this.”

I looked at my phone. It was eight forty-five. I could call my dad, who could probably borrow the neighbor’s car, the Ship of Theseus being the only one between us. Kitty and her mum were in London for a long weekend to see a show, and Linnea didn’t have her license.

“I can drive you home,” Soren said.

“Are there any nails in your tires?”

“I should bloody well hope not.”

But I hoped that there were. Which was stupid. I hoped it anyway.

“And after school tomorrow,” he said, “we can get new tires in town and you can drive back here with me to pick up your car.”

“That’s a lot of driving,” I said.

He raked a hand through his hair, which I was coming to realize was his habit, the thing he did when he’d already decided what he was going to say, but hadn’t yet said it.

“You could just stay,” he said.

“I suppose,” I said, “that would be the most environmentally conscious option.”

“You could take my room.” Quickly, he added, “I fall asleep on the couch all the time anyway.”

“Should I be concerned Lukas will spear me with nails while I sleep?”

“No. He’s… I’m sorry. Maybe he thought it would be funny. I don’t know what he was trying to prove.”

“Trying to prove?”

“You know,” he said.

Soren was looking at me. I could only see his silhouette and the faintest shine of his eyes. He tilted back on his heels, waiting for an answer.

Warmth spread from my stomach up my chest and down my legs. I wanted to call Kitty and Linnea immediately and tell them I was staying the night at a boy’s house. Even Linnea hadn’t done that—she and Henrik only ever had sex in his car or the beach caves. I also wanted to not tell Kitty and Linnea, perhaps ever, because there was something secret and perfect about this quiet house at the end of the world, and in front of it, Soren.

“I should tell my dad,” I said.

Soren exhaled softly, then coughed once to cover it. “I’ll tell Elin.” He went back inside again, and I walked a loop around my car. I didn’t want to call my dad; I felt like he’d be able to hear the hormones in my voice. I turned away from the house and toward the blackness of the sea and pressed his name.

“Tess?” my dad said.

I focused on the waves. “Is it okay if I stay here tonight? Because of the tires.”

“I suppose so. You always make good choices. Is Elin there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you dating Soren?”

“No.”

“Because keep in mind that he’s twenty-seven.”

“He’s eighteen.”

“He has the air,” my dad said, “of someone who is twenty-seven.”

“Can I stay here or not?”

Again, my dad said, “You always make good choices,” as if to reassure himself as much as me. As a parenting philosophy, I found it both endearing and sad. Endearing because he trusted me. Sad because it spoke to my dad’s conviction that I was already more capable of making intelligent decisions and didn’t have much need for him.

Back inside, Soren had started chopping the potatoes. Elin was inspecting something in the oven that looked like mutton, but I wasn’t sure. Despite the legions of sheep across the island, it wasn’t that common in the grocery store. My dad and I tended to buy frozen things imported from elsewhere, like mince pies and fish sticks.

Without preamble, Elin handed me an onion. “Knives in the block,” she said. “Sorry my grandson’s a clod.”

“Which one?” I said.

“Ha ha,” Soren said.

“Both of them.”

I glanced over at Lukas to see if he cared, but he was still staring at the TV. I wanted to ask if he was always this useless, but I didn’t think I’d yet established that much rapport with Elin.

By the time we sat down to eat, it was nine thirty. There were mashed potatoes with sweet sheep’s butter and soft rolls and mutton with rosemary and roasted onion. Elin selected two beers from the fridge with a practiced habit, then said, “Oh, would you like one, Tess?”

My dad hardly drank, and never at dinner with me, but I said, “Sure. Thanks.”

“I’d like one,” Lukas said.

“Too bad.”

“You’ve been giving Soren beer since he was fourteen.”

Soren smiled pleasantly at his brother as he pried the lid off a bottle and handed it to me.

“Do you not see that?” Lukas insisted, waving at his grandmother. “The way he’s smirking at me?”

“Oh, bother,” Elin said. “I must’ve missed it.” She turned to me. “Sorry we’re eating so late. It gets busy out here. Chores, and that.”

“What do you grow?” I asked.

“Abject misery?” Lukas suggested.

“Depends on the year,” Elin said. “How good the soil looks, and whether we can hire help. The sheep are our constant.”

“Do you need to hire much help?” I wasn’t sure if I was being nosy; I was genuinely curious, and I’d never wanted to ask Kitty any of these questions for fear of looking too interested.

“Less so now that Soren’s older. We get by, the two of us, but it’ll look better once he’s not in school anymore.”

Soren ripped a roll in half. He didn’t react to what Elin said, but he wouldn’t look at me either. I had more questions—like why she said the two of us instead of the three of us , and whether Soren, who was so clearly excellent with literature, would have time for university—but I ate my potatoes instead of asking.

After we finished, Lukas wandered off without offering to help clean up. Soren scrubbed and I dried and Elin put away. When Soren handed me things, our fingers would brush, his skin hot and soapy.

“I don’t need to tell you not to fall asleep in the same room tonight, do I?” Elin asked abruptly.

Heat rushed to my cheeks. “No.”

“Well. I would say you should take Lukas’s, since it’s his fault you’re stuck here, but he’s probably already barricaded his door.”

“I was going to take the couch,” Soren said.

“I’m happy on the couch,” I said.

Elin waved me away. “Let him be gallant.”

Soren pulled spare sheets out of a hall closet, and Elin gave me a pair of pajamas. In the bathroom, which was painted soft red and lit dimly, she’d laid out a new toothbrush for me, still in the packaging. I brushed longer than was strictly necessary. My hair looked scraggly, and my cheeks were flushed. Elin’s pajamas were a matching plaid set, bottoms and a button-up shirt. I put on the bottoms but not the shirt, instead wearing the black tank top I’d had on beneath my sweater. When I tried to walk, the excess fabric caught beneath my feet.

Soren wasn’t on the couch when I went back outside. I wasn’t sure where he was. Another bathroom, maybe. In the kitchen, I lingered longer than necessary, drinking a glass of water and then washing the glass. When Soren didn’t reappear, I walked up the stairs to his room, but I didn’t close the door behind me.

What an odd and personal thing, to be in someone else’s bedroom. The bed he slept on and read on and had maybe had sex on. The window he looked out every day, the glass a perfect mirror in night. There were no actual mirrors in here, of course, because Soren did not need to wake up every day and search his reflection for the sudden appearance of a skeld’s mark.

I sat lightly on the edge of the bed. It seemed impossible that I could be here, only a few feet through space from Soren, and we would just go to sleep. I looked at the open door and imagined him coming up the stairs. The house was quiet. I stood up again.

Light footsteps on the stairs. I watched the shadows shifting across the walls, waiting for them to solidify into a person.

That was probably the moment I gave up pretending I did not want Soren completely—hearing those footsteps. Because I knew that if it was Lukas coming to poke at me with nails or Elin coming to see that I’d gotten settled in all right, my heart would plummet through the floorboards and land on the couch next to Soren. I wanted him—him and his serious gray eyes and his pianist fingers and his thin, fine mouth, and when I saw it was indeed him leaning against the door frame, I couldn’t remember, if I was being honest, the last time I had not wanted him.

“I forgot something,” Soren said.

“Oh,” I said. “What?”

“The excuse I was going to make about forgetting something.”

I laughed, and the sound that came out of my mouth was unfamiliar, breathy and uncertain. Soren was wearing a gray T-shirt that fit him snugly across his shoulders.

“A book,” he said. “I always read before bed.”

I turned to the nearest bookshelf because my cheeks felt warm. “Reading doesn’t make me tired, really.”

“Me neither,” he said. “But it’s before bed or not at all.”

Soren came up behind me, his feet quiet on the wooden floor. I didn’t want to turn and look at him because then he might realize we were standing too close together and move back. I could feel him over my shoulder, gazing at the bookshelf, maybe assessing the spines where my fingers lingered.

“What do you read?” he said.

I considered saying something that I thought might impress him—tossing out the few classics I had actually read outside of school and of my own volition. I felt like he’d see through me. “Mostly fantasy. The weirder, the better.”

He made a soft hmm noise over my shoulder.

“That surprises you?”

I was more aware of his body than I had ever been of anyone’s body: the space it took and the air around it, the creak of the floorboards as he leaned his weight to one foot, the sound of him breathing quietly. My skin felt hot and flushed, and if I turned, I would be turning directly into him. If I stepped backward, my spine would meet his chest and his mouth would be at my ear.

“I figured you’d be a nonfiction person,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re very practical.”

“I suppose I like reading about curses,” I said, “worse than ours.”

Outside, I could hear rain pattering against glass. A sheep bleated. Beneath it all was the steady inhale, exhale of the sea, the background music to every moment I had ever lived.

“Tess,” Soren whispered.

I turned.

His expression wasn’t at all what I’d expected. He looked pained, almost, his jaw tight. And he was close, so close that if we inhaled at the same time, our chests would brush. Reflected light from the window cast raindrop shadows across his face, and as I watched, they slid down the length of his nose, across the planes of his cheeks, around his jaw.

“You really hate this place,” he said.

I opened my mouth to say that I didn’t because for a moment, I forgot that I did. I forgot that I was going to leave this island and never come back. “Don’t you?”

“It’s home.”

“Why read if not to escape?”

“If I do it in my head,” he said, “then in real life, I don’t have to.”

I swallowed. Tried to think of something intelligent and witty but got lost along the way. Knew I was staring at him; could not stop.

Soren took my wrist between his thumb and forefinger. I was sure he must’ve been able to feel my pulse; I could feel it, beating out under his touch. There was a smudge of dirt running up the inside of my arm, probably from leaning against my tire. He wiped it carefully with his thumb, bending his head so I couldn’t see his eyes through the fringe of his lashes. His hair shadowed his forehead. The dirt was gone, but he didn’t let go of my wrist. He laid the rest of his fingers gently across my forearm. When he took a breath, the sound scratched, hoarse, and there was nothing he could’ve said that would’ve made me want him more than that: the bare truth of how much he wanted me back.

“Soren?” I said.

He pressed me against the bookshelf and kissed me.

It took me a moment to react. When I kissed him back, he sighed against my mouth and drew his hands to either side of my head, his fingers winding up through my hair. His lips were soft and tasted like toothpaste. There was nothing but him, nothing in the world, just his chest blocking my view of the room and his head tilted down to meet mine.

He kissed the way he spoke: slowly, deliberately, with a control that did not match the tremor in his hands as they moved down my neck, my chest, as they settled around my waist and held me to him.

I kissed him back the way he kissed me, slowly at first, then harder, with a breathless sort of desperation. When I arched my hips against his, he pushed back, making his body taut against mine. It might’ve hurt, pressed so tightly against the bookshelf, but his hands moved, one to the small of my back, one to my head, keeping the shelves from digging into me.

Downstairs, a creak. Soren’s lips left mine. He looked at me, those eyes and that flush in his cheeks—god, god—and then he was on the other side of the room, shutting the door quietly and locking it behind him.

Then he was back, gathering me into his arms and holding me to him. We were turning, and I felt myself pulling him toward the bed.

My knees met the back of his mattress and folded. The weight of him on top of me—I’d expected him to feel heavy, but he didn’t. He was braced with an arm on either side of me, one knee between my legs.

When he kissed me again, there was no more rhythm, no more restraint. The sound of his breathing was ragged and came from the back of his throat. I knew the exact places where our bodies touched and all the places they didn’t, but I wanted them to. My hand found his waistband. I ran my fingers along the fabric, then just beneath, along the smooth skin under the elastic waist of his boxers. He exhaled something that sounded like my name into my mouth, and I made a sound I’d never made before, something desperate and wanting.

He was taking off my tank top, and I was taking off his shirt, and it was not possible to be embarrassed with him looking at me the way he was looking at me. I touched his back carefully, and he shivered. There was just so much of it, this vast expanse of skin, all flat and graceful lines.

“Have you ever…?” he whispered.

I shook my head. “Have you?”

“No.” He was lit from above, silhouetted by the overhead light, and it made him look filigreed, like a Renaissance painting. I wanted to stare at him, memorize him, touch him, have him—I wanted and I wanted and I wanted. “Should we stop?”

I had it in my head that you weren’t supposed to do everything all at once—not at first, at least—and that had sounded fine to me in theory. There were steps; you took them one at a time and not out of order and not in a mad rush. But I had underestimated the power of instinct. The fact that my body would know, so clearly, what it wanted to do. This was what I wanted, all I wanted, to be closer than our bodies were, to be as close as our bodies could be.

“I don’t want to stop,” I said. “Unless you do.”

Soren kissed me again. Our legs were wound together. His hands were touching my body so carefully, exploring, his fingers against my chest and around my waist and against the inside of my thigh.

I slid my hand along the inside of his waistband again, watching his expression. He let out a pained little sound, and my whole body went hot, shivering cold, then hot again.

“Tess,” he said. “I want—”

A knock at the door.

Soren went still, propped above me. His jaw was tight as he breathed to a count of three and then, eyes still on me, said, “What.”

From the other side of the door, Elin said, “I have a phone call for the very gallant young man who offered to sleep on the couch tonight.”

Soren looked up slowly, staring at the headboard. I could see his heart beating at his throat, right where you’d take a pulse. He shut his eyes briefly. His voice was very flat, betraying nothing, when he said, “One second.”

He climbed off me and pulled his shirt back over his head. Abruptly, I felt bare, exposed, uncertain, all the instinct that had been telling me I was doing everything the right way vanishing the moment Soren’s weight had. I pulled the comforter to my chin.

When Soren opened the door, he stood between it and the frame, shielding me from Elin’s view. I curled farther under the quilt.

“It’s Jamieson,” Elin was saying. “He says the flock is on the road. We must have a fence down.”

Soren was quiet. I risked a glance at his back and saw the muscles tense beneath his shirt.

“Don’t ask me to get them for you,” Elin said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“It’s your croft, Soren.”

“I’ll go get them,” he said.

Neither of them said anything else for a moment, and I got the sense some silent conversation was transpiring in the expressions between them. I couldn’t see either of their faces, but when Soren closed the door and turned back to me, he looked, briefly, like he was a thousand years old. He leaned against the door and exhaled, and then he scrounged a half smile from somewhere.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he said.

“Where would I possibly go?”

He gestured vaguely at the books. At his dresser, he started pulling out clothes. His back was to me, so I let myself watch in fascination as he stripped off his pajamas, replacing them with jeans and a sweater.

“Do you need help?” I asked.

“No. I’ll be right back.” He made it as far as the door, ran his hand through his hair, and then looped back just long enough to kiss me again, fast and desperate. “Jesus Christ,” he said, pulling away. “I fucking hate sheep.”

Then he was gone.

Through his window, I saw the arcing beam of a flashlight. I heard a dog bark twice. I touched my face and my lips like they had been remade and were now unfamiliar territories for me to rediscover. Once he was gone, the enormity of my desire felt like a black hole. It should not have been possible. Someone should have warned me. I thought of Soren saying, Love amplifies normal experiences. I wanted him to come back and tell me he loved me cataclysmically, and I wanted him to take off all his clothes and have sex with me, and I wanted him to never see me again so that I would not have to face the truth of the matter, that you could feel so much for one person, that someone could walk into your brain and change it.

I curled on the bed and waited for him, but at some point, I must’ve slipped into sleep, thinking of him out there in the rain and the wind and all that billowing quiet here at the end of the world.

* * *

When I went downstairs the morning after Soren and I did not sleep together, I found Elin making coffee in the kitchen and Lukas eating his breakfast without looking at it, gaze fixed on his phone. The sheets on the couch had been neatly refolded.

Elin said good morning, and though her voice was perfectly level, I convinced myself she was either reproachful or laughing at me.

“He’s taking the sheep to graze,” she said.

“They can’t graze here?”

“If they only grazed here, they’d run out of things to eat, wouldn’t they?”

“And then they’d all be dead,” Lukas said, still looking at his phone. “Which would be terrible.”

To Lukas, Elin said, “Offer Tess some porridge.”

“Can’t Tess get her own porridge?”

“It’s polite to offer.”

“I can get my own porridge,” I said. “Thanks.”

Breakfast was quiet. I wanted something to do with my hands, but I was afraid Elin would like me less if I took out my phone, so I flipped through our translation for class. I kept glancing at Elin out of the corner of my eye, wondering what she, the mother of a son turned to stone, thought of me, the daughter of the mother who’d done it. I knew Elin had been a skeld—once, when she’d been my age, then a second time twenty or so years back. No one really talked about those uneventful skeld seasons when no one had been turned to stone. I assumed that to women like Elin, who had faced down the curse and emerged unscathed, women like my mother seemed impossibly reckless. Or impossibly stupid.

When I heard Soren at the door, I stared fixedly at the paper so no one would see me blush. I risked a glance as he was scooping himself porridge, but he was looking at Elin. Between bites, he told her something I didn’t understand about a fence down at a field with a name I didn’t know. Their back and forth was efficient and practiced, and it made me acutely aware of how little I knew of this world they lived in. When Soren looked at me, his eyes didn’t linger. When he passed behind my chair, he didn’t brush against me. It made me feel like last night existed entirely in my head, but I also knew I would be embarrassed if he said or did anything romantic in front of Elin.

It was still dark when we climbed into Soren’s truck. I expected Lukas to take the passenger seat, but he clambered into the cramped back row without a word.

Soren put the truck in First. It was a manual, old as rocks, but well maintained. I liked watching people drive cars they had a relationship with; I thought it revealed something about them, about the way they took care of themselves. Soren’s hand was light on the gear lever, the other hand loose around the wheel. His eyes were steady on the dirt road ahead.

Lukas stuck his head between our seats. “You should always drive to school with us,” he told me. “And then I wouldn’t have to listen to any agonizing audiobooks.”

“Is that why you put nails in my tires?”

“I already told Soren I didn’t do that,” Lukas said.

Soren glanced back at his brother. “Not convincingly.”

“Whatever,” Lukas said. “Hey, you know Eva, right?”

“Rendall? Sure. She swims the 200 butterfly.”

“She’s my girlfriend. She says you’re bloody quick.”

I’d never learned how to accept a compliment, so I didn’t. “I haven’t competed in months.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “Injury.”

“What happened?”

“Just…overuse.”

I noticed Soren frowning at me in my peripheral vision, but I kept staring at the dark road ahead.

“Oh,” Lukas said. “Well, you’re going to fix it, right? Because Eva said you’re so fast, you’re going to go swim at an American university and that they’ll pay you to be there and everything. And that you and your coach have been talking to all the schools already.”

The truth was that I was only very fast, not astonishingly fast. I wasn’t good enough in Year Eleven to get an offer from any school that could also pay the exorbitant US tuition fees, but my times were improving enough that a few coaches told me to stay in touch. By October, I was meant to have dropped four seconds off my 400-freestyle time, but when I’d tried to swim it two weeks before, I’d gone forty-six seconds slower. The pace I’d swum in Year Seven. Part of me already knew that there was no way, at this point, I could get fast enough before the recruiting deadlines. But it had been my plan for so long that I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do. I thought of my mum in the parking lot, offering to help me write an essay, and I felt a cold wash of panic.

“I think it’d be mad if you went to university in America,” Lukas was saying. “Like, dorms and frats and American football and all that. Then you could get a job there and never again have to eat an animal you named.”

“Cut it out,” Soren said.

“Just because you get off on shit weather and wool sweaters…”

“I do get off on wool sweaters,” Soren said. “That’s why I have that sexy-wool-sweater-of-the-month calendar.”

Lukas made a disgusted noise, and it was so over the top I couldn’t tell if he was taking the piss. To me, he said, “You get it, right? You don’t want to stay on this fucking rock your whole life?”

I was slow to answer because I didn’t want to agree with him about anything, but eventually I said, “Not really, no.”

“See?” he said to Soren. “You never listen to me, but maybe if she says it—”

“Lukas.”

“Or I guess we can just stay here and get turned to fucking statues! That’s fine too! Not like our parents would be offended by that or anything.”

The truck was painfully quiet. Across the hills, faint fingers of sun began to cast the world in gold. I pressed myself farther back into my seat. Lukas muttered something unintelligible and slid on a pair of headphones. I had always thought of Soren’s silences as an offensive, rather than a defensive, strategy. But in this case, it seemed more like he was protecting himself and Lukas both from an argument that wouldn’t lead anywhere good.

I didn’t say anything, but I reached for the gear lever and touched the back of his hand with my pinkie. It was a question, or maybe a few questions. He looked over at me, and just like that, I was all full up of want again.

He drew my hand to his side of the car, and he pressed his lips to the inside of my wrist.

We didn’t speak for the rest of the drive to school. It didn’t feel like we had to.