Bright Midnight: A Second-Chance Romance

by Karina Halle

  “No, I mean it,” she says to me, looking earnest. “She has so much character, like she’s sentient or something.”

  “I believe it,” Espen says. “A stubborn old mule is what she is. Always trying to drown us.”

  Then he grows quiet, remembering what happened to my father.

  I clear my throat, trying to gloss over it. “A lot of boats are heading out,” I say, nodding at the harbor.

  “Yeah,” he says, obviously grateful for the change of subject. “The fishing right now is bonkers, an area just outside the upper bank.”

  Part of my gut twists. What I really should be doing is not taking Shay on a trip around Norway, but heading back out to sea to take advantage of the bounty. Cod stocks have been depleted over the years thanks to overfishing, so it’s rare to have a good batch. The bank that Epsen is talking about is in a really rough section of water, further out to sea than we like to go, but it’s doable for our boat.

  “Fuck,” I say under my breath.

  “What?” Shay asks, and I know if I tell her, she’ll take the first opportunity to insist we cut our trip short. As close as we are now, I still feel like she has one foot out the door.

  “Nothing,” I tell her.

  “Hey, you know Dag is here on the docks,” Espen says. “He says he’s heading out but he’s having engine problems.”

  “Who is Dag?” Shay asks.

  “He used to be my father’s first mate,” I tell her. “He taught me everything I know.”

  Espen clears his throat and gives me an expectant smile.

  “Yes, Espen, and you taught me the rest,” I go on. “Remind me again who is in charge here?”

  “Only because it’s your ship.” He winks at Shay. “He’d be nowhere without me.”

  “Well, why don’t you and Dag take the boat?” I say to him. “Today.”

  “Without you?” Espen asks. That’s certainly never happened before. But I trust both of them, and why should they miss out on this opportunity? I know I’m not going at any rate.

  “Yeah, without me. I’ll go the next round.”

  Espen gets that gleam in his eyes, the kind he gets when he thinks about money. “I’ll have to ask Dag.”

  “Ask me what?” Dag says from behind me, his accent thick. “And why are we all speaking English?”

  “Dag,” I say to him. “Come aboard. I have a proposition for you.”

  Dag puffs on his cigarette for a moment, then climbs aboard with ease. He’s about seventy, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he moves, and even though he smokes like a chimney, he seems in better health than most people. To add to his constant smoking, he wears a jaunty Greek fisherman cap, striped shirts, and has dark leathery tanned skin, even in the middle of winter. He’s what you picture when you think about stereotypical rough fisherman, although Dag is far more intelligent than he seems. I think he has several degrees, and might have even been a lawyer in a past life.

  “And who is this?” Dag says to Shay as he glances at her appreciatively. She’s standing by the cabin door, giving him a shy smile.

  “Shay,” she says, holding out her hand. “I’m Anders’ friend.”

  Dag swipes his palm across his grease-stained pants before shaking her hand. “Dag. Sorry. I was messing with the engine.”

  Shay just nods and when he lets her hand go, she subtly wipes it on her jeans.

  I look to Dag. “Espen told me you’re having engine troubles.”

  He sighs, blowing smoke away from us. “Seems that way. Was just about to go out but I think I need a new alternator. Hate to miss this opportunity.” He looks at Shay. “Cod isn’t what it used to be. When you find a good spot, you have to get out there. You never know if it will be your last.”

  “Anders just told us to take the boat out,” Espen says to him.

  “Is that so?” Dag says, raising a brow at me. “And the girl is coming?”

  I shake my head adamantly. “No. Shay is staying here. On land. With me. I just think since I’m not going to go out, that you both should take it. Go get the fish.”

  Dag frowns. “You sure?”

  “I know you’re good for it,” I tell him, reaching over to slap him on the back. “Just bring her back in one piece. Oh, and save me ten percent of your paychecks.”

  “I knew there was a catch,” Dag mumbles under his breath, but he looks pleased nonetheless.

  With Dag and Epsen now getting ready to go, I bring Shay off the boat. They need to go find some crew, but that shouldn’t be a problem on a day like today.

  We say goodbye and I lead Shay back to the car, wanting to get her alone. The hotel is still a bit of a drive.

  “You’re okay with them taking the boat?” she asks as we walk toward the Datsun, occasionally looking over her shoulder at the boat where Dag and Epsen scramble to get things ready.

  “They’re the best you can have,” I tell her. “Better than me. They’ll be fine. That’s how it is here. If you don’t help each other out, then the community suffers as a whole.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go with them?”

  I knew she’d say that.

  I stop and grab her hands in mine, holding on tight. I peer down at her.

  “You couldn’t pay me to go out there right now. You’re the only thing that’s important to me right now, Shay. It’s you. Only you.”

  She averts her eyes, her cheeks going red. I love it when I make her blush.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I tell her, kissing her softly before leading her toward the car.

  I need to make her blush some more.

  16

  Shay

  Happy.

  That’s the sensation flooding through me as the crisp ocean air sweeps in through the open window, brushing back my hair, making me feel invigorated from head to toe.

  I’m happy.

  Just here, just now, in this moment.

  Sitting in the passenger seat beside Anders in his sexy vintage car, cruising down the Norwegian coast, a place I’d been dying to see. The sun is peeking through the clouds, lighting up my face. Every now and then Anders will reach over and hold my hand and I’ve stopped trying to fight the memories it brings up—the ones of us together in his stepfather’s car, cruising to Echo Lake, no cares in the world. Instead, I welcome that memory in and then I concentrate on making a new one.

  This is a new us, after all.

  I bite my lip at the thought. At the word. Us. It does seem like too much and yet not enough. We’re this undefinable entity, maybe we were from the start, and I have no idea where it’s going or what’s going to happen next. I know neither of us want to talk about the future, about the after. What happens after this trip? What happens to us then? Will there be an us in the way there is right now?

  It’s a lesson in staying in the moment. In appreciating this for what it is. Two people coming together for a second chance. It doesn’t mean that we get another go at our relationship. We’ve both changed too much for that to continue, for us to pick up where we left off. It also doesn’t mean that this is going somewhere again.

  It’s just for now.

  As Anders said, we’re taking it one day at a time.

  It’s too bad I can’t bottle this feeling, though. Of feeling both free as a bird, as a sparrow, and tethered at the same time. Tethered to him, wanting to fly but always coming back around, because I want to. Because his pull is too strong, too magnetic for me to resist.

  We had a late lunch right after we left Kristiansund, at a small restaurant overlooking the wild sea. I had klipfisk soup, which is this dried salted cod that they’re famous for up here (actually very similar to bacalhau I had in Portugal) and a beer, and we just sat beside each other and watched the waves come in. Anders was mostly silent, but content, holding my hand the entire time as I asked him question after question about his boat and fishing.

  That was something I wasn’t expecting. Not only to see the infamous boat that steals him away from his farm
life for so many weeks at a time, but to meet his first mate and his father’s friend. I really felt like I was seeing a side of Anders I had only peeked at sometimes. Back at the farm, even though it seems that Per and Anders run things as a team, Per does take the lead. He is Ander’s uncle and elder and was running the place before Anders was even old enough to help out.

  But on the boat? Even in the brief moments I saw, there was no mistaking that Anders was in charge, and there was something undeniably sexy about that. Oh captain, my captain.

  “Do you think you’ll do it forever?” I ask Anders. We’ve lapsed into a silence for most of the drive, so he takes a moment to snap out of his head.

  “Do what?” he asks, large hands palming the steering wheel, the tattoos on his knuckles moving. The sparrow looks like it’s taking flight.

  “Operate the fishing boat,” I tell him. “Be the captain.”

  His dark brows furrow and he gnaws on his lip for a moment. “I’ll do what I have to.”

  “That doesn’t sound very promising.”

  He sighs. “I know. I know it doesn’t. But I don’t have a choice. You know the farm barely pulls in enough as it is. There’s no other way to supplement our income. I mean, look at me.”

  I look at him. At his storm-blue Henley shirt that shows off every inch of his hard muscles and sets off his dark blue-grey eyes, at his thick beard, his brooding brow, at every inch of man that he is. “I’m looking,” I say quietly.

  He shakes his head. “I’m not meant for anything else, Shay. It’s what I’m here to do, just like my father before me. I didn’t even graduate high school, not officially. I was expelled before that could happen. There was no college for me. There was just…nothing. I was so lost. So fucking lost. And the boat, the boat was the only thing that gave me anything to stand on.”

  “And does it now?”

  “Yes,” he says, a determined slant to his mouth. “It gives me…”

  “Purpose?”

  “No. Not purpose. Just…a means to an end, I guess.”

  “But you don’t love it…”

  He gives me a quick, resigned smile. “You’re not supposed to love your job, Shay. It’s just a bonus if you do. It’s hard work, but it brings in the money. It’s something I can do, and that alone is a good feeling.”

  “But don’t you feel like you’re having to take on your father’s legacy?”

  He starts to knead the wheel, nodding slowly as he brings his eyes back to the road, a hardness in them. “Yeah. I do. More so because he died at sea. Sometimes…I wonder how my life would have turned out if he was still alive. Not just in that I wouldn’t have so much guilt and anger over how our relationship was when he…when I lost him. But I wonder about my own life. What I would have done with it. I took on my father’s life, I never had much chance to make one of my own.”

  We both fall silent after that, and I turn my attention back to the steel grey ocean, the way the sun glints off it like light off a blade. It reminds me of his eyes.

  “You know, our lives might be different,” I say to him after a moment. “But I know exactly how you feel. But instead of having shoes to fill, I have nothing at all. No purpose. I’m just aimless. Never had anyone in my family to guide me toward anything, even shitty prospects. My father’s tech company in Mumbai is booming, but he never took any interest in me, never cared to try and pass the torch my way. You’d think that he’d view Hannah and I as future protégés, but paid us no attention. My mom said it was because he always wanted boys, and I have no doubt that’s true, and it definitely made Hannah buckle down and work harder. I knew she was working for his approval. I just don’t know if she ever got it.”

  I take in a deep breath, the feelings thick like sludge, and yet it’s freeing at the same time to talk about it, like I’m clearing the cobwebs in my soul. “And obviously he didn’t care, because why did he leave us to work there? Why didn’t he bring us all there? We would have gone. We could have been raised in India instead of the US. At least we would have been raised. But instead, he left us and my mother still followed him. She followed and left us to fend for ourselves. She chose him over us. He cheated on her, you know.” I glance at Anders and see the shame on his face. “He had an affair. A mistress. So they got divorced, but even then my mom still went back to him. After all he had done to her, she still went back to him and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why.”

  The words fall around us like snowflakes. Anders has tensed up. Because that’s what’s happening now, isn’t it? I know it’s not the same, or particularly fair, to compare my parents’ marriage to what Anders and I had and what we kind of have again, but I do understand it. My mother chased my father because something in her soul felt pulled to his, no matter what he did to her. Didn’t make it right, didn’t mean it was smart, but it was something she was powerless against.

  And now, after all that Anders did to me, I’m sleeping with him again. I’m with him in ways I never imagined I would be. Does this make me like my mother?

  I clear my throat, hoping to clear away that loaded feeling. “Anyway, I’m babbling. I’m just trying to say, I get it. I get you. Even though things couldn’t be more different. Even though you have a clear-cut path and I have just a trail of overgrown weeds. I never had my father or mother take much interest in me, in what I do, so I’ve just been trying to find myself and it’s like every time I look around a corner, hoping to see me, find me, end the journey, there’s just another corner. It’s like…I’m constantly out of reach, like the longer I go for, the harder I look, the more elusive I become.”

  “Maybe you’re looking too hard,” Anders says. “Maybe what you’re looking for is right in front of you. Maybe you’re not so much seeking out something as you are running away from something.”

  Damn. That was a truth bomb and a half. It seems to denote in the car.

  “And what am I running away from?” I ask softly.

  He gives me a kind smile. “What we’re all running away from. Ourselves.”

  We both ponder that as he takes the Datsun off the highway and we start down a narrow road, the scenery catching my attention. Here, there aren’t many trees, just a lot of rock and tundra-like plants and shrubs, but they provide a stunning contrast against the rows of small red, white, and gold houses lined up at the water’s edge.

  “Where are we?” I ask, taking out my iPhone and snapping photos through the open window.

  “I don’t know the name of this settlement,” he says. “But the guesthouse is called Svegvikka.”

  We continue along the narrow road, dipping past the houses, skirting along the Atlantic, until we come to a large white building that looks built right into the sea.

  “This used to be a cod factory,” he says to me as he parks the car. “A warehouse for klipfisk. It had good ratings online, so hopefully it’s to your liking.”

  I laugh. “To my liking? Anders, I’ve been living out of a backpack forever at this point. I’m used to sharing dorm rooms with smelly foreign boys who snore. Now I’m with you. I couldn’t care less where we stay or go.” I glance at the quaint building. “This looks perfect.”

  And it is perfect. The staff is young and friendly and give us a key with what feels like a small anchor hanging off of it. They tell us we can eat in the communal dining room in a couple of hours and that they have a set menu (I’m gonna guess dried salted cod is on the menu), then let us know that if we want to take part in tomorrow morning’s dive, we’re more than welcome to.

  “Dive?” I ask Anders as we head up to our room. “People go diving? Here?” I shiver at the thought, the water looks so dark, deep and cold.

  “You’d be surprised how much a dry suit can do,” he says to me as we stop outside the door and he inserts the large key. “And the waters here are surprisingly clear. It’s beautiful. I’ve never done it, of course, but I’d like to get my certificate one day.”

  I want to ask him about what other dreams and goals he has for h
imself, the things he wants to do one day, even if he believes that day will never come. But the moment he opens the door, I forget about that.

  The room is large and plain, all white from the wood-planked walls to the floor and the bed. But it’s the view that steals my breath away. I drop my bag on the bed and go straight to the large floor-to-ceiling window that overlooks the water. It drops straight down. You could literally go fishing right out the window.

  “Wow,” I say. “What a view.”

  “I agree,” Anders says, and his voice takes out this rough, husky quality that instantly makes me shiver.

  I turn around to see him staring at me with a heated look that borders on desperation.

  My body immediately kicks into high gear.

  We attack each other, kissing each other hard, hands grabbing each other in desperation, my fists in his jacket trying to pull it off, his at my pants, trying to unzip my jeans. We can’t seem to work fast enough and we’re nearly falling over, trying to get at each other, trying to consume.

  Anders pushes me against the wall and places hot, fevered kisses down my neck as he brushes the hair off my shoulder, then his head dips to my breasts, where he gently cups and cradles them, before his fingers curl along the neckline of my shirt, pulling it down until my breast is popping free out of my bra. His tongue swirls around my nipple, sucking it into his mouth, making it pebble-hard, my nerves electric.

  I moan loudly, my eyes closed, head back against the wall as his wide palms roam over my breasts, down my waist, between my legs. I step back, trying to help him get my jeans and underwear off, and I only have one leg freed before he’s pushing me back again, rougher this time, grunting in my ear.

  My god, he’s intense.

  Especially when I catch sight of his eyes, the way they burn into me, letting me know exactly how much he wants me, desires me, needs me.

  He reaches down between my legs and I immediately let him in, the slow tease and push of his fingers where I’m already wet and waiting impatiently for him, while he pulls my nipple into his hot mouth, pinching the hardened tip between his teeth.