Bright Midnight: A Second-Chance Romance

by Karina Halle

  “Anyway,” Anders goes on, looking everyone sternly in the eye. “As you know, the reason you’re all here isn’t to drink and party like a bunch of loons, but to come together and figure out what to do with the farm.”

  “Well, we’re not selling it,” Lise says, folding her arms.

  “No one said we’re selling it,” Anders tells her. “We’re figuring out what to do so we don’t have to sell it.”

  “Well, you’re getting a job, aren’t you?” Tove asks.

  Anders gives her look that could cut glass. “I already have a job,” he says icily. “It’s called running the farm. Per can’t keep doing this on his own.”

  “I could start contributing,” Astrid says, after she has a sip of cider. “Start a fund for the farm. I get paid enough, and sometimes people are really generous.”

  “Me too,” Lise speaks up. “Karl and I were going to save up to buy a new car, but perhaps we can lease instead.”

  “Well, I have a kid,” Tove says, just as Harry comes tearing back in the room making airplane noises, arms out like wings, knocking over Lise’s beer.

  “You don’t say,” Anders says dryly, while Lise grumbles, wiping up the spill.

  “Hey,” I say softly. Everyone looks at me. “I have an idea. Maybe one that’s better than everyone having to pitch in. What if we could make the farm make more money?”

  Anders folds his muscled arms across his chest and I try not to ogle him. “How so? Getting more animals in? They cost a fortune and I’m not sure we’ll make up for it, not with the big dairy farms in the valley.”

  “Kind of. What about goats? And donkeys? Llamas?” I ask.

  Astrid laughs. “You’re going to milk donkeys now?”

  I shake my head. “No. Not milk them. Just have them. As a tourist attraction.”

  Lise snorts. “People don’t come here to look at llamas and donkeys and goats. Maybe in New York they do, but…”

  “That’s not the attraction,” I tell her. I gesture to the house. “This is. The house, the farm. Look, I know my tourism stuff by now. This place is at the edge of getting discovered, of being on every Instagram traveler’s radar. People are always searching for the next best thing. Well, this is the next best thing. Todalen has it all. The beautiful valley, the farms, the mountains, the hiking, the fjord, the fishing.” I lean forward, pressing my fingers into the table. “Look. Let’s turn this place into a farmstay.”

  Anders frowns. Silence fills the room.

  Except for Harry and his airplane noises.

  Finally, Per asks something in Norwegian, probably along the lines of “what the hell did she just say?”

  Anders answers him in Norwegian, then looks back at me. But he’s no longer frowning. Something like realization is coming over him. “A farmstay,” he repeats, slowly running his hand over his beard. “That could work.”

  “A farmstay?” says Astrid, looking between the both of us. “You really think that could work?”

  I shrug. “Worth a shot, isn’t it? There are a ton of rooms upstairs, not to mention the old guest cottage out back. With a little fixing up, it could make nice accommodations for people. Total cottage-core hygge farmhouse chic. Look, I know travelers and backpackers. They want to discover a new place, not just because it’s free from crowds, but because posting pics that no one else is gives them bragging rights, and they want a total experience. It’s not enough to stay at a hotel these days, the place has to offer them something. Something they can document. Staying at a working farm does just that. The guests can help out, doing the fun chores I guess, and it gives them a sense of purpose and novelty while we get free labor.”

  “Ah!” Lise says with an approving nod. “Now you’re speaking my language. They pay to stay here and they help out.”

  “Exactly,” I say.

  Tove looks me up and down. “And so, while Anders and Per are running the farm part of all of this, who is going to be running the hotel? Because it won’t be me. Or Lise. Or Astrid.”

  I smile. “It’ll be me.”

  I glance over at Anders, having felt his eyes burning on me. He looks surprised. And happy.

  See, I told Anders I was with him till the end, but in the last two weeks we haven’t discussed the future beyond what to do with the farm and how to pay for shit. He hasn’t known just how committed I am to him, and, well, I guess I just told him.

  “You’ll be running it?” Astrid says, brows raised. “So that means that you’re staying here? Like, for good?”

  I nod. “I know. I’m not going anywhere. This feels like home to me already.” I look to Anders. “And my home is wherever he is.”

  Lise lets out a soft, “aww.”

  And Anders’ whole face lights right up, his smile breathtakingly beautiful, his eyes dancing for a moment before they turn serious.

  He walks right across the room to me and grabs my face in his hands and leans down, placing a long, hot kiss on my lips.

  “I love you,” he whispers roughly against my mouth, but before I can whisper the words back, he pulls up.

  “Wow,” Astrid says, and I look around the table to see all his sisters staring at me with a mix of surprise and disgust, because ew, it’s their brother. Even Per looks caught off guard, his eyes wide. He may not know much English, but I have no doubt that he’s picked up on all this.

  I’m here to stay.

  “Okay then,” Anders says, clearing his throat, his cheeks tinged with pink. “So I guess it’s settled.”

  “You might want to tell Uncle Per,” Astrid says, pointing her cider at him.

  Anders gives her a dismissive wave. “He’ll be fine with it.”

  “He’s not exactly Mr. Hospitality though,” Astrid says.

  “Hei,” Per suddenly says. “I do know some English.”

  We all look at him in surprise. Apparently, this is news to everyone.

  Anders frowns at him for a moment before looking back to us. “Okay then. Well. Good. Uncle Per is secretly fluent in English, and now Shay is going to live here with me, running the Todalen Farmstay.”

  I can’t help but grin up at him. “Sounds like a plan.”

  He smiles down at me. “The best plan.”

  “Skal then,” Astrid says, raising her cider. “To the new future of Shay and the Johansens.”

  “To the new future,” we all say, raising our drinks.

  “You’re brilliant, you know that?” Anders whispers to me, his voice thick with lust.

  I manage a smile, though it falters as he pushes himself further inside me, my legs wrapping around his ass, holding him close. “That doesn’t sound like dirty talk to me.”

  “No, but it’s true,” he says, kissing my neck.

  I sigh and lean back into the bed, succumbing to him in every way.

  After the Johansen emergency meeting, after my winning idea saved the day, we kept drinking and celebrating, moving the party outside to the picnic tables between the house and the fjord. Everyone was excited, in planning and brainstorming mode, taking a good look at the property and coming up with a million different ways that this could work. It felt good, knowing that my idea was absorbed so whole-heartedly by them all. The last thing I wanted was to suggest something that everyone was lukewarm to, but as the day turned to night, everything started to make more and more sense.

  This was the future. This was our future. It was a way to keep the farm, to keep the home, while also providing a way for both Anders and I to carve out our own path. There was no legacy here to uphold, instead this was something new that the two of us could share and embark on together.

  I already knew this was my future anyway, and even though I hadn’t told Anders until today, I had told everyone else in my life that I wasn’t coming back. I’ve made an effort these last few weeks to reach out to people more, to stop turning inward as I’m prone to do, just as Anders is prone to do. I’ve started texting Hannah on a daily basis, I emailed my mother, and I’m constantly chatting with Everl
y and Amber through Facebook. They all know that I’ve found my place here, that I plan to stay in Norway indefinitely, figuring out the visas and shit as I go along.

  I’ve started focusing on my Instagram a little more too, looking at it not as some platform that might change my life, but just a conduit for change. After all, I have ideas and I have plans for this place, and those are going to happen without some app. It’s just an added bonus.

  “Are you going to come for me like a good girl?” Anders murmurs, his lips trailing down over my breasts as his finger starts playing with my clit. Suddenly I’m ripped out of my thoughts and back into bed with him. Despite us drinking all day long, the moment we decided it was time for bed, we were ripping each other’s clothes off.

  “Make me come then,” I whisper, and just like that, the pressure builds, my back lifts off the bed, and my orgasm takes me under. All the emotions that have been swirling around all day are coming to a head now as my body shakes, feeling beautifully torn apart.

  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 guess I have the experience of a traveler, but I also know what it’s like to be looking for a home, a place to settle your bones and feel welcome. I want this farmstay to be that for everyone who visits here, and I like to go above and beyond and help make that happen for people, whether it’s giving personalized tours on our new (non-commercial) fishing boat, or letting children bottle feed the baby cows. As long as they leave with a satisfied smile on their faces and a heart full of memories, then I know I’ve done my job.

  Of course, with Anders and I being so busy, we have to remember to carve out time for each other. Every night over dinner we check in, then we have a drink, put the phones and computers away, and find ways to just connect. It keeps us in this together, working as a team, not just on the farm, but on our relationship, which is just as important.

  It’s not the most perfect relationship in the world. We fight sometimes. We’ve had second chances. We’ve had many rocky starts. Cynics might say that first loves should be left in the past, that we had too much baggage to weed through. But the truth is, I love him and he loves me, and that’s enough. It’s more than enough. There’s nothing better than true love.

  So, while our relationship might not be perfect, it doesn’t matter because it’s our relationship. And it’s worth everything.

  “Want to go for a ride?” Anders asks me.

  I snap out of my thoughts and look over at him. While a lot of the guests are in their winter gear,
settling down on the picnic tables with drinks, watching the northern lights, he seems eager to go somewhere. He has that adventurous gleam in his eyes, the kind he gets when he’s about to put me on the back of his motorbike.

  “In the snow?” I ask.

  “On the spark,” he says. “Come on.”

  His gloved hand grabs mine and he leads me toward the driveway where the kick-sleds are parked. He pulls one out and gestures for me to sit down on the seat.

  “Sit.”

  I do so, resting my feet on the skis, and then he leans over and hands me a bottle.

  “And hold this,” he adds.

  I turn it over in my hands. A small bottle of aquavit, of course. I have no idea where he was keeping it.

  “I don’t know why you insist on me drinking this,” I tell him. “I’m never going to like it.”

  “Tastes change, Shay,” he says.

  “Mine don’t,” I tell him as he starts to push the sled. I turn my head and grin up at him, the aurora of purples and greens flashing behind his head. “After all, I’m with you.”

  “Ha,” he says dryly, and then the spark starts to pick up speed as he kicks faster and faster toward the small hill at the end of the driveway where it goes onto the road.

  “Wheeeeee,” I cry out, hugging the bottle of booze to me with one arm, while my hand grips the edge of the chair, holding on. Kind of scary when Anders is driving, but so much fucking fun.

  We go along the road for at least fifteen minutes, heading toward town, nothing but the soft sound of the skis on the snow and Anders’ heavy breath as he pushes us along. We go gliding through the thick forest at some points, feeling like we’re in a frozen fairy-tale, then by the water’s edge, where the snow has melted a little and turned to ice.

  Finally, we come to a stop, though there’s nothing around us.

  I look around, confused.

  Then I look up at Anders. “What? You tired already?”