She saw him as a pet in some ways; an exotic blond sixteen-year-old pet known by all the locals as Andy. I called him Andy too, though sometimes I called him Anders because I liked the sound. My mouth was not used to such exotic things and soon I longed to taste more than his name.
“Tell me about your country,” I asked him while we sat on my bed and watched videos on my laptop. His eyes were the same kind of blue that could be found in our boring town and yet to me they were the eyes of a Viking.
“Denmark? It’s just pigs and cheese and alternative energy.” And so it was to him, but it built up in my mind as this magical place of Hamlet and Lego and old gods. He told me about Shakespeare’s ill-fated prince and his real, still standing, castle. My world was small and he made it big. I used to lie on my back on the guest bed—his bed then—dreaming of running away with this worldly boy by my side.
In the years that followed I would think back on the most arbitrary details about him, like how incredibly large his hands were, how good he was at backflips off of walls and how his jokes were awful but still made me laugh. I thought of how he used to play my father’s guitar and sing songs about shooting stars in a language I hadn’t understood at all. And then I would remember things like being out with my friends or watching movies with my boyfriend and thinking of the light on Anders’s hair, and I would wonder why the guy I’d had a crush on since I was eight years old was suddenly not good enough. None of my friends got it either; to them he was just this goofy, lanky boy with a funny accent. To me he was an awakening.
There was a school dance in November about a month before he left. It was semiformal, meaning the guys wore chinos and button-up shirts and the girls wore things they would be embarrassed to admit to ten years down the road. One of my friends was crying rivers of mascara after being rejected. No fewer than seven of her peers were in attendance on the stairs, decrying the evils of men while glancing hopefully through the glass doors leading back to the dance floor. I had enough love issues of my own and I had misplaced Eric, my so-called boyfriend.
Alone, I returned to the hired DJ and disco lights. I watched from afar while familiar faces clung to each other and slow-danced, or else sucked face until a chaperone pulled them apart. Anders came over amid all this with a half-finished orange soda in one hand and my father’s best dress shirt on. The effect was decidedly uncool, but it made my blood race nonetheless. “Do you want to dance?”
The soda can went in the corner and I followed my Danish exchange student out onto the floor where his skin glowed first pink then orange, blue then yellow under the changing lights. Around my waist his hands were sweaty and being that close I first realized how perfectly my head fit into the crook of his shoulder. His body was hot, as though he were running a fever, but I didn’t mind a bit as he held me tight and set his chin upon the top of my head.
I felt something insistent pressing against my hip—once it dawned on me what it was, the shape was unmistakable. I mean, if I’d pulled away at that time everyone would have noticed it in profile, it was that obvious. Those chinos weren’t hiding anything. He didn’t say anything about it and so neither did I, even though my emotions were shifting like strobe lights between panic and thrill.
The song drew slowly to an end as we rotated in an equally lazy circle. I felt him lean down and whisper in my ear, “Could you give me a moment before you pull away?”
Of course I agreed, taking the time to bask in the scent of his cologne and trying not to cry at the thought that Anders was leaving in a month. We were back to being wallflowers by the time my boyfriend arrived; he had been hanging around in the art hallway doing things that weren’t half as cool as he and his friends thought they were.
My date took one look between Anders and me and handed me a grape soda, which seemed at that moment too sweet and too cloying—too much. I stared at the floor and avoided Eric’s hand when he reached for it, all the while terrified that he’d notice that Anders’s fingers kept brushing against the ones on my left.
“Hey man, I just want to talk to her for a moment, is that okay?” Andy asked. He was gesturing toward the stairs just recently vacated.
“Why can’t you say whatever you want to say in front of me?” Eric’s hand curled possessively around mine while Anders took the other and suddenly I realized that my secret desperation for the boy who slept down the hall from me hadn’t been so secret after all. And I, young, foolish and unprepared for consequences, started to cry. All I could think of was that one or all of us would be hurt by my actions.
“Look,” insisted Anders, “She’s crying now. I’m going to go talk to her.” He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves sometime earlier and the dance-floor lights glinted off of the faint gold hair on his arms. I felt another pang of desire because Anders was there to take me away from it all again.
The staircase was cold and lit with harsh fluorescents, but we hid under it in a dusty corner and shivered, each daring the other to be the first to speak.
“You could come stay with me in Denmark if you want,” he said in a voice full of shaky hope. “You could do a home-stay next and I could teach you Danish for real. And you could be um—”
I remember the way his face crinkled as he said it, as though it were physically painful to say something so mortifying. “You could be my girl, if you want.”
“But I’m going to university here,” I said, mostly afraid of what my mother would say if she knew I had run off with the exchange student. She could tell at this point how madly in love with him I was and did not approve.
“I care about you,” he tried again.
“I care about you, too,” I said. He was holding both of my hands by then and they felt so huge, so warm and calloused. He was everything I wanted.
“But I think I’m in love with you,” he blurted.
“I love you too,” I said sadly. He reached up and stroked my cheek as I’d fallen to pieces again, a sobbing drama queen of her own making.
Eric pushed his way into the alcove with a single disapproving glare and that was that. My dad came to pick Andy and me up from the dance and we were silent the whole way home. To him it might just have been youth but his words stayed with me all the years that came afterward, through all the people that came and went in my life. On my path to adulthood I would think back on Anders and the day he left.
On his bedside table he had placed a letter to my parents on some sort of fancy yellow paper I guess he’d brought with him, thanking them for their hospitality and saying that he would never forget us. The sheets on his bed were made perfectly and he had tidied away any signs of his presence save an unopened packet of tissues from when he’d caught a cold earlier in the month. I’d gone into his room to give him his Christmas present but I was devastated at what I saw, at the hole he was about to leave in my life.
No more mysterious foreign phrases or silly faces, no more backflips or serenades with Dad’s guitar. No more good ol’ Andy. It hurt me far worse than the dance; the idea that I would lose his everyday presence from my life. Anders came in to say goodbye and found me red-faced and sniffling on his bedspread. He sat down next to me and pulled me into a hug. “Don’t cry,” he said gently, as though addressing a small child.
“It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay without me.”
I said nothing and handed him his present. “Open it when you get back to Copenhagen.” I didn’t want to see gratitude feigned or real on his face because it would be too final.
“Here’s yours then, but I didn’t wrap it.” From his pocket he produced the treasured necklace he always wore around his neck, with the pendant in the shape of Thor’s hammer. He set it around my neck and kissed my forehead as the airbus outside gave a honk. “You’ve got my number. We’ll keep in touch, Frøken Stjernestøv.”
Andy called me once on a Saturday morning, saying he couldn’t talk long because his parents were worried about the bill. He said that things were back to normal over there but he missed me and missed the scho
ol. He asked me to call him next time, and I was walking on roses until I realized I couldn’t find his contact information anywhere.
I searched the entire house; days passed and I turned our home upside down. Months passed and I began to despair, throwing myself into learning about Denmark as a country instead. The Internet then wasn’t exactly the information goldmine that it is today but I devoured all the knowledge I could find—all because I couldn’t find Anders.
University came and went and with it new boyfriends and new perspectives, but I never forgot about that boy. I graduated and moved to Denmark, got a job and a life and settled there. I learned the language, slept with plenty of Danish men and even after exotic became standard I still wanted him. Fifteen full years passed of periodically typing Anders Christensen into search engines until suddenly—finally—he appeared on a website dedicated to photography.
His hometown and birthday matched! It was him! I hyperventilated for a few minutes, clicked the contact button and sent off the least stalkerish message I could think of:
Remember me? You lived at my house for six months in high school. I accidentally lost your contact info and I wondered how you’ve been all these years. Great photography! Anyway, I live in Denmark now, how about you?
As if all of my incredible awkwardness at the thought of him wasn’t a subtext to that entire message.
A few hours later I got a cheerful note about how it was good to hear from me and how we should catch up. Shamelessly, I texted his number right away.
Whoa! How times have changed! I remember the dance and your boyfriend was so angry, haha. Oh, and chemistry class— my sleeve caught fire once. Two seemingly random memories, but he’d mentioned “the incident” and there had to be something to that, so I swallowed my cowardice and invited him out.
Sure, he wrote, twenty minutes later. I’ll pick you up after work tomorrow? I gave him my office address, stared at my phone for a few minutes and tried to sleep.
Panic returned as the clock rounded seven the following evening and I knew intuitively that he was waiting outside. The daylight had taken the day’s warmth and I pulled my coat up around my neck to block out the chill. It had been raining and the streetlights reflected in puddles as I exited the office and descended the staircase. In the shadows stood a broad-shouldered and faceless figure looking at the ground, and I had a split second of doubt. Was dredging up old memories the best thing to do after all this time?
And then he looked up and beneath that side-swept blond fluff was Anders, with the same mischievous blue eyes and crooked smile. To me no time had passed, though the night hid gentle crinkles and a five o’clock shadow that might’ve been on purpose.
“Hey,” I said. He pulled me into a hug and my first thought was that his cologne was different but underneath it was the scent of the Andy I knew, resurrected from my past. I felt alive— and just as nervous and wonderful as the first time.
Then I thought, as he whispered, “I miss you,” in my ear, how his torso was thicker; more solid. More of a man than the Anders I had once known.
“I missed you too,” I said in a daze. “Losing your address was one of the biggest regrets of my life.”
He barked out a laugh. “Is that what happened? I should have guessed.” A white rain-spattered road bike sat next to him and he climbed on. “Get on and I’ll take you somewhere out of the wet.”
“How?”
“On the back of course.” He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “The luggage rack is plenty sturdy unless the thought of putting your arms around me makes you uncomfortable.”
“No!” I said a little too quickly. I wished I hadn’t worn a skirt and heels, but he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and laid it on my makeshift seat and then we were off, wobbling at first then moving through the streets of a city I was now seeing with new eyes.
“I guess I should have realized you’d lost it,” he called into the wind, pedaling hard in time to turn a corner. I held Anders tighter, relishing the texture of his pea coat and the body moving underneath. “I just assumed I’d made you uncomfortable after—well.”
“No! No, never.” I pressed my face against his back and sighed. “Never that.”
“Really?” Our urban chariot suddenly drew to a stop. I climbed off, thinking we’d arrived—but there weren’t any shops and not a single soul around us. Leftover raindrops fell from the awning and Anders’s breath was a fine mist in the chilly air. “I really thought I’d misread everything with you. If I hadn’t been so stubborn—”
“If I hadn’t been so forgetful—”
“Then I might not have wasted fifteen years of my life. I should have known.” He squatted down, head in his hands.
“It wasn’t a waste,” I insisted, wondering if he was saying what I thought he was. “I’ve learned a lot in that time. I’m sure you have too.”
He stood again and walked toward me with a gentle smile on his face. His hands closed over mine, just as huge and sinewy as they’d always been. “I have, it’s true, but seeing you again it’s all the same—you’re still that girl. Still the same girl who held my teenage heart in her hands.”
“We aren’t teens anymore.” His eyes were full of the fascination he had once held and of the puppy love of warm summer days on a cold autumn night. I grabbed his coat lapels and kissed him fully on the mouth, marveling as his arms wrapped around my waist and he kissed me back. His lips were dry and cool in delicious contrast to the hot, wet tongue that made its way into my mouth.
Only when it became necessary to breathe did he pull away and press his forehead to mine. “If losing my address was one of your biggest regrets, not kissing you that night was one of mine.” We kissed again and I felt him smile against my mouth. “Shall I take you to that bar, now?”
I climbed onto the back of the bicycle, and when he was seated in front of me I ruffled his soft, thick hair. “No, I want to catch up on what we’ve missed.”
He guided us through the city lights and half-frozen bystanders until he stopped at a tall, narrow building three floors high. He hurried up the staircases and I trailed behind, followed closely by my suspended disbelief. I had always wanted to see Anders’s room and now with the turn of a key I was in his apartment.
“It’s really small,” he warned. “It’s just big enough for me.” He was right, too; a single dish sat by the sink and a little TV in the living-slash-bedroom, his computer in the corner and an acoustic guitar. There were posters of movies I would never have guessed he’d like and along with the photography equipment, they helped me to form an image of Anders the man, not the boy. Still, there was something about the scene that told me he hadn’t changed much in fifteen years.
“Would you like something to drink?” he asked, suddenly the shy host. I took off my coat and sat down on his futon.
“Um, a beer I guess?” The stereo system came on and a moment later Anders reappeared with a bottle and a remote control.
“Hang on,” he said, as I took my first sip. The songs shifted through and finally settled on one I recognized but couldn’t place at first.
“Is this—?” I asked with my heart in my throat. He stole my beer and took a swig, setting it aside to pull me to my feet. “Frøken Stjernestøv, he mumbled. We were dancing in a slow circle, kissing while he pulled my shirt over my head.
“I have no idea what that means,” I said, running my hand down his chest to cup him between the legs. I wasn’t entirely the shy girl he remembered, either. “Miss…?”
“Stardust.” His tongue traced a slow arc just below my ear. “Miss Stardust.” I moved his hands to my breasts and his lips to my mouth. I held his face in my hands and traced the muscles of his jaw that had grown sharp in adulthood, the long, straight bridge of his nose. His hips drove insistently against my thigh as he bent to hold me, groaning with hunger.
I was like a starving woman too, yanking at his belt buckle and the buttons on his shirt. My tongue was on his collarbone as he hiked up m
y skirt; I bit at his nipples when his fingers slipped into my panties and stroked my slit.
“Lie down,” I told him, yanking down his chinos—and then I laughed aloud in sheer surprise. “You still have these?”
“Of course I do. My girlfriend in college hated these boxers— quite rightly, since they were my Christmas present from you.” His eyes smoldered and suddenly the boxers were gone. I was left with a new sense of disbelief.
“So what they say about big hands is true,” I said, climbing over his erection so that it could press against my underwear. It pulsed and throbbed with a life of its own, quite in time with the music playing in the corner.
“It’s yours,” he sighed, pulling down the cups of my bra so he could flick my nipples. “I’ve always wanted to see these— every time you walked by my room in a towel or in a tank top. I think I jerked off—oh god, move your hips like that again— more in that room than anywhere in my life.”
“I would have liked to have seen that,” I breathed, rocking back and forth over him. Arms snaked up my back and pulled me down so that he could tongue my areolas; that crooked grin never left his face.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Anders murmured, breathing in the scent between my breasts. “You still drive me mad. I wish we’d done this years ago.”
“Somehow I don’t.” I climbed off of his lap and turned my back to him, still shy as I undressed. “Teenagers always blunder through things when they’re naked.” I looked back at him over my shoulder, grinning as his cock jumped with interest. I wiggled my bum. “I’d much rather see what Andy can do now.”
He was on his feet in an instant with a possessive growl in his throat. My left breast fell to his ministrations and his fingers stole between my legs, stroking at the wetness there and spreading it slowly while his stubbled jaw moved over my neck and shoulder. “Clench your legs,” he whispered, guiding me over his fingertips. I shuddered and squirmed, sparks tingling through me in fits and starts. A finger pressed on either side of my clit to form a track as I moved my hips.
The One Who Got Away Page 17