Stockholm Diaries, Caroline

by Rebecca Hunter

  Caroline suddenly felt exhausted.

  “I’m getting exactly what I came here for,” she said. “Why am I not happier about it?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Caroline stepped out of the taxi and onto the wet sidewalk. Rain had fallen in bursts all afternoon, but the evening sky was bright and clear. She reached back into the front window to hand the driver a wad of money, but Niklas covered her hand with his.

  “Please, I want to take you out tonight,” he said softly and handed the driver the fare. Then he smoothed her hair and let his lips brush against hers. It had felt odd to step out of the building with him, as if she wasn’t quite sure the Niklas she knew would still exist off their apartment floor. But he did exist, as the very real presence of his towering body reminded her.

  “The place is across the street, right there,” he said, pointing.

  Niklas grabbed her hand, and they ran across, towards the warm glow of a tiny restaurant. He held the door open, and she stepped in. She took a deep breath, trying to relax. There was something that felt different about Niklas now that they were out, something guarded. She wasn’t sure she could get used to it.

  “I’m going to the rest room,” she said, pointing the doors in the hallway next to them. “I’ll come find the table.”

  Caroline closed the door behind her and let out a deep breath. Why was she so nervous, more nervous than she had been when he stepped out of the elevator the night before? Caroline looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. It was hard to believe that only the night before she had walked into his apartment, wondering if she would find what she had hoped for. Something had shifted during the night, opening up, giving her the answer she wanted.

  She had felt that same pull less than an hour ago when she opened her apartment door. Niklas leaned against the door frame, freshly showered and in jeans and a button-down blue shirt that matched his eyes. He looked polished, like he did on the day of the press conference, but he was smiling—a real smile—and his eyes fixed on her. His slow, measured kiss seemed to say Tonight I am yours, and she felt that promise echo through her body. For a moment, Caroline regretted her suggestion that they go out.

  It was the remains of this kiss, lingering on her lips, that had slowly transformed into a knot in the pit of her stomach: Tonight, she was going to disturb this delicate connection, so new and raw. It wasn’t just his guarded look that had made her nervous. She couldn’t put it off anymore. She needed to tell him about Spain. She had already waited too long.

  Caroline ran her hand through her hair in an attempt to tame the curls that had sprung up, taking on a life of their own in the humid night air. Then, with another deep breath, she opened the door and entered the restaurant.

  The room was long and dark with private little nooks along the edges. Niklas’s kind of place, she thought. The hostess wasn’t at her station, so Caroline let her eyes adjust and scanned the room. Then she saw him. Them. Niklas was seated in one of the last alcoves along the wall, and a woman was bending over in front of him, writing something and giving him a deliberate view down the front of her shirt at her large breasts. Her long, blond hair fell over her shoulders, and her miniskirt covered little of her tanned legs. She put down the pen and stood up. Then, with a smile, she walked over to a table across the room to join her friend. After taking her seat, the woman turned back to Niklas for a last smile.

  Caroline felt her nails dig into her hands as she watched the scene play out in front of her. The woman was undoubtedly sexy, and she was clearly making herself available to Niklas. Niklas looked down at the table and back up again, finding Caroline’s eyes.

  Her instincts told her to walk out of the restaurant, to get away from this sinking feeling. She had left this kind of guy behind in college. The kind of guy that had driven her to Brad in the first place. Why had she thought that Niklas would be different? She stood, frozen in place, as Niklas crossed the room. He took her hand and led her to the table in a way that told Caroline he wouldn’t take no for an answer. But instead of sitting down, she stopped in front of their alcove and looked down at the tiny scrap of paper that Niklas didn’t bother to hide. On it was a phone number, the name Marie and three words in Swedish, the middle word double underlined.

  “What does it say?” she said, her voice soft and even.

  He gave her a long, hard look. “Do you really want to know?”

  No, she didn’t.

  “I do.”

  “It says, Marie, your biggest fan.”

  In another context, the blatant crassness of the message might have seemed funny, but nothing about it seemed funny at this moment. Silence hung in the air.

  “Please, Caroline, sit down. Please don’t leave. Please.”

  That was, in fact, what Caroline was about to do: leave. But she heard something in his last please, something that changed her mind. She frowned and sat down. The waitress brought a bottle of wine to the table that Niklas apparently had ordered before she came. The waitress opened her mouth to speak, but after taking a look at their faces, she disappeared again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He kept his voice calm, but she could hear impatience and frustration lurking behind it. “It happens. Not a lot, but it happens.”

  “And I don’t suppose you said, ‘I’m here with someone,’ or else she wouldn’t have left her number.” Caroline could hear her own voice rising, but she didn’t care.

  Niklas closed his eyes and shook his head. “You’re right, I didn’t.”

  “So you took her number, like a back-up plan for tonight?”

  His face darkened, and his eyes blazed at her in anger.

  “What are you saying?” he growled. “You think I would do that to you? I didn’t tell her about you out of respect for you. Then you would be right there in the spotlight, too.”

  Caroline let out a deep breath, trying to think rationally. Actually, she believed him. She didn’t really think that he would encourage another woman’s attention in the middle of their evening together. It wasn’t even that she was jealous, not really. But something inside revolted at the thought of being a part of this kind of circus.

  Niklas was no longer trying to hide his frustration.

  “Listen, I thought this part of playing hockey would be better back here in Sweden, but it’s not; it’s just different. My public life is a mess, and I don’t want you to have to get tangled up in it unless you’re sure you want to be. These kinds of things get twisted and then—”

  He broke off his sentence and ran his hand through his hair. Caroline could feel the flush rise on her face. She tried to think of something to say, but nothing came.

  “Look, Caroline, I can understand if you don’t want anything to do with this,” he said. His face had softened, and he reached across the small table for her hand, which was still balled up next to her plate. “I love hockey, but playing means my life isn’t always my own. That’s the trade-off.” He paused and then added, “This is why I didn’t want to go out tonight.”

  She swallowed hard and said, “So we just stay away from your public life? It’s that simple?”

  Caroline could hear her words were far from conciliatory, that she wasn’t offering understanding, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  Niklas’s voice was full of emotion when he spoke again. “I don’t know where this is going or even what this is between us. I don’t even know how long you’re staying in Stockholm. I’m trying to figure it all out. I just don’t want to hurt you.”

  He let out a deep breath, and when he continued, his voice was softer. “My idea was that we could spend some time together, time alone, before we have to face this.” He gestured to the scrap of paper that still lay, face up, on the table.

  “I’m finishing up a few things this week, but then I’ll be free. Maybe we can rent a boat and drive out onto the archipelago, find a cabin somewhere and spend some time together, just the two of us. Everything just feels so… so right
when it’s just us. We can come back for the games you need to cover and then go back out.”

  For the first time since they had stepped into the restaurant, his face relaxed, and he met her eyes with a smile that should have filled her with happiness. Instead, it sank, heavy, inside her.

  “Niklas,” she said quietly, unable to meet his eyes any longer. “I have something to tell you, something I should have told you before now.”

  The smile slowly left his face.

  “I—I took a job covering a soccer tournament in Spain. It starts in a few days.”

  He was silent, and she could feel Niklas’s gaze weighing on her, but she kept her eyes on the plate in front of her.

  “And today Veronica told me that Tommy and Annika need their apartment back on Sunday.”

  More silence. Caroline took a deep breath and looked up at Niklas. He opened his mouth, started to say something, but then closed it again. He remained silent, and when she glanced up at him, he was looking at her with eyes too sad and dark to meet.

  “I had to leave sometime,” she whispered. It hurt just to say these words, and she now could see that this was why she had kept the news from him. Selfish and true.

  The waitress, who had been hovering in the corner, seized the apparent break in conversation to approach them. She said something in Swedish, and Niklas answered.

  “Are you ready to order?” he asked.

  Caroline hadn’t even looked at the menu, and food was the last thing on her mind. She glanced down at the paper in front of her and skimmed the foreign text: Italian and Swedish, she guessed, and even her Spanish wasn’t helping much.

  “Is this pasta with seafood?” she whispered to Niklas, pointing at the menu.

  The waitress looked at her in surprise and then attempted to switch over to English.

  “Yes, pasta with… how do you call it? Shrimps and…” The waitress looked over at Niklas for help.

  “Shrimp and calamari,” he said.

  “Yes. That one, please,” she said to the waitress.

  Niklas spoke to the waitress in Swedish, and she disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Now it was just the two of them. Silent. Caroline searched for something to say to make the situation better, but she came up with nothing. The silence nagged at her. What was going on inside his mind? Maybe he was sorry now that he had talked her into staying at the restaurant, she thought with a silent, humorless laugh. She knew there was little chance that he would yell in a public place like this, and yet she almost wanted him to. At least she would know what he was thinking. Finally, Caroline couldn’t stand it any longer. She opened up her mouth, sure that anything that came out would be better than not knowing.

  “I should have told you earlier,” she said. Then the words came tumbling out. “I got the offer a few days ago, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, but I really need the money to travel. Yesterday, I still wasn’t sure, but Ludvig said he needed an answer, so I said yes.”

  “Ludvig with the flowers?” Niklas was watching her carefully now.

  She nodded slowly.

  “And you’re going to Spain with him?”

  Caroline searched Niklas’s voice for anger, but instead it was hard and even, as if he were simply trying to figure out a puzzle presented to him.

  “Yes,” she said, though her answer sounded more sure than she was. “His boss made me an offer I couldn’t afford to turn down.”

  Caroline waited for Niklas to say something else, but he didn’t. She saw only surprise and hurt on his face, neither of which he made any effort to hide. The pit in her stomach was growing, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

  “I’m really, really sorry, Niklas,” she said softly. “We barely know each other, but the truth is that I don’t want to leave you. I didn’t tell you because all of these things came so fast, and I didn’t want it to be like this. And I also know how long it took me to start this trip. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was in college, but it’s taken years for me to leave my life in Michigan and venture out on my own. How can I give it up so easily?”

  She looked at him, silently begging him to understand.

  She added, “I keep waiting for something to happen so that I don’t have to decide between the things I want.”

  “But you already did decide,” he said.

  His voice was soft and cool, almost as if he were just talking to himself. Caroline opened her mouth to disagree but closed it again. She viewed the job in Spain as a spontaneous opportunity that she had jumped on, not a choice that she had carefully weighed among the other possibilities. She had told herself that the job was just temporary, that all the other things she wanted might still be waiting for her when she returned.

  And yet Niklas was right. She made a decision. And with that decision came the risk that none of the other paths would be open when she returned. The job might lead to another, one that dangled even more possibilities in front of her, one that would make it even harder to break from the path she had started down.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I did decide. But that doesn’t make it a good decision. In fact, it feels like a really bad one right now.”

  He looked at her for a while, and then she saw something change in his face. Some of the coldness melted, and in its place, his eyes had a glint of what she had seen on the ice and then later, much closer up, though Caroline didn’t know what to call it—resolve? But the look disappeared before she could figure it out. Caroline was left with the sense that he had made up his mind about something, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that decision was.

  He reached across the table for her hand, once again balled up into a fist next to her silverware. He held her hand in his as he teased her fist loose into his large, warm palm. When he spoke, his voice was low and tender.

  “Okay, we’ll do this your way,” he said. “We’ll wait and see what happens.”

  They sat that way until the waitress reappeared, this time with their meal. The sight of food made her mouth water. Caroline was suddenly starving. Niklas let go of her hand, and the waitress set the steaming plates of pasta in front of them, triggering a loud growl from her stomach.

  Niklas chuckled and wrapped his legs gently around hers. Caroline picked up her fork and let the warmth of their tentative truce enclose her as she started to eat. By the time she looked up again, Niklas was finishing off the last of the formerly heaping bowl of pasta in front of him. He looked from his plate to hers and then back up at her with a hint of red in his cheeks.

  “Sorry. When it’s hockey season, I’m hungry all the time,” he said, glancing down at his now-empty plate. “If I’m going out, I usually have a meal before I leave just so that I can eat like a normal person. But tonight I was too… I didn’t feel like eating. And this is what I get.”

  He was finally smiling at her again, and she could hear the relief in her laugh.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I need another course,” he said, searching for the waitress.

  Caroline looked down at her meal, most of which was still there, and nodded.

  The waitress approached and then, after a few more exchanges in Swedish, she left.

  “I can’t believe how well you speak English,” said Caroline.

  “We start learning English in first grade here in Sweden,” he said, “but most of what I learned came from living in Detroit.”

  Caroline shook her head. “My Spanish is terrible, and I’ve been listening to it for my whole life. Something about it just doesn’t click for me. I can’t imagine learning a language I didn’t grow up with.”

  Niklas raised an eyebrow and said in a low, teasing voice, “Maybe you just need the right teacher.”

  “Is that so?” said Caroline and tried to match his look. She could think of plenty of things she’d love to learn from him, but none of them made for appropriate dinner conversation.

  “Was it hard to leave S
weden and move to the U.S.?” she asked.

  Niklas leaned back in his chair. “In a way I guess it was. Everything looked different, bigger—the roads, the yards, the supermarkets, even the cereal boxes. A little like I was Alice in Wonderland. People expected me to talk all the time—neighbors, people waiting in line at the post office, everywhere. At first I went out of my way to avoid them, but it didn’t work,” he said, chuckling. “I must have been the worst neighbor that area had ever seen. And I had to speak English all the time. My brain felt like it was going to explode. After being out for a few hours, I’d lock myself in my house to try to regain my sanity.

  “So, yes, the move was hard. But I didn’t think about it that way at the time. All I ever wanted was to play in the NHL since I was old enough to watch it on TV. All the difficulties of moving to another country were just minor inconveniences when I thought about the kind of hockey I got to play.”

  “What did your parents think?” she asked. He had never spoken of his family, she realized. And the one time she had asked, he had put her off.

  Niklas was silent for a moment before he said, “My parents divorced when I was 10. My father moved away with his new wife, and that was that—until I started playing in the top league here in Sweden. As you might imagine, he was thrilled. Suddenly, he was interested in having a son again.” Caroline stopped eating and looked at him carefully. His wry smile belied the sadness in his voice.

  “My mother was more ambivalent. On the one hand, she was just as invested in my hockey career as I was. I went through some rough years, got into some trouble for a while until hockey took over. I can’t imagine what I’d have gotten into if I hadn’t had somewhere to take out all my frustrations. The same thought probably crossed her mind, too. But she wasn’t sure that the NHL was the right place for me. She didn’t think I’d ever come back. Lucky for her, things didn’t turn out that way.”

  The same sadness was still in his voice.

  “And now you’re back playing for your old Swedish team?”

  “For a year, maybe more, while I figure out what I’m going to do after that. Something that keeps me out of trouble,” he laughed. “I can’t imagine my life without hockey. It’s hard knowing that I’m 30 years old, and my best years are already behind me.”