“Coincidence,” Aksel says under his breath. “Right.”
I know I should be concerned, but the longer I sit here with Aksel, the further I can—must—push the man with hazel eyes and curly hair from my mind.
Aksel has no proof I am being followed.
Neither do I. All I have is instinct. And fear. That’s what it was tonight—fear I would be found. Followed.
My throat constricts as I try to block it all out. The smells. The voice. His voice.
I am safe here. Because not being safe here has an outcome I can’t consider.
“Sophia, you should tell your parents, or even the police.”
“I’m not telling them.”
Aksel jerks his thumb toward town. “He’s trailed you twice, and those are only the times you know about—”
“You don’t get it!” I say adamantly. “If he were following me, I wouldn’t still be in Waterford!”
Saying it aloud catches me by surprise.
Aksel tilts his head against the window. His angular face is impassive, unreadable.
I sense the friction building between us.
“How did you even know he would be there tonight?” I peer over at him from beneath my lashes.
“I didn’t,” answers Aksel diffidently. “I knew you would be.”
“How?”
“Henry texted me.” Aksel shifts in his seat. “And I thought, sure, yeah, why not … But then this happened tonight, and I don’t know, Sophia …”
Beneath his stoic expression, I struggle to maintain eye contact. My heart beats vigorously in my chest.
“Why are you so determined to not … hang out—”
“Sophia.” His voice is calm, but his eyes are fierce. “I do want to hang out with you—”
“So why do you keep acting like we have nothing in common? Like you can’t decide whether you want to be friends or …” My voice catches in my throat.
“Because, Sophia …” He seems torn. Rattled. Flustered. The defined line from his cheekbone to his jaw sets into place; his eyebrows are drawn tight, frustrated. Like he doesn’t understand why I don’t understand. But I don’t understand. What is restraining him?
“What if we have too much in common?” he asks quietly.
I stare into his eyes, a piercing green that seems to smolder. “Don’t most people consider that a good thing?” I prompt.
“Do you?”
“Yes.” I pause. “No.” I shake my head, “I don’t know.”
Buzz. I look down at my phone. Charlotte, wondering where I am.
“I have to go,” I say, biting my lip. “Thanks for the ride.”
I get out and start walking briskly toward the house, circled by a tempest of emotion. A stiff pain ripples across my chest. It’s clear. Aksel recognizes I have a past. And he doesn’t want any part in it.
I have almost reached the porch when I hear Aksel jog up behind me.
“Sophia, wait.”
His strong fingers wrap gently around mine.
Rotating to face him, my insides flutter—I grip the edge of my sleeve.
Staring at Aksel, I am sure of almost nothing. I have no idea how to interpret my feelings for him. And I have no idea how he feels about me.
I only know that being in Aksel’s presence is exhilarating and thrilling and transcends all the complicated emotions I’ve felt since I arrived in Waterford.
Is this what it’s like to like someone?
His fingertips linger on my skin, sending pulses of heat up my arm. It feels like there is so much, yet so little, distance between us.
“What if I’m wrong?” Aksel asks.
“You are wrong. He was just some guy—”
“I meant wrong about thinking we shouldn’t be … together.”
When Aksel says together, my heart fumbles a beat. Or two. Or ten.
My chest tightens as I search his gaze.
“Sophia, maybe this can never work”—his eyes lock with mine—“but maybe it can. Maybe it’s worth trying. Because the truth is, I haven’t stopped thinking about you since that day in the forest. Since Berlin, if I’m honest; I had no reason to think I would ever see you again, yet I still remembered you,” he declares.
Aksel shifts his posture. “And now you’re here, and I meet you, and I question everything—” He stops, catching his words.
Indecipherable thoughts clutter my head.
He steps closer to me. Tingles rise up my chest and spread across my collarbone.
“I want to see you, Sophia, hang out with you, date you, whatever you want to call it. And if we get a few weeks, or a few months, fine. I only know I don’t want to spend one more day trying so hard to not see you.”
A few weeks. A few months. Does Aksel assume I’ll leave Waterford?
Is that what is holding him back?
I am too stunned to speak.
“And I suppose I don’t want to wait for circumstances to change to make it easier, or better, or safer,” he finishes brazenly.
My circumstances.
I grip the sleeve of my jacket so tightly I start to lose circulation in my fingers.
I push my tongue to the back of my teeth to stop my lips from quivering. Heat flushes through my body.
“So don’t wait.”
A glimmer of a smile crosses his full lips. “You want to go out with me then?”
I check my Skagen watch. “Now?”
Aksel grins. “Unless you have a seven o’clock curfew?”
“No.” I blush. “Considering I ditched my friends, I don’t have plans. And I don’t want to be home yet. So, sure, I’ll come.”
He slides his hand down to my palm and interlocks his fingers with mine. “Hungry?”
CHAPTER 22
With icicles dripping from the rooftop eaves, the homes in Waterford resemble gingerbread cottages.
We drive north to Silver Canyon. Beneath the velvety black sky, the forest thickens—grand houses are interspersed among old mining cabins until eventually they disappear—and Aksel veers into the entrance of Waterford Ski Resort.
He winds around the back of the resort to a gravel lot. Ahead is a diminutive cottage with stained glass windows glowing amber. Smoke swirls up from the chimney. Twinkling lights line the pathway to the arched front door. A Tyrolean painted sign across the second-story balcony reads: Alpenhof.
“It’s so …” Not-American, I think. “Unexpected,” I say.
“It was one of the first homes built on the mountain,” Aksel tells me, catching my eyes surreptitiously sweeping the perimeter as we enter the restaurant.
We are seated at a table near a stone fireplace. A candle in the center sends flickering shadows dancing across the white linen.
Noticing those around us wearing Gorsuch après-ski gear, I glance sidelong at Aksel. “Are we old enough to be here?”
Aksel laughs under his breath. “Don’t order wine. This isn’t France.”
After the waiter tells us the specials in very gastronomical terms, Aksel asks, “Did you understand what he said?”
I grin. “I heard fondue.”
“Melted cheese? I’m in.”
Aksel puts aside the menu. “So what’s the strangest food you’ve ever eaten?”
“Pop-Tarts,” I say, wrinkling my nose.
Aksel laughs. “Pop-Tarts are not strange.”
“Strange is relative!” I proclaim. “Fine. What’s the strangest food you’ve ever eaten?”
“Blood pudding.” Aksel shudders. “My grandmother makes it for Christmas.”
“Blood pudding is delicious!”
“Okay, what’s the most obscure-to-a-Montanan food you’ve ever eaten?” he asks.
I click my tongue. “Chicken feet? Pig ears? Snake? We would have these competitions, daring each other to eat things we’d never seen before. My father always won until one day in Laos he told me if I ate a grasshopper I would win forever. So, I ate it.”
Aksel nearly spits out his water. “Alive?�
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“I don’t like dead grasshoppers,” I explain.
Aksel pushes his lips together and swallows.
As the waiter pours our water, I motion to the framed black-and-white ski photography on the walls. “Is this what you do when you skip school?”
Aksel averts his eyes. “I don’t skip school. I have permission, like other seniors.”
“What do you do with your free time?”
His leg shakes incessantly beneath the table. Does he ever stop moving? “I’m taking different college courses,” he answers reticently.
Usually, I can tell if people are lying. Aksel seems to be both truthful yet omitting—reflecting my own style of deceit.
“Which courses?”
“Advanced Physics. Engineering. Arabic.” Aksel pauses. “Are you interrogating me?”
I smile demurely. “If I was interrogating you, you’d be sweating.”
“I am.”
I laugh. “Doesn’t look like it. What exactly do you intend to do? Attend the Naval Academy?”
Aksel looks discomfited. “I haven’t been admitted,” he answers. “Not yet.”
I open my mouth, surprised that I guessed right.
“I’ve wanted to go to the Naval Academy since I was a kid,” he continues. “I can study nuclear physics, swim competitively for four years; graduate as an officer.”
“Your future seems all planned out.”
His brow is tight. “Not quite.”
Our fondue arrives. I unfold my napkin and lay it on my lap. “I could help you—with the languages,” I offer.
In the firelight, Aksel’s vivid eyes shine bright. “You speak Arabic?”
I skewer a bread cube and swirl it through the cheese. “Bittab,” I say. “That means ‘of course’ in Levantine Arabic. In Egyptian Arabic it’s ‘tab’an.’ Many countries develop their own dialect. Tunisian is my favorite. It’s singsongy with a lilt at the end …”
Aksel shakes his head, smiling. Beneath the table my foot bumps his. Why does being around Aksel make my skin feel like it is perpetually on fire?
“How many languages do you speak?” he asks.
I drink some water. “Not as many as my father.”
“How many is that?”
“Like a native? A few. But if you include basic fluency, I have a few more.”
“There’s a spectrum?”
“Sure. Many languages and dialects are similar; you can speak one and understand another. For example, after I learned Danish, Scandinavian languages derived from Old Norse took only a few weeks to master. Same with Slavic and Germanic languages. Though we didn’t spend a lot of time in East Asia, I loved Taipei so I tried really hard with Mandarin when we were there. And Africa …”
I inhale, catching my breath. “Africa is the epicenter of linguistic diversity. Thousands of languages and dialects coexist: merging together and breaking apart and constantly evolving. It’s impossible to learn even a fraction of the commonly spoken languages. I learned Swahili in school in Nairobi, but thrived learning less widely spoken dialects, though I never became fluent in any of them …”
Aksel’s eyes gleam in the dancing firelight, “A number, Sophia?”
I stop chattering. I hold up all five fingers on one hand, and all five on the other. Then I close my fists and reopen my right hand with four fingers. “Although if you include proficiency, there are dozens. However, my father says I can only count native fluency …”
Aksel whistles. “I’m impressed.”
Fiddling with my napkin, I look down. “You shouldn’t be.”
“You’re ashamed,” Aksel says. Then he shakes his head and leans toward me. “How can you possibly be ashamed of anything you just told me?”
“I want to be normal,” I explain. “Like everyone else here. But my normal is driving in armored vehicles at high speed while watching out for IEDs …” I eat a cheese-soaked apple off my fork. “Staying at a St. Regis one night—visiting refugee camps with my father and sleeping on cots the next.”
Aksel looks pensive. “You want to be like every person in Waterford?”
“Of course! What American teenager do you know who speaks fourteen languages?”
“Why do you say it like it’s a bad thing?”
“It’s weird! Emma can’t conjugate a verb in French, and she’s taken it since seventh grade!”
“How does Emma’s lack of French proficiency make you weird?”
“It … does!” I proclaim.
“Don’t you get it, Sophia?” Aksel says, becoming agitated. “You can have what your friends have—”
“No, I can’t—”
“Yes, you can,” Aksel says emphatically. “But no one can simply have what you have.”
“And they shouldn’t—”
“Not your past, Sophia!” Aksel’s eyes blaze. “I’m talking about the way you challenge yourself—the way you challenge me. Yet, you remain oblivious to how remarkable, how resilient, you are. You can be anyone you want, Sophia … but no one can be you.”
As we stare at each other, I have the distinct impression that we—our lives—are welding irreversibly together.
For the first time my past doesn’t feel like it’s smothering me, but buoying me.
Later, after devouring several pots of fondue, we retrieve our coats from the maître d’.
“The Kirov Ballet!” I pull a flyer off the noticeboard tacked behind the coat closet door. “It’s coming here?” I utter, astounded. “I saw them in Oslo when I was seven. The prima ballerina signed her slippers for me. I still have them someplace. Or had them. I always loved the ballet—watching, rehearsing, performing. I eventually had to quit because we moved too frequently, and now …”
I pin the flyer back onto the board, laughing, “I should have taken line dancing.”
As we reach the Range Rover several minutes later, I turn to Aksel, “So what do you want to do now?”
He grins, “Are you up for a walk?”
We drive back out of Silver Canyon to the fork by Charlotte’s house. Here Aksel turns left into Eagle Pass. Five kilometers up he points at a high rock wall. “We climbed that,” he reminds me, almost smugly.
Against the rock wall is a huge snowdrift. Only the far side of the road is open. I clutch my seat belt, hoping we don’t tumble into the ravine.
“Yikes,” I murmur, looking back through the rear window.
Farther up Eagle Pass—past several limestone walls with gates concealing long driveways—Aksel turns through an iron gate and onto a stone driveway, leading to an enormous estate covered in cedar shingles and stone, surrounded by towering pines.
I raise my eyebrows at Aksel who evasively says, “It’s way too big.”
“Not exactly the Wuthering Heights I expected,” I murmur. “More like the Winter Palace.”
Aksel laughs.
We park beneath a portico on the side of the house, ascend a flight of stairs, and enter through a side door. We walk by a wood-paneled library, down a long hall with polished floors, and emerge in a magnificent room with high-beamed ceilings, a river rock fireplace, and windows along the far wall, facing sheer rock cliffs.
“You live here by yourself?”
“Technically, yeah, though my family visits often. Here, gear room is this way.”
After Aksel outfits me with a pair of snowshoes, we exit through the mudroom door, cross the meadow beyond the deck, and enter the woods. Above us, the sky is an inky blue. The moon peeks out from behind a barren oak tree, like a polished freshwater pearl.
A brisk twenty-minute hike later—snowshoeing in deep powder is not a “walk”—we reach a clearing. In the center of the clearing, from a rocky ravine fifteen meters high, a waterfall crashes into a small lake whose incandescent surface glistens in fractured moonlight.
Unclipping his snowshoes, Aksel points to a rocky plateau jutting out from the western shore. “In the summer, this is the best swimming hole. The lake is warmer because of the hot springs,
and you can see all of Waterford from that rock.”
Sitting down near the lake’s edge, I unclip my snowshoes.
Above us the stars stretch out in a canopy of diamonds. A soft wind ripples the lake.
“You chose a pretty great place to move,” I say.
Aksel sits beside me, stretching out his long legs. “Waterford’s my favorite place in the world.”
“Hmmm, I’d choose Portillo in summer, Kitzbühel in winter.”
He flashes me an audacious smile. “You must be a good skier.”
“I haven’t skied for a long time.”
“Sophia.” Aksel chuckles softly, and when he says my name, heat shoots up my spine. “You’re sixteen, aren’t you? How long can it be?”
“Two seasons,” I answer.
“A lifetime,” he says, which is ironic because it is true. A lifetime has passed since then.
I wring my fingers. Not now. Please don’t happen now.
“Last time I skied,” I blurt out, “we were in Gstaad. I begged my dad to race. He won so I demanded a rematch, but as I was persuading him, he got a call to return to Pakistan—”
Aksel’s hand twitches. Momentarily, I stop talking, but he says nothing, so I continue.
“I was devastated to leave early, so driving through Geneva, we parked near the Rhône Bridge to play my favorite game: I would lead us to our favorite place using landmark navigation. My father would follow behind, never interfering, until eventually I reached Patisserie Claudette. My mother would be waiting there with the car, and we’d all eat pains au chocolat …” I trail off.
Among the barren tree branches, wind whistles softly. Aksel watches me quietly.
“You didn’t want to return to Pakistan?” he asks.
“It wasn’t that,” I smile. “I loved Karachi. The intense atmosphere—the volatile politics, the walled complexes—it all intrigued me. I loved my friends. I loved the seamstress who embroidered me my own shalwar kameezes … But I was sad to return to Pakistan because it meant my father would disappear often. He was always busy on assignments …”
Silence lingers in the air between us.
Intuition warns me to be cautious, hesitant, especially after earlier tonight.
Girl from Nowhere Page 11