On the staircase, I turn around to face him. It is dark without any natural light. Confined. With Aksel standing on the step below me, we are the same height. Our eyes lock. My heart bangs against my rib cage.
I know it now, more than ever. Aksel intimidates me. Not in an alarming way, but because when I’m around him I feel so much less in control of my thoughts, my instincts.
The connection between us is visceral.
His hands entwine my waist, resting on the hollow of my lower back.
Gently, he pushes me against the wall.
I slide my arms loose and crawl my fingers up his chest until they reach his neck. I tangle my fingers into his hair, and before I know it, our lips are meeting, quickly and urgently.
An intense heat races throughout my body. Blood pulses in my ears. I want nothing more than to be close to him. To feel his skin against mine.
We kiss until he leans away.
My breathing is so heavy, he must be able to hear it. He smells faintly of salt and sweat; his skin is still damp. With our bodies pressed tight together, I can feel each finger of his hand against the small of my back, holding me close to him, firmly, but not tightly. Securely.
His voice is calm, but concern and worry are etched into every syllable. “Sophia … I think …”
“Maybe you still shouldn’t be getting involved with me?”
He chuckles softly. “Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking.”
I push back against his stony chest, and saunter up the stairs. “So don’t.”
In the kitchen, Aksel opens the fridge, takes out a copper pot, sets it on the stove, and turns on the flame. “Henry’s mom dropped off dinner.” He grins. “My mom left her with a spare key, and she refused to give it back.”
I take a loaf of bread from a paper bag and slice two pieces using a serrated knife from the block on the counter.
Aksel notices the knife in my hand: my wrist tucked against the blade, my fingers clasped around the shaft. Immediately, I loosen my grip and spin the knife around to face the ground. “What do you eat when she doesn’t drop off food?”
“I have a cook,” he answers nonchalantly, ladling some soup into a bowl.
I raise an eyebrow. “And Krenshaw thinks I’m spoiled?”
While I eat the creamy, peppery potato soup, Aksel runs down the hall for a quick shower. When he reemerges, clean and dressed in a wool sweater and jeans, the skin on my neck warms.
Eventually, we leave the kitchen and wander into the cozy great room. With snow falling outside and a fire crackling in the hearth, the last thing I want to do is homework.
I empty the contents of my backpack onto the sofa. My calculus text lands with a thud. “I despise Krenshaw,” I groan.
Laughing, Aksel takes my calculus textbook and opens to our assignment. “You definitely have that in common with every other student at Waterford.”
I peer over Aksel’s shoulder as he pencils out the equation, his damp hair loose on his forehead, his mouth tight in concentration.
Even in Kabul, eating MREs and using flashlights, my father tutored me relentlessly. But here with Aksel, the numbers blur. “I don’t want to do schoolwork,” I say, and drop onto the sofa.
Aksel taps his pencil against his wrist. “We can go skiing? Fresh powder today.”
I scrunch my nose. “There’s fresh powder every day.”
He looks amused. “What about shooting?” he suggests.
“I’m not firing your rifle.”
“That’s fine. I want you to teach me to shoot a handgun.”
“You’re an excellent shot!”
Aksel shakes his head. “I can hit a soda can from four hundred yards, no scope, no problem—eight hundred yards on a clear day with a scope, but that’s long-barrel shooting. With a handgun, I can’t hit a stationary target at ten yards. It’s so unpredictable—it aims wherever it wants.”
I fold my legs on the couch. My knees bump against his thigh. “It’s not the gun that’s unpredictable,” I say. “It’s you.”
He lifts his eyebrow audaciously. “Me?”
“Technically, it’s because of the shake.”
The side of his mouth curves upward. “The what?”
“You know, ‘the shake’ …”
He tilts his head, as if trying not to laugh.
I push his biceps. “Go get your SIG, sniper, I’ll show you.”
Aksel hops over the back of the sofa and disappears around the corner. He descends to the ground floor and, a few minutes later, reemerges with a SIG.
“How many guns do you keep?” I ask.
“Only my hunting rifle and this. I got rid of the rest after my dad died.” Aksel locks the slide back and passes it to me.
“First,” I say, “disassembly.” I take the SIG apart and point to the pistol components in my lap. “Magazine. Chamber. Slide. Barrel.”
Aksel whistles. “You do that fast.”
“It’s always easier with your eyes open.”
Aksel watches me with a disconcerted expression. My skin tingles.
I point to the grip. “A pistol is always a compromise of accuracy, power, and concealment. You can have one, but you compromise the other two—you can’t have all three. Understand?”
Aksel nods. I begin reassembling the SIG.
“Concealment is problematic for me because I don’t wear baggy clothes. And I don’t like too much power—I want accuracy. With a pistol, it’s important how the gun fits in your palm. The FN 5-7 has a nice grip; it gives me the most accurate shot. I prefer it over a SIG, but my dad prefers an HK45.”
“And your mom?” he quips.
“Beretta Tomcat in a thigh holster, but I’ve only seen her use it once.” I take his SIG in my hand.
“When you hold it …” I lift Aksel’s hand off my knee, keeping it steady in the air. My fingers graze the top of his. He smells so good—like pine and leather and sandalwood—I have to concentrate on what I’m trying to explain.
“… insert the magazine, load a bullet into the chamber, then tap, rack, and roll as usual. Now, you’ll want to hold it taut but loose, like you’re cradling a small bird, a swallow: don’t crush it but don’t let it get away. When you’re ready to shoot, aim like you would with a rifle, except control the shake.”
I put my hand out, palm down. “See it shaking? That’s the natural resting point of a hand—moving. With a Remington, the tremors in your hand are compensated for by the rifle lodged here …” I place my hand on his chest, my palm flat against his pecs. He smiles.
I force my voice not to quiver. “… distributing the shake throughout your muscular and skeletal systems, neutralizing it.” I draw my fingertips across his chest and down his arm to his fingertips.
Under Aksel’s intense stare, my breathing is heavy. His presence makes every nerve in my body feel like it’s been scorched.
“When you’re shooting a pistol,” I continue, “all the shaking in your fingers is concentrated into the trigger pull. If you want an accurate shot, you have to train yourself not to shake.” I hold my palm out again. Aksel frowns, putting his hand next to mine. His fingers twitch, nearly invisibly, but enough to affect aim at twenty meters.
“Don’t clench your fingers. Relax your muscles,” I advise.
“You’re making me nervous,” he mutters under his breath.
I move my hand closer to his. Our hands drift in the air side by side, like spaceships hovering above earth.
“If you control the shake, you control your aim.”
“That simple, huh?”
“So simple an eight-year-old can do it.”
“Don’t tell me—”
“Can’t help it.” I grin. “My father likes guns. Very Montana of him.”
Aksel laughs, dropping his hand.
Gathering the disassembled parts of the pistol together, I return them to Aksel. “I learned to control the shake by reassembling a pistol in less than twenty seconds.”
Aksel seems to refrain fr
om rolling his eyes. Nevertheless, in twenty-nine seconds, he has the pistol reassembled and passes it back to me.
“Nine seconds too slow.” I eject the mag, check the chamber, clip the mag back in, and hand it back. While he practices—twenty-seven seconds, twenty-four seconds, twenty-three—I stare out at the wilderness beyond the massive plate glass windows.
In the distance, pine trees at the edge of the clearing tremble in the breeze; their peculiar cone shapes and deep green hues intersect a sky thick with snow clouds. In the west, a patch of sunlight threatens to break through.
I look back at Aksel. His collar is slightly askew, and his neatly trimmed hair is mussed, giving him a ruggedly beautiful look. Aksel makes me feel secure. I trust him in a way I’ve never trusted anyone—in a way that transcends everything my parents have trained me to believe.
“Aksel, why did you think you shouldn’t become involved with me?” I ask sedately. It’s been weeks since the Creamery, and I’ve been unable to get his words out of my head.
“Twenty!” He pushes the safety on proudly, placing the SIG on the table behind the sofa.
He looks at me like I have morphed into some complex equation he needs to solve; he drags a hand through his tousled hair.
“I don’t know, Sophia,” Aksel eventually says. “I should be concentrating on other things, I suppose.” He weaves his fingers into mine. “Except when I’m not with you, I think about being with you. And when I’m with you, I only think about you. And I get that maybe you don’t want to discuss places you lived, or people you knew, or why you can disassemble and reassemble a pistol faster than I can load my rifle … But if anything feels right, Sophia?” He traces the inside of my palm with his thumb. “This does.”
Aksel kisses my neck. Linking my hands behind his neck, I close my eyes.
“And maybe we’re wrong for each other.” His lips brush my jaw, sending warm currents tearing through me. “Maybe, Sophia, this is a really bad idea, maybe it can’t last …”
Aksel’s hands slide across my neck, slipping down my back. Goose bumps rise up my spine. His lips are inches from mine; flames of heat surge across my throat.
I feel his pulse, flush against my chest. Our lips hover.
“I’ll go with you,” I whisper.
Confused, Aksel props his head up on one elbow and touches my lips with his thumb. “Where?”
I nudge his thigh with my knee. “Skiing.”
Afternoon sunlight breaks open the clouds and pours into the house through the windows. In the brilliant sunlight, Aksel’s green eyes are nearly translucent.
“Finally.” He casts me a wide smile. “It’s my turn to teach you something. Skiing is always a compromise of three things: speed, style, and slope …” He pulls me in, wraps his strong arms around my waist, and kisses me.
But I can’t get his words out of my head, that we might be a bad idea.
That I might be a bad idea.
I sit upright and look at him. “Aksel, are you scared of me?” I ask quietly.
Aksel watches me like he can read every thought that circulates inside my head. Maybe now is the moment he’ll decide I have too much history. That my past is too strange—that I am too strange.
But I also feel like there’s a live wire connecting us, and severing it would detonate an explosion.
Aksel locks his arms behind my back and draws me toward him. His words come out smooth, breathless almost. “Sophia, you scare the hell out of me.”
CHAPTER 27
Saturday arrives blustery and cold. Aksel texts me at seven: Wake up, weather’s perfect.
The floorboards creak as I walk to the bathroom. After combing my tangled hair, I pull on ski leggings and a Fair Isle sweater.
Passing by the living room on my way to the kitchen, I see my father asleep on the velvet wingback chair beside the piano.
In his fist is a tiny note. I pluck it from between his fingers. On the paper are words scribbled in Cyrillic letters. One near the bottom is circled. Even in sloppy Russian, I can read my father’s slanted handwriting: Nemcova.
I go into the den. The map has moved to the bottom right whiteboard on the grid. On it dozens of strings create a web of words; my father constructed it using his own encryption technique. It isn’t undecipherable, but it slows someone down to translate a sentence of mixed-up Hmong-Arabic-Swahili-Portuguese-Latvian-Icelandic.
Nemcova is written as an acronym in the bottom left corner of the top centerboard. One end of a string is attached to the name. The other end is hooked around a pushpin jabbed into the center of Helsinki, Finland.
“Godmorgen, Sophia.”
I turn, startled. Discreetly, I tug on the hem of my sweater and slide the note into the waistband of my pants.
“Any clues?” I ask, motioning to the board. The fire is burnt embers, and the room smells faintly of peppermint. My mother’s teacup teeters on the corner of the mantel.
My father tidies his cluttered desk, stacking papers, files, and three open laptops.
“To what?” he asks.
“To how Farhad found us in Tunis—how he got into the safe house?”
“None, Sophia.”
My mother enters the den from the kitchen. “Good morning, darling.” Although she is dressed in pleated slacks and a cardigan, she looks disheveled; wearing no lipstick, she looks as though she hasn’t slept in three days. Two days with no sleep she can fake. But on day three? The shadows around her eyes darken. The pallor of her skin alters.
By the drawn looks on their faces, I know they’ve been up all night. And I assume they know I can tell, so why are they pretending otherwise?
“Why are you working?” I demand.
The teakettle whistles from the kitchen. My mother switches off her desk lamp and kisses me on the forehead. “Old paperwork, Sophia.”
My father nods at my clothing. “Going somewhere?”
The teakettle is still whistling from the kitchen, and my mother leaves the room.
“Skiing, with Aksel,” I answer.
His face reveals his surprise. “How nice.” He taps the desk with his fingertips. “I suppose I should be worried about you spending so much time with Aksel,” he says, “but it’s part of being an American teenager I suppose, dating American boys.”
I twist my hair around my fingers. “You’re okay with it?”
A contemplative expression appears on his face. Behind him through the window, wind rustles the branches of the barren oak tree in the back garden. A clump of snow plummets to the ground.
When he finally meets my nervous stare, his steel-gray eyes are moist and vulnerable. “My dear Sophia,” he whispers, “I’m just happy to see you smiling again.”
In addition to a Gruyère soufflé, my mother makes cardamom waffles with apple streusel topping and hot cocoa with freshly whipped cream.
“She’s fattening you up in case you get buried in an avalanche,” my father says with a wink.
“False,” my mother objects. “I’m making waffles because I haven’t eaten Bisquick in a decade.”
After breakfast, my father disappears and doesn’t reemerge until Aksel knocks a half hour later. Rushing to beat my parents to the foyer, I fling open the door.
“Hi.” He grins. Aksel is wearing a ski jacket and snow boots. His eyes are bright in the morning sun, and the little azure flecks in the green sparkle.
My father shakes Aksel’s hand. “I’m Kent Hepworth.”
My mother steps forward. She has applied lipstick and put on an ironed blouse—she no longer looks tired.
“I’m Mary Hepworth,” she says in her soft, melodic voice. “We must thank you again for bringing Sophia home safely a few weeks ago.”
Aksel shakes her hand too. “Sure, Mrs. Hepworth.” He says this easily, but I sense a wariness in him and wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that my mother is watching him in a peculiar, inquisitive, slightly unnerving way.
Now I know why Charlotte detests introducing her
boyfriends to her parents.
“Okay, well, we need to leave.” I tug Aksel’s hand and promise my parents we won’t enter the backcountry.
It isn’t until we reach the Defender that I see them—shiny, white, waxed pristinely. Propped against the bumper is a pair of new Stöckli powder skis.
My father must have kept them hidden in the garage this whole time. Perhaps, I think with a rush of affection toward my father, he knows me better than I know myself.
When I look over at the house, the door is closed. But through the front window I see a shadow—my father is standing in the back of the living room near the piano, watching us.
Thank you, I mouth. He tips his head forward and disappears into the den.
CHAPTER 28
“Nervous?” Aksel asks.
Above us, the sky is a thick layer of white cloud pierced by knifepoints of blue. A deft wind sends snowflakes swirling around us.
I click into my gleaming new boots and laugh. “Skiing doesn’t scare me.”
“What does scare you?”
I point across the road. “Them.”
Tourists, wearing expensive one-piece ski suits, have prematurely clicked into their skis and are attempting to walk across the pavement. Their helmets are on backward, and their goggles are on upside down.
Aksel snickers. “Steer clear.”
At the base of Waterford Resort, we ski into line to access the upper runs.
The lift creaks around the track, and I sit down on the hard seat. As we swing upward, I want to reach out and touch the spiky treetops. I want to stand at the peak of the mountain. Challenge it. Conquer it.
We ski off the lift and pause on the flat plateau at the head of the run. To our left, an intermediate trail descends gradually. Directly ahead, the steep mountain narrows into a chute descending through trees.
I angle my skis toward the top of the chute. “Here?” I shout to Aksel.
I don’t hear his response. Instead, I am blinded by assaulting snow flurries.
Laughter explodes behind me. A figure in all black—from helmet to boots—has hockey-stopped beside me.
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