Page 142 of Salto

"Fine. If you don't want to talk about the camp, or your pain, or anything that's obviously going on... what do you want to talk about?"

"Do you speak Finnish?" I asked suddenly, turning to face him.

His brow furrowed.

"What?"

"Do you speak Finnish?" I repeated. "Like, did you learn it before you came here? You had to have, right? You lived there until you were what, eight?"

He blinked, clearly caught off guard by the change in subject.

"Uh... yeah. I speak Finnish. I grew up speaking it. I've been in America long enough, though, that I don't really have an accent anymore."

I looked back out the window and sighed.

"My mom speaks Italian, but she didn’t get to teach me as much as she wanted because she worked so much. I don't speak it very well, but I understand some of it."

"Makes sense," he said quietly.

I could still feel the concern radiating off him.

"Maybe you should just start speaking Finnish,” I said abruptly.

His eyebrows lifted.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." I took another sip of my coffee. "Maybe it'd annoy me less."

One corner of his mouth twitched, and a small chuckle escaped him. "Niinkö luulet, kulta?"

My brain stopped functioning for a few seconds.

The Finnish words rolling off his tongue were so smooth, and so unexpectedly... attractive.

To hide just how much it affected me, I looked down at my hands and shrugged with feigned nonchalance.

“Nah, still pretty annoying,” I lied, fighting a smile.

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Alright, that's enough of you. Let's get you home.”

He tossed his empty cup into the trash behind him and stood.

I threw mine away too and followed suit.

“What does kulta mean?” I asked as we started back across the street.

“Maybe if you're nice, I'll tell you someday.” He gave me a pointed look.

The curiosity stayed with me all the way home.

I'd planned to look it up, but by the time I made it back up to my tower, the pain had flared again. I swallowed another round of ibuprofen, drew myself a bath, and by the time I crawled into bed, looking up a single Finnish word was the last thing on my mind.

Sleep came before I ever got the chance.

CHAPTER 50

The next day I got a text before my morning session with Rove: