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This time it won’t be so bad since Shay is still here, even though I don’t know how long she plans on sticking around. I’m not exactly offering her an exciting life here, and I know there’s so much more of the country that she wants to see. I wish I could find a way to take her around myself, but short of Uncle Per hiring someone else, I’m not sure it could work.
Besides, even though I’m catching more and more of these coy, flirtatious looks from Shay, noticing the way she leans in to talk to me, the way she touches me, whether hitting me playfully or just brushing my shoulder when she walks by, I’m not sure if she’d want to see Norway with me at her side. Though she’s much more comfortable around me now, and even starts talking about innocuous events from the past, I know the odds of her leaving with our relationship completely repaired are slim.
Above all, I’m not even sure if we have a relationship. We’re definitely friends more than first loves and ex-lovers, and that’s probably the right way to go about it.
But still, sometimes I want nothing more than to grab her, kiss her, ask her if she remembers what it was like to love me, to want me. It’s pure selfishness on my behalf, but these feelings are really starting to fuck with me.
I’ve even started writing again like I used to, just a few lines before bed. It’s all shit, as usual, but the fire is there, the flames growing. She’s as inspiring as she ever was, and I don’t have to grab for a Bukowski book to find the drive and ideas. Just looking at her causes the clouds to move, the earth to shift beneath my feet, for that electricity that begets creation to seep through my veins.
I feel like I’m a fucking teenager all over again, for better and for worse.
Back then I was such a mess. Sometimes when I feel like my life has disintegrated like the rusted chains on my boat, all I have to do is think back to those days in high school. Shay was the only thing holding me together, a girl that loved me with all her young heart, and yet even she wasn’t enough to keep me from total destruction.
I was an awful person, through and through. The worst part is that was just the start. After I left New York and came back here, my downward spiral became quicker, deeper, until I was a shell of myself.
And yet, through it all, I still wrote. Even on my darkest days, I wrote. The journals that are stacked in shoeboxes under my bed are proof of that, proof that my deepest pain produced the most art. I’m not saying it was all good. My words as a teenager are mired in purple prose and dramatics as I tried to figure out what I meant to Shay and what she meant to me and how the two of us were in a world alone, dancing until there was nothing left between us. But the fire was there.
And now it’s back, because she’s back.
I just don’t know what it means. If having her here is bringing us back to the way we used to be during that turbulent, soul-scarring, formative year, or that I’m foreseeing the way things will end between us…again.
“Anders?”
I look up from my desk to see Shay standing in the doorway, looking so fucking sweet and unsure at the same time that my dick immediately jumps to attention.
I clear my throat. “Come on in.”
She hesitates before she steps inside, and it’s then that I notice she’s holding two bottles of beer. Says a lot about how much her beauty steals my attention when I don’t even notice the alcohol in her hands.
“Astrid told me to drink all her leftover beer,” Shay says. “I figured you could use one. Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
She stops beside me, her eyes drifting over the closed journal, the pencil in my hand. I always write in pencil. I hate the permanency of ink. My thoughts are as fluid as the sea, no use making them last. I figure that’s what tattoos are for.
“You’re not,” I tell her, offering a smile.
She hands me the beer, our fingers brushing. My heart glows electric, though I sense a bit of sadness in Shay’s demeanor.
“Miss them already?” I ask her, meaning Astrid and Lise. I think Shay was fairly upset about their departure. She really seemed to hit it off with my sisters, Astrid especially, and there were a lot of hugs before Lise’s friend drove them into Trondheim.
Honestly, I thought maybe Shay would have gone with them, but she’s still here. Now, with the buffer of my sisters gone, it feels like the house is just a little smaller, and the two of us are a little closer.
