Half an hour later, I’m on coffee number two, the Toblerone is history and I’ve finally found what I was looking for in the bottom of a box marked ‘University’ which has followed me from my halls of residence to Mum and Dad’s, to the Love Shack and now it’s here, and in all that time it’s never been opened.
From beneath ring binders filled neatly with my meticulously handwritten lecture notes (I wasthatnerd at uni; well, for the first half of my degree at least), I lift out the green faded T-shirt. It was his favourite. After we’d gotten to know each other I took to wearing it, wanting to stake my claim to gorgeous Stellan so the other girls knew he was with me. The T-shirt has spent the last fifteen years wrapped around a bundle of photographs. I crawl into bed with them and pull the duvet around me. OK, let’s see if I’m remembering him correctly.
And there he is. Blond, very blond, and serious-looking. There’s that furrow between his thick flaxen brows, and those pale brown eyes, the lightest I’d ever seen. As I inspect the image it hits me all over again, that familiar stomach flipping feeling I used to get when he looked at me like that. He really was something else.
There are a few more pictures of him taken at student parties, one where he is singing karaoke, his arms around his fellow exchange student friends’ necks, bottle of beer in hand. He’s at ease and grinning in that one and showing his deeply bowed lips curling over straight white teeth. He had the kind of smile people round here pay a fortune for.
And then I stop flipping through the images as my eyes fall upon one of us together. Who took this? I have no idea. It’s me and him sitting by a table piled with empty beer bottles and glasses at some hall party or other. I look so young, only nineteen and effortlessly pretty, though I had no idea of that fact back then. And we’re right in the centre surrounded on all sides by partying students. I can see someone’s got a guitar and people are singing. But Stellan and me look oblivious. We’re facing one another, the tip of my nose brushing his. His eyes are half open and his lips are parted for the kiss that was to come. He has that desirous, intense look on his face that I could have grown so used to, given half the chance. But what gets me in the pit of my stomach as I gaze into this glossy window into my past is the sight of Stellan’s fist twisting the hem of my top into a scrunched knot, the muscles in his forearm flexed and taut. For a second, tucked up alone in my bed, I can almost feel the graze of his knuckles on my skin as I, teenage Sylvie, sank into his kiss.
Placing the photo aside, I reach for what was once Stellan’s T-shirt, holding it at arm’s length as it unravels, and I read the faded lettering, ‘Lapland-Manchester Cultural Exchange 2004’. Obviously, giving it a little sniff would be weird, wouldn’t it?
I’d like to say that Ididn’thold the soft material to my face and inhale it like it was cocaine and I was an addict falling way off the wagon; I’dliketo say that, but I’m pretty sure I drifted back to sleep moments later with Stellan’s T-shirt fully covering my face.
Maybe I was partially asphyxiated by the fabric, maybe it was the shock of finding him online, or maybe it was all the day’s talk of Lapland and those old photographs. Maybe that’s why Stellan Virtanen turned up in my sleep.
In the dream, I’m at one of those student parties. It’s late at night, the room is packed with people and there are disco lights spinning and sparkling everywhere. Stellan is smiling, his lips swollen from kissing me, and he’s leading me by the hand into one of the bedrooms. He lies back on the pile of coats in the dark as the door closes, and I lie down too.
My younger self’s body feels long and lithe beside him, and he’s so warm. He covers my mouth with his, and I let him, dizzy with the feeling of his full lips and the sound of his breathing. He takes his time, stretching the wide neck of my top down over my shoulder, and his mouth travels across my throat before placing a slow kiss into the hollow above my collar bone. He must be able to feel me trembling.
‘Should I stop?’ he asks in his heavenly accent as he pulls away cautiously, but I smile and shake my head, guiding his mouth back to mine.
His hand passes over my stomach and comes to a stop cradling my hip bone through my clothes before he shifts his body on top of mine and presses my legs apart with his thighs. He sinks down onto me, letting me feel the weight of his long muscular frame and his hardness through his jeans. I let my head roll back. I’ve never experienced anything like this before and I don’t want him to stop now, or ever.
I pull his plaid shirt off his back, throwing it to the floor, before slowly lifting his T-shirt, letting my fingertips run up his sides, making him inhale sharply. As he breathes hot kisses on my neck, the ends of his clean scented hair fall against my face. My nerves prickle as his hand gently eases inside my jeans and I melt into the slow movement of his fingertips, wanting to arch my back under the weight of his body anchoring me down. In the dark I can see his eyes are open and he’s watching me, tantalised and smiling.
And then I wake up.
I lunge for my mobile and quickly type a message for Nari.
You said there was a choice of two Lapland destinations? I quite fancy Saariselkä.
Chapter Three
In late December I can usually hear the Christmas carols blaring out from the kitchen before I even get up my parents’ garden path. Their house always looks cosy and festive at this time of year. There are usually two holly bushes decorated with luscious red bows and topiaried into perfect spheres on either side of the porch and long strings of coloured fairy lights running around the window frames, but as I unlatch the gate it strikes me that they may have broken with tradition this year. Maybe Mum’s mixing it up a bit and the décor is all indoors for a change.
I ring the bell, knowing just what to expect. Even though it’s only the seventeenth of December, Mum will have been cooking for ages, there’ll be a big pot of mulled wine on the stove and a Christmas cake ready for cutting taking pride of place amidst the poinsettia and ivy decorations running the length of the dinner table. There’ll be a sprig of mistletoe over the living room doorframe and they’ll already have stopped a million times beneath it for a parental snog (I’ve spent my life swinging between extremes of thinking my parents are adorable lovebirds and recoiling in squirming horror – especially in my teenage years – seeing them kissing when they thought nobody was looking). Dad will have polished up all the silverware and a festive aperitif will be waiting for me in a twinkling champagne glass.
As I reach for the doorbell again, wondering why nobody’s answering, I’m struck by the strongest memory, the thing I loved best of all about Christmases past, and I can see it now so clearly: an image of Mum and me stirring up homemade Christmas puddings and a humungous, boozy fruit cake on the last Sunday before Advent, adding a gleaming sixpence to each one before they were baked. The sixpences had once belonged to Mum’s great, great auntie and were a treasured part of Mum’s festive rituals long before I was born. I was supposed to place one of those sixpences inside my shoe on my wedding day; a little reminder of home, family and happy times as I walked down the aisle, a precious token of good luck from Mum. I’m in danger of having a weepy wobble right here on the doorstep, but Dad appears just in time.
‘Sylvie! Come in. You’re early and we’re, um, not quite ready for dinner.’ Dad’s looking flustered as I head past him to the kitchen. ‘Just a minute, Sylve…’
I tell him not to worry, I already kicked my gritty boots off in the porch, but he’s still flustering behind me. There are some yummy cooking smells but, I notice, no music, no scented candles and no tree.
‘Is Mum ill?’
‘Eh, no, dear. Why do you ask?’
‘Everything’s… different,’ I say, as I catch my reflection in the hall mirror which is neither frosted with spray-on snowflakes nor adorned with tinsel. Something’s definitely up.
‘We thought, since we’re going away for Christmas, we needn’t bother with the whole palaver this year. No point letting a tree go to waste in an empty house, is there? Anyway, Sylvie…’
‘I suppose not.’Dammit!Given the sorry state of my flat, I’d been hoping for a dose of familial festive cheer and, whilst I’m busy mourning the loss of Mum’s traditional Christmas, I don’t mind admitting I’d been looking forward to their obscenely expensive cheeseboard. Mum really goes to town for the holiday season, and I did too, until this year.
In Christmases past I’d have a six foot tree delivered to the Love Shack and even if Cole wasn’t around to help decorate it – I can only remember two occasions where he was, now I think about it – I’d make it pretty with the baubles Nari brought home for me from the festive markets she visited on her travels. She knew how much I loved this time of year and always indulged my festive obsession. I just don’t know where all that goodwill to mankind went after Cole ran off, but I’ve definitely lost my Christmas sparkle, and it looks like Mum and Dad have too.
‘Hold on, Sylvie, there’s someone…’ Dad’s trying to take my hand as I round the corner into the kitchen, clearly also a Christmas-free zone. I clock Mum looking harassed, standing over a pile of hotdog buns, brandishing a knife as she slits them down the centre. Dad overtakes me inside the doorway and hurriedly takes the knife from her. ‘We’ve got a visitor, actually, Sylvie, love.’
Suddenly, Mum’s stormy expression and Dad’s agitated blustering make sense. Cole is sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee. He’s in his pilot’s uniform.Shit!I hadn’t spotted his car outside.
