Gael and I exchange a glance, and I decide to fuck with Erik a little.
“Wow. Your Spanish is getting better, you Swedish giant.”
Erik stops short. “What did you call me?”
“Oops. Wrong place. I meant Danish. Or maybe Finnish,” I tease, tapping my chin.
Erik’s mouth drops open, offended to the highest degree. “Jeg erNorsk!” he proclaims, looming over me.
My smile is practically feral.Got him.
“Oh. Norsk.Norwegian. Silly me. It’s so hard to keep all those weird northern European countries straight in my head.”
Gael hums in agreement and then goes in for the kill. “Almost as hard as it is to tell the difference between a victim and a survivor,” he says, raising one razor-sharp brow.
Erik turns to stare me down. “Youtoldon me?”
I wink at him and tear away a piece of his bear claw, popping it into my mouth. Gael is—and has always been—my ride-or-die, and Erik will learn exactly how dangerous we are together.
Side note: I’m enjoying Erik’s annoyed glare way more than I should.
When I don’t give him an answer, he turns to Gael and huffs in frustration. “I know I fucked up. I promise. I’ll never use that word again.”
Gael leans in and plucks a bit of bear claw from Erik as well. “Good. I’m just making sure it sticks.”
Gael and I high-five each other, and Erik reaches out, pulling me into an aggressive hug. “Point made,” he says, kissing the top of my head before heading toward Charlie and Justin.
Gael watches him leave, then faces me with his back to everyone else, raising his theatrical brows.
“What?” I ask, licking the sweet drizzle from the bear claw off my fingertips.
“He hugged you.”
“He always hugs me.” I laugh. “Actually, he’s hugged me a ton more times since I broke his nose.”
“He’s a side-hugger. That was a full-frontal hug,” he says, miming the move. “With a head kiss.”
“Yeah, that’s…new,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck as Gael continues to mime the hug. “Stop making it look dirty. Why are you doing that?”
“Because I can, and because maybe your little fantasy scenario is not so impossible after all.”
Like I said, Gael and I share everything, and he is all too aware of my pathetic pining over theNorskgiant. He also knows I’ve put my feelings in a lock box at the bottom of the sea and thrown away the key because there is zero chance of anything ever happening between us.
“He feels guilty because he broke the victim code, and now he doesn’t know how to be around me,” I say, shrugging it off.
“What do you mean?”
“He doesn’t know he can joke around with me. He’s always got some sort of battle going on behind his eyes—like he doesn’t know which version to be around me.”
“Yeah, but now he’s Affectionate Erik. What do you think about that?”
I shake my head. “I try not to think about it at all, especially with this trip we’re going on.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
“We’re still working out the details, but my initial idea is to make this big circle around the country. We’ll hit New Orleans, then southern Florida, then head up the East Coast to hit a few spots, then New York, then we’ll head west. Once we’ve circled back, we’ll hit the island.”
The island where it all began. There’s a nice bit of symmetry to the trip. New Orleans is where the guy who bought my first night on the island lives. I’ve walked through that awful night, and all the awful nights after, in my therapy sessions with Hedy. We even did EMDR therapy to, in her words, re-sort the trauma from an active folder to an archived folder. It’s all still disturbing and sad to think about, but it feels more like a memory than something still happening to me.
