‘A picture, no?’ Gunnar said. ‘Made by the greatest artist.’
‘God?’
‘If you like. But, I prefer “nature”. A scientific fact, but open to interpretation.’
‘Well,’ Chloe said, shifting her body slightly closer to him until there was that actual connection. ‘I can see The Plough.’
‘Everyone can always see The Plough. Or as some call it, The Big Dipper or the kitchen ladle. A friend of mine calls it The Grandmother’s Spoon. She is crazy.’
‘So, what different ones can you see?’ Chloe asked.
‘Well,krúttio mitt, I do not look for the constellations. I look for patterns of my own. Connecting the stars, then disconnecting them and connecting them a different way. I find that it helps my mind be free, you know.’
Chloe turned her full attention back to the sky and honed in on one particularly bright star. Where did she look next? What picture could she make?
‘Right now I see a husky dog with very big ears,’ Gunnar stated.
Chloe laughed. ‘Now you’re teasing me. You can’t see a dog.’
‘How do you know this? You do not trust that I have been stargazing for a very long time. That I know my way around the changing sky?’
‘I believe you are a fantastic tour guide who knows his way around many Icelandic sites, but I don’t believe anyone can see a husky dog up there.’
‘Oh really,’ Gunnar said, his tone a touch combative as he got into a sitting position. ‘We need to fix this. Sit up.’
‘What?’
‘I cannot have you thinking that I am making this up. My reputation as a guide is at stake.’
She sat up and then suddenly his body moved. So swiftly, he shifted and moved right behind her until she was almost swallowed into the softness of his jacket and the firm, hard body that lay beneath.
‘We need to be close,’ he told her, voice soft yet edgily sensual. ‘For you to be in the same line of sight with me.’
‘OK,’ she breathed, already feeling all the closeness and imagining so much more.
‘So, follow the line of my finger, there.’ He pointed to the sky, leaning her back into him so she was sat inside his embrace. ‘You see this star?’
She concentrated, focussed on the tip of his finger, the star at its very end. ‘I see it.’
‘OK, so that is the start of the husky nose and then you go around here and up to its eyes, see?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Come on, you are not looking right.’
‘Maybe because I’m not you,’ Chloe suggested. ‘You said that it was open to interpretation. Perhaps I don’t see a husky dog but I see something else.’
‘What do you see?’ Gunnar asked her. ‘Tell me.’
Chloe looked at the stars, all supposedly very similar but some of them, whether it was a trick of the light or of the mind, standing out just a little brighter than others.
‘I see… the letter “v” like a string of beads making a necklace.’ She pointed. ‘There.’
‘I see,’ Gunnar said. ‘But are they beads? Or are they teardrops?’
‘Raindrops,’ Chloe answered, letting her imagination roam. ‘Or droplets from a waterfall. A necklace of nature.’
‘It could be better,’ Gunnar answered.
