“No, that’s not going to happen.” His voice was rising, and he held onto the phone like he might snap it in two. “I said no. And she’s not part of this.”
He closed his eyes, listening, his mouth pulled into a deep frown. I wanted to walk up the steps that separated us, but the look on his face warned me away.
“I’ll talk to you when I get to Detroit.” He ended the call and shoved the phone into his back pocket. I stood only a few feet away, listening to the sound of his breath.
He bent over and rested his hands on his knees. His head hung down, and his broad back rose and fell. I took the last steps until I stood just below him. I brushed my fingers up along the muscles of his arm, around his shoulder and down his side. The rise and fall stopped, mid-breath. I stroked his arm again and held on gently. Finally, Niklas inhaled, long and slow. He shook his head before he straightened back up. He took my hand in both of his, but he didn’t say anything. I waited as long as I could.
“What was that about, Niklas?”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he said. “Today’s our last day here. I don’t want to get into that shit yet.”
He stared out at the water, probably not to take in the beauty of the bay. Whatever his agent had told him had shaken him, and my mind had already begun stringing together the one-sided conversation I had heard. The call from his agent must be about hockey—and it was something Niklas didn’t react well to. Hockey alone wouldn’t get a rise out of him. But I knew one thing that would: the rumors of abuse that had driven him out of Detroit in the first place.
Niklas had saidshe. Was I thesheor was it another woman connected to Niklas? I frowned. The old me, the person I was last spring back in Detroit, would have given in and dropped the subject, no questions asked. But that’s not who was standing here, in the middle of the longest staircase I had ever seen, listening to Niklas discuss something that probably involved me.
So I took a breath and tried again. “It sounded like you were talking about me, too. I’d like to know what that was about.”
Niklas folded his arms. “It’s about hockey.”
I folded my arms, mirroring his stance, and waited.
“Look,” he said, his voice gentler, “you’ve avoided talking about what happens when we get to Detroit, and that definitely affects me. Now I’m asking for a little time to think about this call before we talk.Please.”
The last word,please, came softly, breaking through the arguments I had lined up in my mind. One more day, and everything would change. My stomach twisted. His gaze was still fixed on mine, and his eyes pleaded for me to leave the subject alone. And he was right. I’d asked the same of him back in Hawaii.
“Tomorrow,” I conceded quietly.
Niklas closed the distance between them and folded me into him, ignoring my crossed arms. I couldn’t resist. I rested my head against the warm, hard planes of his chest. Slowly, I slipped my hands around him. We stood on the step, still and silent. After a while, the tension in his arms eased. Or maybe it was my own body that settled. Wordlessly, we found our way back to each other.
I turned my head and looked out at the bay, dotted with the white triangles of sailboats. The water sparkled in the late-afternoon sun. On the other side, slopes of houses faded into deserted hills of dry brown and dark green. Still so far away from Michigan.
Niklas’s chest rose and fell in a heavy breath, and he kissed the top of my head. “Ready for more steps?”
I rolled my eyes. “Always.”
That earned me a little smile.
The pathway zigzagged into an alley of houses, each stretching down the steep incline. The houses ended in lush yards, hidden behind tangles of vines. I stopped on a landing, panting. Niklas graciously looked like he was resting, too. He leaned back onto the railing.
“These properties are beautiful,” I said, peering through the tree branches into someone’s yard. “I feel like we’re not supposed to be here.”
Niklas moved behind me, almost touching me, and looked over my shoulder. Warmth radiated from his body, but he didn’t sound out of breath.
“Not sure I’d like a location this public, but that one…” He pointed through the trees, to a house further across the hill, lit up in a patch of sunlight. “That one I’d take.”
I nodded, though the idea of living here felt as foreign as staying in Stockholm had. Niklas slipped his arm around my waist and kissed the base of my neck.
“We could live here, you know,” he whispered in my ear. “We could just leave everything behind and move here.”
I tried to ignore the clench in my stomach.Yes,my heart sang before I could squash the thought,run away to San Francisco. Begin a new life with Niklas. But despite the shiny appeal running away together held, I knew this wasn’t going to happen.
My trip had shaken up my life in exactly the ways I had hoped it would. No more taking baby photos in a mall studio. No more living life on my ex-boyfriend’s terms. And no more getting walked all over by a man. In the span of a few short months, I had managed to turn my life around.
Now I needed to get to work, not run away. No matter how appealing Niklas was, we were flying to Detroit tomorrow, and soon after, he would return to Stockholm.
But I turned to Niklas and allowed myself to be seduced by the warmth of his arms and the temptation of an easy future, just for a moment.
“What would we do here?” I asked.
