“Don’t clench your fingers. Relax your muscles,” I advise.
“You’re making me nervous,” he mutters under his breath.
I move my hand closer to his. Our hands drift in the air side by side, like spaceships hovering above earth.
“If you control the shake, you control your aim.”
“That simple, huh?”
“So simple an eight-year-old can do it.”
“Don’t tell me—”
“Can’t help it.” I grin. “My father likes guns. Very Montana of him.”
Aksel laughs, dropping his hand.
Gathering the disassembled parts of the pistol together, I return them to Aksel. “I learned to control the shake by reassembling a pistol in less than twenty seconds.”
Aksel seems to refrain from rolling his eyes. Nevertheless, in twenty-nine seconds, he has the pistol reassembled and passes it back to me.
“Nine seconds too slow.” I eject the mag, check the chamber, clip the mag back in, and hand it back. While he practices—twenty-seven seconds, twenty-four seconds, twenty-three—I stare out at the wilderness beyond the massive plate glass windows.
In the distance, pine trees at the edge of the clearing tremble in the breeze; their peculiar cone shapes and deep green hues intersect a sky thick with snow clouds. In the west, a patch of sunlight threatens to break through.
I look back at Aksel. His collar is slightly askew, and his neatly trimmed hair is mussed, giving him a ruggedly beautiful look. Aksel makes me feel secure. I trust him in a way I’ve never trusted anyone—in a way that transcends everything my parents have trained me to believe.
“Aksel, why did you think you shouldn’t become involved with me?” I ask sedately. It’s been weeks since the Creamery, and I’ve been unable to get his words out of my head.
“Twenty!” He pushes the safety on proudly, placing the SIG on the table behind the sofa.
He looks at me like I have morphed into some complex equation he needs to solve; he drags a hand through his tousled hair.
“I don’t know, Sophia,” Aksel eventually says. “I should be concentrating on other things, I suppose.” He weaves his fingers into mine. “Except when I’m not with you, I think about being with you. And when I’m with you, I only think about you. And I get that maybe you don’t want to discuss places you lived, or people you knew, or why you can disassemble and reassemble a pistol faster than I can load my rifle … But if anything feels right, Sophia?” He traces the inside of my palm with his thumb. “This does.”
Aksel kisses my neck. Linking my hands behind his neck, I close my eyes.
“And maybe we’re wrong for each other.” His lips brush my jaw, sending warm currents tearing through me. “Maybe, Sophia, this is a really bad idea, maybe it can’t last …”
Aksel’s hands slide across my neck, slipping down my back. Goose bumps rise up my spine. His lips are inches from mine; flames of heat surge across my throat.
I feel his pulse, flush against my chest. Our lips hover.
“I’ll go with you,” I whisper.
Confused, Aksel props his head up on one elbow and touches my lips with his thumb. “Where?”
I nudge his thigh with my knee. “Skiing.”
Afternoon sunlight breaks open the clouds and pours into the house through the windows. In the brilliant sunlight, Aksel’s green eyes are nearly translucent.
“Finally.” He casts me a wide smile. “It’s my turn to teach you something. Skiing is always a compromise of three things: speed, style, and slope …” He pulls me in, wraps his strong arms around my waist, and kisses me.
But I can’t get his words out of my head, that we might be a bad idea.
That I might be a bad idea.
I sit upright and look at him. “Aksel, are you scared of me?” I ask quietly.
Aksel watches me like he can read every thought that circulates inside my head. Maybe now is the moment he’ll decide I have too much history. That my past is too strange—that I am too strange.
But I also feel like there’s a live wire connecting us, and severing it would detonate an explosion.
Aksel locks his arms behind my back and draws me toward him. His words come out smooth, breathless almost. “Sophia, you scare the hell out of me.”
CHAPTER 27
Saturday arrives blustery and cold. Aksel texts me at seven: Wake up, weather’s perfect.
The floorboards creak as I walk to the bathroom. After combing my tangled hair, I pull on ski leggings and a Fair Isle sweater.
Passing by the living room on my way to the kitchen, I see my father asleep on