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I watch her face for a moment. She’s wearing bright red lipstick that shows off her perfect, expressive mouth and full lips, but it can’t hide her eyes.
“Did everything with your grandmother go okay?” I ask.
Her jaw goes tense, eyes still glued to the menu, but now I can see they aren’t taking anything in. “It was okay.”
The waiter comes by, speaking Norwegian, and Laila puts an order in for herself. “I’m getting a glass of the Chiara Condello sangiovese,” she tells me. “Plus fried klipfisk. What do you want?”
I would normally get a beer, but the weather and the atmosphere in here (and the fact that it’s a wine bar) have me placing the exact same order as hers.
“Do you even know what klipfisk is?” she asks me as the waiter leaves.
I shrug. “No idea. I’m sure I’ll find out. It’s not like fish eyeballs or something?”
“What if it was?”
“If it’s fried, I’m sure I can handle it.”
“Quite the stomach you have,” she says. “Then again, you’re Scottish. You invented haggis.”
“We invented a lot of things, lass,” I tell her, deepening my brogue. I twist in my seat to try to face her better. “You know, the only problem with sitting this close to you is that I can’t get a good look at your beautiful face.”
Just as I expected, her cheeks wash with a touch of pink. “Probably for the best. So what did you end up doing today?”
“Went to the museum, walked around the harbor, nearly slipped on ice a few times and went into the sea. Pretty good day as a tourist.”
She nods. “There’s a lot to see here. I’m sure all your days off will be booked.”
“As long as I’m booked with you.”
She finally looks over at me, a wry smile spreading on her face. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
“I know. I believe you’ve told me that at least a few times.” I add a wink at the end, so she knows I meant in bed.
Her smile vanishes, her gaze going to the window, watching people pass by on the snowy street. “James…”
“What? You going to tell me I’m being inappropriate again?”
She sighs, putting her hands on her face. “What’s the point?” she mumbles. Her voice sounds so distraught that I actually don’t think she’s talking about me.
I place my hand on her back, and she flinches slightly from my contact, which, I have to admit, hurts a little.
“Hey,” I say, leaning in. “Are you okay? Do you want to leave?” I’m so close that my lips brush against her hair as I talk.
“I’m okay,” she says in a tiny voice. “Today was just rough.”
“Can you talk to me about it?”
She gives a slight shake of her head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
I don’t know why, but that bothers me. “Why wouldn’t I understand? Just because I never knew my grandmother? Or my parents?”
She takes her hands away and turns her head, her mouth just inches from mine. Her eyes are wet, and they drop to my lips before going up to meet my gaze. “I just mean…”
“I know what you meant,” I tell her, moving back to give her space.
There’s a lot that Laila doesn’t know about me, but then there are some things that she does. She knows that my birth mum was a drug addict who overdosed when I was two years old and I was raised by my deadbeat father until I was six, when he decided he couldn’t do it anymore. I spent my whole life either being in a home for boys, or being bounced around from house to house. Some of the foster parents were indifferent, some were in it for the government help, others were abusive. Others had family members who were abusive. I barely survived the whole ordeal intact. In fact, I still think that I lost some part of myself then, some part I never got back. But when you’re raised among loss, it doesn’t matter if something else is taken from you. It leaves you empty all the same.
But while Laila knows the gist of all that, I’ve never gone into details. I haven’t told her about my time in the army, and I barely touched on my divorce. She knows I was married, that is all. She has no idea what that marriage did to me.
