Page 20 of The Square

CHAPTER SIX - CHRISTINE

I caught himwith a girl once.

Danny, I mean.

We were staying in downtown Reykjavik for a few weeks waiting on new passports to come in from Copenhagen. We had this skinny, blue townhouse with a top-floor terrace, which was my favorite part.

I was… I dunno. Seventeen? Maybe? We’d just finished a job in the Southern Hemisphere and decided, hey, we’ve never been to Iceland, why not lie low there for a little bit?

So that’s what we did.

Alec was gone, mostly. I don’t even know if he was really in Iceland the whole time because he’d disappear for several days, then come back, then leave again.

But Danny was there.

This was during summer break from school and it was relatively warm and I was trying to practice some parkour moves that I’d seen these guys doing in England a few months earlier.

So I was clinging to the side of the severely-pitched roof when Danny came home that night with a woman.

It was about three in the morning. Though the sun was still hanging low on the horizon in what’s called “the white night.”

Which I sorta loved. Both the fact that the sun refused to set and the name for the phenomenon.

It was weird and I wasn’t used to the light, so I had a hard time sleeping those few weeks we were in Reykjavik.

Anyway, Danny came home with this beautiful Icelandic girl. Just picture it in your head for a moment…

Right. That’s what she looked like.

Pretty much the opposite of Christine from Dirty City, America.

So of course, I hated her immediately. Not even because she was so blonde, and blue-eyed, and beautiful—but mostly just because she had Danny’s full attention.

They were kissing in the kitchen. The townhouse was four stories tall and I’d claimed the top floor as my bedroom, so I’m going to assume that Danny figured I was sleeping or far enough away that he didn’t need to worry about me hearing them.

But I scaled my way down the side of the house, plopped silently onto the patio in the back garden, and peeked through the window to spy on them.

He had her pushed face first up against a wall. Her hands were pressed against it, arms and fingers spread wide, and he was fucking her from behind as he pulled her hair with such force, her neck was bending back in a weird way that momentarily made me forget that I was watching him fuck and made me worry that he was gonna kill her by accident.

Because, by this time in our little round-the-world adventure with Alec, he’d killed plenty of people.

As had I.

I’d had sex plenty of times too. That boy in New Zealand was my first back when I was fifteen but there were lots of them since. And they were all older than me by years. Like Danny’s age.

I guess I have a type.

But they’d never fucked me like this.

And he had this look on his face like he wanted to kill her. And the window was open so even though they were trying to be quiet, I could hear him murmuring things as he pressed his face up against her ear.

Dirty things. Angry things.

And I kept thinking, Why is he so angry?

But he wasn’t angry. I get that now that I’m older. He’s just… that kind of lover.

I’m thinking about this now, lying here in bed in the cabin on the yacht, because I just had sex with him like that.