Page 61 of A Winter in Wonderland
Chapter 28
Ilay in my bunk that night, in the early hours of Christmas morning, feeling more excited anticipation than I had in years. Something had shifted in me; I could feel it. It wasn’t just from the warm and welcome glass ofglögiI’d had at the end of the party alongside my co-workers and friends. And this wasn’t my imagination; there was something between Josh and me. Had I known ever since we sat together on the plane? Maybe.
But now there were no more maybes. It couldn’t have been more obvious.
I replayed the moments leading up to our near-kiss. The eye contact, our arms touching at dinner, the smiles, the glances, and then finally being alone with him, with all of his acting put aside and it was just him, me, and that electric space between us.
And now I couldn’t sleep. Unlike Esteri, who, in the bunkbelow, was snoring and occasionally chatting in Finnish in her sleep.
A thought danced through my mind like the sugarplum fairy: what if he would be mybadmemory from this Christmas? What if, as I held my heart near his, it would soon break like a fallen icicle?
Or … What if I stop living in the past, or the future, for just tonight?
I rose from my bed and as quietly as I could pulled a jumper over my pyjamas and stepped out of our bedroom. In the dark corridor, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I couldn’t go knocking on Josh’s door because a) he had a room-mate, and b) now I was standing here in the silence I didn’t know what I thought would happen anyway.
I went downstairs to the kitchen and started making myself a hot chocolate as quietly as I could. In front of the hob was a small window with short, plaid curtains, which I pulled aside and peered out, looking up towards the moon.
‘Is he up there?’ came a soft whisper.
Turning, I saw Josh standing against the doorframe of the kitchen, his arms folded. He wore those flannel PJ bottoms and a Seattle Seahawks sweatshirt. His hair was a mess. He looked beautiful.
‘Must be still out on his deliveries,’ I answered, and he smiled. ‘Do you want a drink? I’m making hot chocolate and I could split it with you?’
‘Um, if you’re sure?’ He stepped into the kitchen and pulled up a chair at the table. ‘You couldn’t sleep?’
I kept my eyes on the milk, warming on the hob, stirringit slowly with a wooden spoon, the steam rising to my face. Because if I looked at him, I’d give everything away. ‘Yeah, just a busy brain, you know?’
He paused and then said, ‘Me too.’
Dividing the milk between two pottery mugs, I heaped in some powdered hot chocolate and then something caught my eye. I looked up and out of the window. ‘What was that?’
‘What?’ Josh came over, his body beside me, and he looked out of the window with me.
I pulled the curtain further aside. ‘I thought I saw something, in the sky.’
Our eyes met and in a flash I was back in that cramped position behind the stage. ‘Was it being pulled by flying reindeer?’
‘No,’ I laughed and peered back up at the sky. ‘It was green.’
‘The Northern Lights?’
‘It could have been.’
‘So let’s go out and see.’
We scrambled ourselves and our hot chocolates to the boot room and pulled on our coats and snow boots as fast as we could, all while I tried to act totally normal.
Opening the door to the chalet, Josh exclaimed, ‘Wow, it’s freezing out here. Are you going to be OK?’
‘For the Northern Lights, I’ll be fine,’ I answered, and followed him through the door.
The world outside was silent, sleeping. The snow was untouched, the top layer freshly frozen over, the imprints from party returners having softened over the past coupleof hours. The trees were still and steady. My PJs and my dad’s thick jacket were no real match for the deep cold, but nevertheless we stepped further into the clearing and craned our necks, searching between the trees for more swirling colours.
The only sounds were our breath, and the soft crunch of the snow under our feet as we moved in circles, exploring the stars.
‘There!’ I whispered, suddenly seeing the green glow move behind the very tips of one of the pines, off to one side.
It would have been wonderful to be up on one of the fells, or out in the middle of one of the frozen lakes, somewhere I could see a huge panorama of the sky instead of this small-lensed view from within the clearing of the trees, but even without the conditions being perfect, it felt perfect. I’d been here six weeks and this was the first time I’d been lucky enough to catch the aurora borealis.
