Page 18 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
Her smile tells him she does.
* * *
The night is clear, the stars pricking the ink-black sky, so they take a circuitous route, walking over the cycle bridge then through Christianshavn, passing the houseboats which are gloriously decorated for Christmas. Then they cross back over the harbour via Knippelsbro almost as far as Børsen, the stock-exchange, but dropping down steps just before, to the bar which perches against the water. They talk as they walk, Jamie explaining how he knows Mikkel from work, whose grandfather owns the boat. He tells her about the wedding he’d been to, plus a few others, and Anna is impressed.
“You don’t seem to have any problem making friends,” she says.
“What do you mean?” he asks. “I’m a friendly guy.”
Anna snorts.
“What?” he demands, offended.
Anna rights her face. Should she poke this wasp nest? She’s leaving soon, she reasons, egged on by thegløgg. Why not?
“Mikkel seems to like you, so OK. But my first experience of you wasn’t overly friendly.”
“I let you in,” he states.
“Before that,” she clarifies.
Jamie’s lips chew this over as they walk, his hands stuffed squarely in his pockets.
“Yesterday was… challenging,” he finally says. “Theentiretrip had been challenging. You caught the tail end of it. Last straws and that.”
“Difficult business meeting?”
He sighs. “Difficult parent. Five days of nonstop badgering to move back to Skye. Yesterday I just wanted to get home, to some peace.”
Well, Anna sees now that context has its place. “And being assaulted by a hot dog didn’t help?”
“Not so much.”
“If you’d hung around for the rest of my apology I would have offered to pay for some dry cleaning.”
Jamie’s eyebrow raises. “I don’t remember you offering during your other stalker moments.”
“Again,notstalking, just going the same way,” she says firmly, “and you’d been rude to me by then, so I’d retracted my offer. In my head.”
He rolls his eyes at her. Which makes her laugh. His is not a rolly-eyes face.
“Iamfriendly,” he says, grumpily.
“Let’s say that, then,” she says, deliberately making it sound like she’s placating him. Mean, but he’d called her a stalker, so fair is fair. “But Danes are a reserved people, and not always quick to let new people into their social circles,” she says, returning to the subject. “I don’t think it’s meant to be rude, it might be more a wariness, but that’s what I’ve heard from many non-Danes who come to live here. Thatsaid, once you’re in, you’re in– and you seem to have fast-tracked the selection process.” Anna thinks of her first sixteen years, constantly moving, just managing to make friends before her mother uprooted her again. She stopped bothering by her early teens, and while she might have played the education card in her case to stay with her grandparents, wanting friends was a large part of her motivation.
“I reckon you get what you put in. I’m normally friendly.”
“Even though you say you don’t always read people correctly?” She wants to know more.
He wrinkles his nose. “Sometimes I get it wrong. But I don’t want that to change me too much. I don’t want to be that person who assumes the worst of people up front. Ifthat means I get disappointed sometimes, so be it.”
He managed to think the worst ofherup front, she thinks, but bites her tongue. Bad day and all that. Instead, “Hmm” is all she says as she considers his point. If she’s honest, that’s how she’s come at most new people she’s met in the last year and a half. That might explain why there’s no one she needs to phone in London to let them know she’s delayed. Now she thinks of it, if anything happened to her– staying with a serial killer, for example– there wouldn’t be many people who would come and check on her. Maybe her mother, when Ida eventually noticed the radio silence…
“You OK?”
“Fine,” she says with a forced smile and briskness. “Super.”
He doesn’t look fully convinced, but they’ve reached the soup station and ordering two bowls of hot fish soup with what looks like freshly baked bread rolls, is a welcome treat and subject-changer.
