Page 77 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
“Once you’d googled me.”
“Not apologising for survival instincts,” he returns, unabashed. “You do trust me, Anna, and I’m asking you to hold onto that, to believe in us.”
Anna studies the floor, but it holds no answer for her.
A phone alarm chimes in her pocket. She’s out of time.
Raising her eyes to him, she says finally, “I can’t.”
“Youwon’t. Different.”
Her eyes widen with exasperation, and frustration at him not understanding this, or not wanting to understand her position. “How can I believe in something that can’t work? I am leaving,” she spells out. “You always knew that. I backed off because I didn’t want to hurt you. I never wanted to be another woman leaving you.”
“Surely that’smyproblem, the hurt? That was my risk to take. And I am here for it.” His hands have moved from his chest to his hips and Jamie looks ready to take on the world.
“Then you have no sense of self-protection,” Anna snaps. “Or you haven’t felt what real hurt feels like.”
He throws his head back with a “Ha! I know hurt, Anna, trust me, but I won’t let it shape me, like it does you. This is about trust. Trusting your own feelings and someone else who sees you and wants you. I’ve given you space, but god it’s tiring, because what I see is you drifting away and not because that’s what you really want, but because you’re too fucking scared to face the right direction.”
They’ve reached an impasse and she is done, given what she sees as his inability to listen. She walks around the table towards her bags. She can’t bring herself to look at him.
He catches her wrist.
“You won’t take a risk,” he says hotly. “And little wonder, given your mother never taught you to stick around or work for a relationship.” His anger reignites her own.
“Don’t you come at my mother,” she rages, the stab at Ida being a step too far, and before she can stop herself, she punches back, “at least mine stuck around for me…”
Whatever he was about to say, it catches in his mouth and they stand for a long moment, the awfulness of what she just said hanging spectre-like between them. He releases her wrist, the skin instantly cold.
Then, eyes dull now and shaken, Jamie finally nods towards her bags and says, “You’re right. It’s time for you to go.”
ChapterThirty-Two
Østerport station is buzzing with people as Anna drags herself in with her case. Walking the fifteen minutes from the house has been a miserable effort, to say the least. She’s taken the route through Holmens cemetery to give Vivi and Mads’ stone a stroke. And she took a photo of that, too, so she can look at it from wherever in the world she is. It sits, in her phone, next to the picture of the house. The phone that now sits in the depths of her pocket, her ticket ready on the first screen.
All these small things, as well as deliberately noticing shops and signs as she passes, are about being present in the moment, engaging with her surroundings, she tells herself, and nothing at all to do with distraction and taking her mind off the horrendous way things just ended with Jamie. How could she have said that to him? She is deeply ashamed of it, that she could even think it, but she’d been angry and stressed, and… no, it was inexcusable. She knows that. Andshe should probably have hammered on the door, and begged his forgiveness. But he’d thrown her out, of her own house, and her plane is leaving, and so she’s done as he asked and gone. She’ll write to him from London, apologise properly and hope he accepts. She’ll feel wretched until he does.
On reaching the station, her AirPods go in, playing a podcast she keeps losing track of, hoping it will divert the hideous feeling in her. As such, it takes her a couple of seconds to realise someone is staring at her as they come up the escalator as she steps onto hers heading down to the platform.
Ah fuck.
It’s Carl.
Not today, not now.
Her eyes shift to the passage in front of her in the hope of dashing through, but her case is big and the stairs are rammed. Why are these people not all at homehygge-ing?? She deliberately doesn’t look behind her, hoping he never actually saw her, but that stare was quite clear. At the bottom, she steps off and is about to make the turn to the next escalator to take her down to the platform, when she feels a hand on her shoulder. She immediately wrenches away.
“Anna.”
His large frame crowds her backwards out of the flow of travellers. She doesn’t have time for this. Nor the emotional bandwidth. Not now. She just wants to huddle into a seat on the train and shut everything out.
“Go away,” she mutters.
Decidedly not going away, he reaches to remove an AirPod from her ear. She slaps his hand away, outraged.
“Don’t touch me.”
“You can’t hear me with those in.”
