Page 70 of The Happiness Blueprint
“So you’re my princess—not my Viking font!” The stare Alex gives me is so stern I burst out laughing.
I burrow my face against the curve of his neck and take in his smell. I’m scared, but I think it’s a good scared. Alex is worth a little fear, a step outside my comfort zone.
“God, Klara. Your eyes...”
“Oh?”
“They’re piercing, absolutely on fire.”
“People always tell me I’m too intense. I have to try to remember to blink and look at various objects every now and again.”
“Too intense? You don’t even understand what you do to me, Klara Nilsson.”
“To me it’s incomprehensible that not everyone looks at you that way,” I say. How could I not notice all this the first time I saw him? He was so distracting to me because Ilikedhim.
My hands run down his back, from the shoulder blades, along the spine.
Alex gently stops me, taking my hands in his. The wave of rejection washes over me. Memories of googlinghow to kisspop up and the stress of always performing, running through each technical step in my mind as I do it, hoping I’m good enough, mutes me for a minute. Being too much but also never quite enough. It’s about to happen again.
“I want to sit with you in this moment, just like this, for a bit longer.” He drapes his arm around me and swivels us around to face the windows, ocean before us. “You’ve made this apartment a happy place for me again.”
Things fall into place. His attitude when he first turned up, his shortness.
“There’s an amazing sunset starting in about ten minutes. Dan cleared most of the furniture, but I think we can pull something together. We have a front-row view,” he says. He goes away and comes back with some blankets and a heap of pillows.
“This will do.”
We arrange them across the living room floor, and I stand there hesitating as the orange begins to take over the dusky sky. I think how this is very much like a fantasy, but also very different. I haven’t rehearsed a version involving a sunset and a den floor.
“This is where you sit down, make yourself comfy and let me hold you. Okay?”
“Okay.” I swallow, relieved to have instructions.
It’s unknown territory, but I wriggle myself into sitting comfortably. I rest my head against his chest.
“I like it here. I’ve been coming almost every week since the accident. Sometimes my brother-in-law comes over, and we watch a movie and have a beer. Even now that the place is almost cleared out, I haven’t been able to stay away.”
“Dan. He seems nice.”
“The nicest.”
Alex doesn’t say anything else, so I do. “People tend to define things asbefore-and-aftersomething. A turning point. Was losing your brother the turning point in your life?”
“Yes. Calle, his death.”
“So all this time, when I’ve been going on about my sister, all the moaning... I’m so sorry, Alex. I didn’t know.” All the times I had complained about Saga—my sister that I love, that I still have, can still talk to and hug and see—he’d been hurting. It must have been torture for him.
“It’s okay, you couldn’t have known. And I’m glad you still have your sister.”
“Yes, I do.” A great one, it turns out. That I haven’t given enough credit. “I wish you had told me. Tell me about him.”
And Alex tells me everything. From childhood to growing up, to being best man at the wedding where Calle married Dan. Holidays together and the type of sibling relationship most people dream of.
“If you sit with the pain, it gets easier. Nothing lasts forever,” I offer when he’s done. This is what I do when I can’t run. Option one is escape, when the world gets too intense. But when I can’t do that, I sit with the stress, the overwhelming feeling I’m drowning in, and wait for it to pass.
Alex is quiet for a while, then says, “I guess I’ve been running away from it. Driving—when I was moving and trying to do something, I could handle it, ignore the pain. It stopped me feeling.”
I feel our hearts beating through our clothes, out of sync, one odd and one even, perhaps.
