Bright Midnight: A Second-Chance Romance Read online

  Bright Midnight

  Karina Halle

  Copyright © 2021 by Karina Halle

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design: Hang Le Designs

  Edited by: Laura Helseth

  Contents

  Adrift

  Prologue

  1. Shay

  2. Shay

  3. Anders

  4. Shay

  5. Shay

  6. Shay

  7. Shay

  8. Anders

  9. Shay

  10. Shay

  11. Shay

  12. Anders

  13. Shay

  14. Shay

  15. Anders

  16. Shay

  17. Anders

  18. Shay

  19. Anders

  20. Shay

  Epilogue

  The Wild Heir

  About the Author

  Also by Karina Halle

  For Scott

  Laura

  And For My Norwegian Family

  I think we missed our turn

  Back it up

  You think I'd learn

  “Aqualung” - Morcheeba

  Adrift

  By Anders Johansen

  Adrift

  I look to the sea.

  waves glinting like glass

  sharp enough to silence

  the emptiest cries.

  my cries.

  swallowed

  to a darkness like the hell

  from which they came

  the hell

  that she brings me

  the hell that made me love her

  the hell that love creates.

  this sea, she sees

  but doesn’t know.

  or maybe she does.

  maybe that’s the joke.

  that we will die here

  together

  the sea

  and me.

  and then there is the water,

  in which we drift.

  right now.

  who doesn’t care about us.

  doesn’t care about unrequited love

  or burning hearts

  or her very heart

  that drowns me.

  just the empty years

  after being saved.

  Prologue

  Anders

  THEN- Eight Years Ago

  “Are you lost?”

  When am I not, I think to myself. I’m in no hurry to turn around and find out who’s asking the question. I’m in no hurry to do anything, including figuring out where I am.

  Lost.

  Who isn’t?

  The female voice doesn’t come again, though I can sense her presence behind me, like she’s waiting for an answer. She doesn’t realize she’s not going to get one. If she did, it would insinuate I need help.

  I don’t.

  Finally.

  I look down at the schedule in my hands and the shitty map that the principal gave me. I crumple up the map, drop it on the ground, and kick it. It skitters down the empty hallway, past lockers and water fountains and the horrible beige paint that’s piled on the walls. Americans don’t know anything about color.

  I breathe in through my nose and contemplate walking forward, ignoring the voice, and skipping this next class, this first class here at Westminster High School. Or I can turn around and stop.

  Find my way.

  I turn around and see the girl.

  This is it, I think, standing, blinking at her. She was no one to me before, just a voice, but now she’s her.

  She’s beautiful. But that word seems too plain, too common, a word you use to describe a sunset or a waxed, classic car gliding slowly down the street.

  This girl is beyond beautiful. She’s a mix of faults that all combined until she’s something right. A bump on her nose. Acne scars at her chin, covered with makeup that’s a shade too light. Her eyebrows might cost her some friends. But her body is ripe, like a peach, soft and more womanly than anyone in high school should be. Her skin is soft brown. Her hair hangs around her like a shield; I wonder if she hides behind it. And her eyes…warm, mahogany honey…her eyes are what cause me to just stop and stare and wonder why I didn’t turn around earlier. They burn. They scream. They yearn. She has eyes that are already asking me to take her far away and never look back.

  I already love her eyes.

  I want them to love me too.

  I clear my throat, because I can’t take her anywhere unless I speak. The English that usually comes so naturally to me is scrambled and it takes a moment for me to put it together.

  “I am looking for Mrs. Chaffey,” I tell her.

  Her eyes widen as she hears my accent. I’m not just a boy, I’m a foreigner. Maybe I can’t take her anywhere. Or maybe I can take her too far.

  “Mrs. Chaffey?” she repeats. “Do you have Spanish with her?”

  I nod. “I was supposed to be there five minutes ago.”

  “So was I,” she says with a devious slant to her smile, the kind that tells me we are both the same, or at least she wants me to think so. “Follow me,” she adds, walking past me, her head held high, her eyes glancing me over like I’m a secret. But her words warble, her tone shaky, as if she’s being brave for the first time today.

  “You’re in twelfth grade?” I ask, falling in line beside her.

  “Yup, a senior,” she says, brushing her hair behind her ear and looking away, her smile now more shy than before. Maybe because I’m walking close, so close I can smell her. A fruity perfume. It reminds me of summers in Todalen, the apple trees by the house, sunshine and fresh air and reading a tattered copy of Huckleberry Finn. The past smells great on her.

  “Where are you from?” she asks.

  “Norway,” I tell her, observing her closely. The way people handle that information always tells me so much about them.

  She nods, looping her thumbs around the straps of her leather backpack. “Cool. Europe.”

  “You ever been? To Europe?”

  She shakes her head and her earrings, gold stars, catch the faint light streaming in through the windows. She has small ears. I wonder if she likes to have loaded words whispered in them. Point blank.

  “No,” she says. “But one day. I really want to go. Maybe next summer after I graduate. Or maybe in college. I need to save a lot of money though. Which means I need a job. But it’s hard to get part-time work and I hear this year will kick our ass anyway, so I guess I won’t be going anywhere until college. I have been to India though, a few times, so that’s something. Right?”

  She’s rambling. It’s cute. I might just make her nervous.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Shay,” she says. “Shay Lavji.”

  I don’t offer my hand. I was taught to do that, but it doesn’t seem right, not as the two of us walk down the hallways. Instead, I smile. “I’m Anders.”

  “Anders. Cool,” she says again. It does sound cool when she says it.

  She points at a closed door. “This is Mrs. Chaffey’s,” she says. “She’s not even Spanish, it’s so lame. You missed the first class, didn’t you?” I nod. “Well, anyway, don’t worry. She’s tough but she’s a lot nicer to boys than she is to girls.”

  Shay opens the door and we go from our own private little world in the hallway to a classroom filled with tired, wired eyes, all staring at me.

  They are strangers. I am stranger. My hair is long
, my face scruffy, like some dog on the street. I wear mostly black. I have a lot of tattoos and I plan to have more. I look different, am different.

  And this suits me just fine.

  They put me in a role and I will play the part.

  If they want me to be bad, then I will be worse.

  I don’t even look at the teacher. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter.

  All that matters is the girl with the yearning eyes and the shy smile and the small ears.

  As I find an empty seat at the back of the classroom, I know that by the end of the week, I will be whispering in those ears, I will be telling her things she wants to hear, promises I may not be able to keep. I will be her savior.

  And she will be mine.

  1

  Shay

  Present Day

  My face is inches away from a flaccid penis and saggy pair of balls, the rain from earlier still glistening on the carved folds.

  As if my day couldn’t get any weirder.

  “Balls!” Michelle shouts out before erupting into rapid-fire giggles, and I spot her peeking at me from the other side of the hanging appendages. I’m tempted to take a picture for extra giggles, but taking a photo of a child framed by male anatomy is probably all kinds of wrong.

  Of course, it helps that this is a statue, expertly sculpted out of granite by the renowned artist Gustav Vigeland and these remarkably realistic—and huge—statues are spread out along the middle of Oslo’s Frogner Park. Young and old men, women, children—everywhere you turn there’s a carved stone face staring at you in awe, boredom, or contempt.

  Or, you know, a penis and a pair of hefty balls.

  Aware that I’m leaning a bit too close to the statue for comfort, I step back and pretend to look elsewhere. I can feel the studious granite eyes of the statue watching me, maybe waiting for me to pay him a compliment over his junk.

  “Michelle, come over here,” Michelle’s mother yells at her, waving at her to follow them down the steps and into the rest of the park, which looks dull under the oppressive grey skies. Michelle grins at me, half her face obscured by the blue hood of her raincoat, and I count two missing teeth. I’ve always been pretty bad with kids’ ages, but I’m guessing she’s around six or seven years old.

  She runs over to her mother and the mom—again I’m forgetting her name—gives me a wary half-smile. She’s not sure what to do with me. Neither am I, to be honest, but here I am in naked people statue park, in the capital of Norway, with a family I don’t even know.

  Yeah. So I’ve been having a rough couple of days. I’ll try not to bore you with the details, but hear me out first, and then I’ll get to the part why I’m tagging along in a foreign city with strangers.

  For various reasons (okay, one reason, and I’ll get to that later), since I was a teenager I’ve been obsessed with the country of Norway. Maybe most sixteen-year-olds pine for Kpop stars, but I was researching Norway, learning about their food, culture, landscape (and then the show Vikings came around, oh Ragnar) and dreaming one day I would visit the country myself. I even tried to take out some “Learn Norwegian” audio books from the library, but I gave up on those after a few days.

  It wasn’t until I decided to go to Europe with my then-boyfriend Danny that visiting Norway became a distinct possibility. The only problem at the time was that Danny had zero interest in Scandinavia and wanted to stay as close to the sunshine of the Mediterranean as possible, which is why we hunkered down on the gorgeous, magical island of Capri, in Italy.

  To be honest, at first I wasn’t even all that sold on Europe in general. The year before I had just graduated college and was looking to find some kind of normalcy in my life, and in my head I thought that meant that Danny and I would go back to sharing an apartment in Brooklyn (depending on the job situation, I mean I’m a millennial and that whole situation is pretty bleak). Regardless, I thought that would be the start of the life I’d always craved and needed.

  But Danny decided on Europe, and I wasn’t about to let him go without me. We saved up. We stayed in Capri for months. Made friends, got jobs bartending and getting paid under the table, lived la dolce vita.

  And then…

  He dumped me. Suddenly the whole “let’s go to Europe and have fun” decision from him became less about us having a new experience together, and more about him not wanting to settle down and commit. Suddenly it all made sense.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, I knew our relationship wasn’t perfect—I knew that over the months things between Danny and I had been strained, I had that niggling feeling at the back of my head that things weren’t quite right. It often came at me late at night when he was sleeping beside me. I loved him but…was this it? I had experienced butterflies and fireworks once upon a time—was that a thing of the past? Was it just going to be like this between him and I forever?

  Naturally, the beauty of Capri was an easy distraction and I buried those feelings away, until he broke up with me. I can’t say I’m crying over it anymore—it’s been over four months since I left Capri and he went back to New York—but that doesn’t mean I’m quite right yet. My heart, and my pride, has been in repairing mode ever since. This kind of breakup is like when you drop your smartphone on the ground—the screen might be cracked and hard to see, but you can still use the damn thing.

  So, with Danny out of the picture, I’m on my own. Alone. This is Shay Lavji’s default mode, how I’m used to operating, and I’m choosing to see the bright side. Which is, mainly, now I’m free to go where I want, see what I want, and there isn’t a single person or thing out there that I’m responsible for.

  I sigh as the rain starts to fall again, a drop here and there rippling across puddles beneath the statues. Even though I’m free as a bird, I can’t ignore the creeping realization of how incredibly lonely it can be when you don’t have someone to write home to.

  Which is probably why I did something kind of crazy this morning.

  “Shay,” Michelle cries out in her sing-song voice. “Are you coming?”

  I smile and nod, noticing the mom giving me a look of pity before I walk after them, the father and the son, Stuart, already at the bottom of the stairs waiting for us.

  This is the Wright family, from Birmingham, England. I met them this morning when I was having breakfast in the hotel’s breakfast room, mowing down on a typical Norwegian food (one that the hotel touted as “the best breakfast in Oslo” but being new to the country and city and having never had a Norwegian breakfast before, I can’t quite attest to that. I’m not sure if the best breakfasts have more smoked, dried, or pickled fish or less smoked, dried, or picked fish).

  Anyway, this morning I woke up in kind of a funk. Yesterday I arrived in Oslo only to find the city cold, wet, and miserable. Unlike Ireland, where I’d just spent three months working at an inn in a small town, the people here didn’t smile, didn’t meet your eyes. Even during the nastiest gale blowing through the land, the Irish always found an excuse to keep that twinkle in their eyes.

  This didn’t exactly start my experience in Norway off on the right foot. Maybe because I had too many hopes and expectations—this was my dream country after all—but I was left feeling a bit disappointed. I traversed the streets trying to capture images for my travel Instagram account, yet ended up back at the hotel soaked to the bone and lonely. Even a long Facetime chat with my friend Amber back in Capri didn’t lift my spirits, and there’s nothing like a hotel room to make you realize how alone and unmoored you really are.

  So, while balancing layers of smoked salmon and cucumber on top of teeth-breaking crisp bread this morning, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on the family next to me, chatting in their lilting British accents about their plans for the day. First, they were going to check out the Viking Museum, then Frogner Park, then make their way down to the royal palace to ooh and ahh over the guards and all that fancy shit.

  And then I did something I never expected.

  I leaned ov
er, smiled with a mouth full of salmon goodness and asked, “Can I come too?”

  The mom stared at me like I was crazy—because obviously I fucking am—and exchanged a worried look with her husband. No doubt she’d heard some weird horror stories over the years about deranged solo tourists. But Michelle said, “Sure you can! What’s your name?” and when I introduced myself as Shay, her brother, a few years older, said, “Don’t you have any family?”

  I smiled through that one, even though it hurt like hell. “Of course I do. But I’m in Norway alone and could use the company.” I glanced at the parents. “Feel free to tell me no, I know this is a weird proposition. I just got in to Oslo yesterday and, so far, I’m not all that impressed. Maybe seeing it all through your eyes would help.”

  The mom mulled that over for a while before the dad spoke up. “You’re more than welcome to join us, Shay.”

  And that was that. So, together, we’ve seen the Viking Museum this morning, which was a nice respite from the rain and I got to show off my geography skills by telling them about the various Viking ships and the history of the people (which I hobbled together from actual textbooks, Lonely Planet, and binge-watching Vikings), and then we took the tram and walked a bit to Frogner Park and the Vigeland Sculpture Park in the middle of it all.

  On a nice summer day, this place must be nothing short of amazing. But it’s late April here and not only do we have gloomy weather to contend with, but the buds are barely appearing on the trees and though the air smells sweet, there’s enough chill in it to seep into your bones.