A man incensed by her lack of honor.
A man who had kissed her like he’d die if he didn’t have her.
A man who had this room, hidden away in the back of his house.
“Gunnar. We have to play a game.” She took the box off the top of the stack, one she was familiar with. A strategy game that was all about building empires with wheat and sheep and ore. “We must not pass up this opportunity to match wits with one another.”
“Must we not?”
“Absolutely.”
“I suppose while we are still waiting for the doctor...”
In truth, she was just desperate to have a moment with him that wasn’t...well that wasn’t fraught or angry.
“Yes. All right.”
He took the game from her hands and walked out of the room, charging toward the kitchen. She followed. She sat across from him at the table, and it quite reminded her of times they had sparred in the boardroom. They set up their game tiles and chose their pieces.
“You should fear me. I am a master at this kind of thing,” she said.
And he smiled at her. For the first time in a long while. “You should fear me. I am a Viking.”
She smiled back. “Oh, I know.”
They got stuck into their gameplay, and it was fearsome. And there was something about the moment, about the connection. Him smiling and laughing when he would rob her of her land, that made the time fall away. And she wished they could’ve done this before. She wished they could’ve been children together. Properly.
She wished that things could be different.
He was another side to the coin of her existence. There was no one else like him. Nobody. And she feared if she couldn’t find a way to connect with him, to fix this with him, she would never have a connection with anyone.
“I’m quickly cornering the market on sheep,” he said.
“I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of,” she said.
“I think you will find that it is.”
He grinned, the way he did when he presented her with a cupcake.
“You know what you were doing with the cupcake,” she said. And to his credit, he did not seem confused at the abrupt introduction of the subject. It was almost as if he had been thinking of it too.
“You mean I knew I was training you?” He shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“I’ve never understood it, you know. What we were. Really. Before all this. Before I... Before I broke it with what I did. And I am sorry. I am. And then we made a muddle of it with sex and then... Here we are. I never understood.”
“We are not like anything else,” he said.
And that, she feared, was the only answer to be had. They were not like anything else.
They had not quite been friends, but never quite enemies. Rivals, but allies in some ways.
It had all gotten strained and difficult with her attraction to him. With the way the loss of her father had spurred her to behave.
She felt so much loyalty to her father, but sometimes she wasn’t sure why. More and more there were cracks beginning to form, particularly if she imagined what kind of parent she might want to be. Particularly if she imagined what her life might look like going forward. And in those moments of honesty, she could realize that Gunnar had actually been the closest person in her life. The one who had been the most human on many different occasions.
“You’re right,” she said. “We’re not like anything else.”
Tension stretched between them, and what she really wanted to do was close the distance between them and kiss him. What she really wanted to do was take back so many of the things that had happened in the last couple of months. Just so she could erase the anger that he felt at her. The obvious betrayal it had created.