Then her gaze clears. She places her hands on the table and her voice grows sharper.
“Are we talking about Christopher Olsen here?”
“Huh?”
It takes a moment for me to catch on.
“Did he try to control you, Stella? Was he jealous?”
I battle my impulses. They’re hammering and pounding inside my skull, yanking and tugging at every fiber of my being. Christopher Olsen? Was this what Shirine was trying to get at from the very start? Is she trying to investigate me? Everything has just been a front.
“Fuck you!”
I plant my hands on the table and stare her down. Shirine scoots backward in her chair and one hand slips under the edge of the table. I know there’s a panic button there.
“Go to hell,” I say. “You’re just like everyone else.”
Then I stand up even as two guards storm in and lock my arms behind my back.
62
The two weeks that followed were fantastic. Summer was in full bloom. Chris and I ate ice cream on the long pier in Bj?rred and he snuck his hand under my skirt and kissed the caramel sprinkles from my lips.
“Let’s go to a spa!” he said over beers the next night when he met me at Stortorget after work.
“I’m working all weekend,” I said with a crooked smile.
“I don’t mean this weekend. I mean now!”
Of course. Why not?
He made me call Malin and say I was sick.
“Brutal cramps,” I whimpered into the phone. “I can hardly stand up.”
Then we walked around in bathrobes all day, having sex every hour, and when nightfall came we cuddled in a wicker chair with our limbs intertwined, enjoying champagne and strawberries, watching the sun sprinkle the Baltic Sea with twilight.
On Sunday Amina called while we were walking on the beach.
“I was worried,” she said. “You’re not answering your texts.”
“Sorry!”
I realized that I’d completely lost track of time and space. Chris had occupied my world and I felt bewitched.
“Friday,” I said to Amina. “Let’s go to Tegnérs.”
Chris winked and squeezed my hand.
I kept playing hooky from work. On Monday we took the train to Tivoli in Copenhagen and screamed ourselves hoarse on the roller coaster, checked into a hotel when it got late, and had sex in the morning until they called from the reception desk to say we should have checked out an hour earlier.
* * *
On Friday, Amina came over to my house with pizza.
We ate with our hands in front of Dr. Phil and discussed some of life’s great questions. Such as whether it’s to your advantage to mention, in your résumé, that you’ve been on a reality show （depends on which reality show and what job you’re applying for）， which quote we would have chosen to get as a tattoo and where （I fear no evil on the back of your neck or It hurts to know, but wondering is just as painful on your forearm）， and obviously, whether Dr. Phil’s wife had had even more plastic surgery, and how gross it was that she was sitting there in the audience in every episode and left the studio arm-in-arm with Dr. Phil when the show was over.
It didn’t take long before I was texting Chris.
“Can I see?” Amina asked, yanking at my phone. “What did he say? Is it dirty?”
“Dirty?”
She laughed.
“Come on, though. Why so secretive?”
I don’t know why. Normally I have no problem with the whole kiss-and-tell thing. Kind of the opposite—I like to dissect every last detail. There’s not an erogenous zone on my body that Amina doesn’t know about. But somehow it was different with Chris. It felt wrong to discuss it too exhaustively. Not just the sex, all of it.
“So, what? Are you together?” Amina asked.
“Of course not.”
“But you like him?”
“Maybe? I don’t know.”
Most of all I didn’t want to think about it too much. There was no way that could lead to anything good. I was not about to fall in love, especially not with a thirty-two-year-old.
“I guess a summer fling isn’t so bad.”
Really, it was just something I threw out casually. That’s not how it felt. The problem was, those feelings I’d started to discover in myself were scaring the shit out of me.
“You player!” said Amina.
“You should get a summer fling too.” I laughed.
* * *
I slept at Chris’s after Tegnérs that Friday and woke to a breakfast buffet with fresh-baked buns and candles. Chris filled the juicer with oranges and massaged my shoulders as I drank.