I walk over to an igloo and cup my hands around my eyes to peer in. Each one has got a double bed in the centre with enough room to walk around it, and then the arched doorway leading in is made of covered glass that conceals a tiny kitchen area and bathroom. They’re small enough to look inviting even though the idea of sleeping in a greenhouse at minus-twenty shouldn’t be appealing. ‘They’re not very private, are they? It gives a whole new meaning to that Christmas song – Santa can, quite literally, see you when you’re sleeping. And so can anyone else who happens along. That’s not creepy at all.’
He lets out such a hard laugh that he leans a hand on the glass to keep himself upright. ‘Do you want to go in?’
He pushes the door open, holding it for me to step inside, and then he ducks through the doorway and closes it behind him. His hands touch my shoulders as he urges me further in until he can get to a control panel on the wall and press some buttons. A row of lights illuminate around the bottom edge, and warm air instantly starts filtering in from an inbuilt heating system.
‘Sit?’ Tav indicates towards the bed, and I perch on the edge and lean forwards to hold my hands over the vents where warm air is coming in. My hands tingle with pins and needles as the numbness dissipates.
‘You must be freezing too.’
He looks at me with that soft smile. ‘I’m fine.’
I don’t think he’s ever given any other answer to that question. He’s still holding the mug like it’s warm, even though the contents have almost definitely turned to ice by now.
When I can feel my limbs again, I shuffle backwards on the bed until I’m sitting against the headboard, and have got a soft headrest to lean my head on.
When he’s decided I’m comfortable, he turns the light off, shrouding us in darkness that makes it easier to see the lights above. Instead of sitting like I thought he would, Tav stays at the edge of the igloo, leaning against the frame, his fingers red from the cold, still curled around the empty plastic mug like it can somehow warm him.
‘Aren’t you going to sit?’
‘If I sit down, I’ll fall asleep.’
‘Ah-ha! So you are tired.’
Even in the low light, I can see his raised eyebrow. ‘It’s a little strange how happy that makes you.’
‘I meant because I was right, not because I’m happy you’re overworked.’ I roll my eyes. ‘If you fall asleep, I’ll carry you to bed.’
He bursts out laughing. ‘You couldn’t carry one of my legs, never mind the rest of me.’
‘We’re in an igloo. You’d be sitting on a bed – there are worse places to fall asleep.’
He flashes his eyebrows at me.
‘Sit, Tav. Please,’ I say after a couple of minutes. ‘And don’t tell me it’s easier not to sit down because it’ll be harder to get back up. All that shows is how much you need to rest.’
He shakes his head with a tight smile.
‘Right, I’m not above brute force.’ I vault myself back up and stalk around the igloo to him. I remove the cup from his hands and put it down on a shelf, wrap both my hands around his forearm and pull.
He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t budge an inch. Time for a different tactic.
I go up the entrance step so I’m approximately two centimetres taller than I was before, which obviously makes so much difference, get both hands on his upper arm and start pushing.
He raises the other eyebrow.
‘For God’s sake, Tav. It’s too cold to go back outside yet, so we’re stopping here for a bit. You’re not just going to stand there. If you need to fall asleep that badly then your body is trying to tell you something. Sit down.’ I fold my arms and raise an eyebrow, giving him the sternest look in the history of the world.
He holds my gaze, his eyes not hiding his surprise, and I think he’s going to refuse, but eventually his shoulders droop and his arms sag. Even his head drops and he shuffles over and perches on the edge of the bed, and the whole thing tips towards him under his weight.
‘Good.’ I give him a “so there” nod and go back around to my side.
‘Do you know how long it’s been since someone bossed me around?’ he says as I wriggle around to get comfortable, kicking my boots off and sitting back against the headboard again.
I cross my ankles over each other on the bed. ‘What I want to know is how long it’s been since someone realised that being six-foot-six doesn’t make you invulnerable.’
The hitch in his breath is sharp and audible in the otherwise silent night. He looks over his shoulder and meets my eyes before he swallows and looks away. ‘Last time a doctor checked, it was six-foot-seven actually.’
My ears prick up. Why would he be measured by a doctor? His shoulders were tense anyway, but from the way they’ve gone absolutely rigid, I don’t think he meant to say that much. Maybe he is capable of letting his guard down after all.
We sit there in silence for a while, his shoulders never losing their tension, his head tilted upwards, but I get the feeling he’s not really watching the lights, and even though his back is to me, I’m struggling to take my eyes off him. I know I shouldn’t say anything else, but I can’t help myself. ‘People don’t reach your level of hyper-independence without being hurt, Tav. Refusal to rely on anybody and being so determined to do everything yourself is a result of your ability to trust being so badly damaged that you don’t think it can ever recover.’
‘That’s a very generalised assumption.’
‘Yes it is.’ I look over at him. ‘I also think it’s true.’
As is tradition, he doesn’t give anything away. ‘You’re missing the lights.’
I force my attention back upwards, but his shoulders sag after that. His hands come up to his knees and he rests his chin on them, watching the lights straight ahead instead of above like I am, and I hope my reflection in the glass doesn’t give away how often my eyes flick to him, or how often his head keeps jerking up like he’s dozed off and woken up sharply.
Eventually I can’t take it anymore. ‘Can I touch you?’
‘People don’t touch me, Sash.’ His voice is deep and rough with exhaustion.
I’ve got a choice to make here. I think he’ll bolt if I touch him without permission, so I can either leave it at that or push him even though I don’t know him well enough to know which way he’ll react.
‘Well, new experiences are good for us.’ I turn his own words from the other day back on him. He’s too tired to have his walls fully up and I can’t help picking at the tiny cracks that are showing through. ‘Character building and such.’
He laughs. ‘I brought that one on myself, didn’t I?’
He considers it for a moment and then toes his boots off and pushes himself back on the bed so he’s sitting nearer, cross-legged instead of perched on the edge, his back still to me, and I shift over and touch my hands to his shoulders.
He’s still got his coat on and a thick jumper underneath, and God knows how many layers under that, so it’s not exactly an intimate massage, but I rub his shoulders, trying to ease out some of the tension that’s clear in every angle of his body.
‘Oh, ho-ly night.’ He puts a long extension on the O. ‘It should be illegal how good that is.’
It makes me laugh out loud and my hands tighten on his shoulders. It isn’t a good massage – it can’t be with so many layers between us, but it confirms I did the right thing.
His elbows slip off his knees and his arms fall down limply, and his head drops forward. He grunts and groans, making little noises of pleasure with every movement. I can feel his shoulders loosening with every press and push and his moans get so risqué that I’d blush if this wasn’t the least intimate setting and we weren’t both done up like Michelin men.
‘Is masseuse your regular job?’ His words sound like they’re already slurring into one.
I laugh again. ‘No.’
‘Seriously.’ After a few moments, he lifts his head and looks back at me through heavy-lidded
eyes. ‘I want to know. If you don’t work at a hotel, what do you really do?’
I use the angle of his head to move further up his neck, being careful not to stray off the coat, and his eyes close while I’m holding his gaze.
It’s my turn to groan. ‘At the moment I don’t do anything. My friend owns a dog grooming parlour and I’ve been helping out there, but her sister-in-law lost her job so she let me go. I’ll start job-hunting again in January when we go back.’ A cold shiver slides down my spine that has nothing to do with the temperature. The thought of going back to normal life after spending Christmas here seems so much more impossible than I ever expected. The North Pole Forest is like a little glowing gem in the middle of the woods and once you know it’s here, you can’t ever un-know it.
‘Do you want to work with animals again?’
‘Honestly, at this point, it’s any job that will have me. I’ve got the cottage to look after, and if Dad’s with me …’ The image of him in his Santa grotto floats across my mind again. He’s never going to get that in the UK. What is he going to do back there? Draw his pension and join one of those Santa agencies that send Santas out to supermarkets or shopping centres? Give it up entirely? What about all the Santa mail? He won’t be able to get any of that in the UK …
‘But what do you want to do? Isn’t that important?’ Tav’s Norwegian accent sounds stronger as he relaxes and his long, long spine curves forward.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never known. I worked from dead-end job to dead-end job, until I got fired or the companies downsized or went into administration. I’d just lost a supermarket job a couple of years ago and Debra asked if I wanted to take some dogs on walks and it morphed into being her general assistant.’
‘Only to throw you away as soon as someone better came along?’ He’s quiet for a moment. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean someone better than you, I meant …’
‘It’s okay. It’s the truth. I’m never a priority in anyone’s life. I’m just there, existing on the sidelines. I come in useful when someone needs something. I don’t think the people I call my friends would even notice if I disappeared. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here. How sad is that? There’s no one to tell. No one who will notice I’m not there. No one to wonder where I’ve gone.’
‘That’s impossible. I’ve only known you a week and I can tell you’re going to leave a gigantic hole in my life when you leave.’
For just a second, I stop breathing. It’s like there’s a lump in my throat and I’m not sure if I’m going to cry or throw my arms around him. Or possibly both.
‘It must be quite an event for you to have a conversation with someone who’s not a reindeer,’ I grate out eventually.
My emotion must be audible because he looks over his shoulder at me again before he answers. ‘Something like that.’
I squirm under his gaze, because the idea of not knowing him, of going home and pretending I never came here and never met him, leaving him to deal with whatever the consequences of selling this place will be … It prickles at me worse than the pins and needles of earlier.
I use the different angle of his neck to rub at a knot I can see under his collar and his eyes close again and he lets out a debauched moan and faces front, his chin dropping onto his chest.
The long and straight front parts of his hair have fallen forward and my fingers twitch with the urge to tuck it back. He looks dishevelled and softer than usual. He’s usually so sarcastic and barbed, and I know just from how relaxed he is that I’ve got at least one brick out of his wall tonight.
They are scars on his neck. I thought I could see them the other day but I wasn’t sure. Barely visible marks and silvery lines in the thin skin. His hair is long enough to cover them, but I catch a glimpse when his head drops forward. I want to reach out and touch, pretend it’s part of the massage, but I keep my hands firmly on his coat-covered shoulders. And I definitely don’t have the urge to lean forward and press my lips to the back of his neck.
I have absolutely no doubt that if I asked about them, he’d bolt upright and run away, so I steadfastly ignore how anyone gets scars like that on the back of their neck or how many more his thick hair hides. It isn’t my business. I shouldn’t have to keep reminding myself that I barely know this man. Whatever scars he hides are nothing to do with me.
I don’t realise my hands have stilled on Tav’s shoulders until he reaches back, slips his fingers around mine and lifts my arm over his head and away, and without letting go, lies down and shifts until his head is resting on the pillow. He tugs at my hand until I do the same.
‘My limbs feel like blancmange after that,’ he says as I get comfortable, keeping a space between us even though his fingers are still curled around mine. ‘I don’t think I could walk if I tried.’
He must be being sarcastic because a quick shoulder rub through layers thicker than the earth’s core does not have that sort of effect on anyone, but we lie there in comfortable silence for a while, watching the phenomenon of Mother Nature above. The stars have moved across the sky since we got here, and lying here looking up, it’s like we can see the world turning. I’ve never known anything like this before.
And I feel ridiculously lucky. I never dreamed I’d ever get to see the Northern Lights, and now getting to fall asleep under them is a normal part of my life.
‘He is proud of you, Sash.’ Tav’s voice is barely a whisper.
‘Yeah, for a job I don’t even do.’
‘No, for you.’ His hand squeezes mine to punctuate his words. ‘It isn’t my place to get involved, but he has huge regrets about how things have gone between you two. He talked about it a lot after the heart attack. Something like that makes you think … a life flashing before your eyes thing … He wasn’t proud of himself. He knows he’s let you down. I think that’s the main reason he asked you to come – because he was terrified of dying without making things right between you.’
His words make me feel emotional for a multitude of reasons – my dad thinking that, Tav being kind enough to tell me, and the fear of losing my dad. It’s dissipated since I got here, seeing him happy and a far cry from how ill he sounded on the phone, but hearing that brings back how close his brush with death was and how easily he could have another one. I nudge my elbow into his arm on the bed. ‘Not because he wanted my help as a fancy hotel manager then?’
Tav lifts his head and fixes me with a look that says he can see right through my false attempt at humour.
I sigh as he settles back again. ‘I was seventeen when my nan died. It was the first Christmas I’d been alone for. He promised he’d come home for it. It would be the first time I’d seen him in nearly five years. I was so excited. My nan had been anti-Christmas and neither of us felt like celebrating with Mum gone and Dad away, but that year because he was coming back, I went all out. I couldn’t afford it, but I put up a huge tree with all our old family decorations, I got a turkey, all the trimmings, festive food, crackers, silly jumpers, Santa hats, mince pies, the lot, and he rang on Christmas Eve to say his flight had been cancelled. The following year, it was because snowfall had closed the road to the airport. One year, he rang me on Boxing Day because he’d been out of signal up a waterfall in Thailand to tell me he wouldn’t be able to make it home for Christmas, which I’d pretty much worked out for myself by Boxing Day. Every year, there’s some outlandish excuse or another. He can’t just admit he doesn’t want to come back. That would be easier to take.’
‘That’s why you’re not a Christmas fan?’
I nod, our heads so close he can feel it. ‘Christmas isn’t fun when you’re on your own. It reminds you of the people who aren’t there.’
His fingers tighten around mine. ‘You’re not on your own this year.’
I have to blink fast to stop my eyes filling up. There’s something about Tav. I don’t know if it’s his size or his competency at just about everything, or the sense of protectiveness that comes from being near him, the fact he saved my d
ad’s life or what Dad’s said about him being a good friend. He’s the sort of person who I wish there were more of in my life. ‘What is it about you? Why do you make everything seem better than it is?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about – there’s nothing about me.’ He’s smiling as he says it.
There’s definitely something about him.
‘You should talk to him, Sash.’ His whispered voice is serious again. ‘I know Christmases have been difficult, and a huge part of that is his fault, but an accident like the one your parents had, losing your mum like that … It changes a person. Maybe it’s not that he hasn’t wanted to see you, but he hasn’t been able to face the past. And right now, he misses you as much as you miss him. That has to count for something.’
I don’t reply. I know he doesn’t expect me to. The sky shimmers and changes as we watch it. The stars twinkle through the stripes of green light, making it look like someone’s up there brushing glitter paint across the universe.
I can feel Tav’s breathing evening out, feel his pulse slowing down where it’s beating against my fingers, and when I shift my head far enough back to see his face, he’s blinking long and slow, and with every blink, I think he’s going to fall asleep right there.
His eyes are barely open, but he can obviously sense me looking at him. He pulls his hand out of mine and stumbles upright, goes to a chest at the bottom of the bed and pulls out an armful of fluffy blankets and tosses a couple to me, which is an impressive feat for someone who’s ninety-five per cent asleep already.
He flops back down beside me, stretching a blanket over himself too, and wriggles around to get comfortable.
‘Sash,’ he murmurs. He holds his hand out from under the blanket and I slip mine into it again. ‘Thank you.’
He curls towards me and snuggles down, his forehead nearly on my shoulder, my hand still in his as he drifts off.
‘Goodnight, Tav,’ I murmur, leaning to the side so my cheek presses against his hair.
He takes care of everyone else, but doesn’t allow anyone to take care of him, and it’s about time someone pushed that wall down, brick by brick.
The Post Box at the North Pole: The perfect cosy and uplifting Christmas romance to curl up with in 2021! Page 16
