“It would just be the ticket. I would have an interrail card anyway so the travel to Belgium would be free, and we would bring our own tent. I just need the money for the ticket.”
“What ticket?” Erik says, entering the room and dropping his body down on the chair opposite with a crash. “Lucas is hungry, what are we eating?”
“Did Lucas have his flu jab today?”
“Yes, he’s good.”
“I’m trying to convince Oskar to let me cook dinner, in return for sponsoring my cultural experience during my Interrail tour next summer,” Emilia says with a sugary smile.
“Are you now?” Erik laughs.
“She is not going to a rave festival.”
“I would love to go to Tomorrowland. I saw some clips on YouTube, it looks insane.”
“Babe…” Oskar whines.
“But Oskar says no, because he is all sensible, Emi, so us adventurers will just have to back down.”
Sometimes Oskar hates his boyfriend. Sometimes he wants to bang his head into the hard surface in front of him and whinge. And sometimes he kind of wants to smile so hard that he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Because he’s actually bought tickets for the bloody Rave festival that Erik has been going on about since Emi first mentioned it, and they are not that old and it’s for everyone and it’s the stuff of Oskar’s more recent nightmares, but... Whatever. He’s given up on being afraid of things, and anyway, they are not sleeping in a tent. He has been very sensible and booked a nearby hotel with dinner and breakfast included. If they are going to do the festival thing? They are bloody doing it in style.
The only thing that is worrying him is that he has, in his head, kind of decided to propose. At a rave festival. Which is so kind of out of his comfort zone that it is not even funny, but he can’t help it these days. Like when Erik took him camping. (He had loved every minute.) When he booked a cheap last-minute holiday to Mallorca. (They both hated it and spent most of their hard-earned holiday in their hotel room having sex. Which of course neither of them hated. At all) And of course, when Erik had had the wild and crazy idea to uproot everything they had built up in Oslo and move back to Moss? Best idea ever. There is no denying that they both love living here.
He loves Erik. Deeply and madly and sometimes on a level that seems kind of insane. He’s overly co-dependent on Erik. He kind of knows that, but then, Erik doesn’t mind. And the rings hidden away at the bottom of his sock drawers were bought in a moment of madness. He had seen them at Leila’s craft shop. New stock from a local silversmith and somehow, he had just known. Leila had known too, wiping the moisture from his eye with a tissue, then she had knowingly putting them aside for him, and the next time he had seen her she had slipped them into his bag. They have sat in his sock drawer for a year, burning a virtual hole in his consciousness.
“So, Emilia is cooking dinner and in return, we are paying for your tickets to a Belgian Rave Festival?” Erik questions, raising an eyebrow at Oskar.
“No.” He sighs back. “No, no no, Emi said she wants to see bloody Ed Sheeran. I said no. No bloody Ed. We are having kebabs.”
“Oh! I don’t like those delivery kebabs.” Erik pouts. Then laughs. “Oskar, just order the damn pizzas.”
“It’s Tuesday! At least the kebabs come with salad.”
“Who cares, we need to eat, and we are all too tired to cook anything. So just go with the flow, babe.”
“Will you still contribute to my concert fund?” Emi tries with a wink as Oskar swats her playfully over the head.
“Nope, Em, you will just have to work for it like everyone else. If you want to cook, I am willing to pay you a small wage that includes buying ingredients, and tidying up afterwards.”
“I’m not your slave,” she mutters.
“Not a slave, an employed chef. I could be onboard with that,” Erik says, shooting Oskar a supportive look.
Good save. Oskar thinks. And damn him, I love him.
Because there is nobody else in the world like Erik Nøst Hansen. There has never been anyone else to turn his head or make him smile the way Erik does. The way he holds him at night, scratching his back when he’s all tense from a long day at work. Laughing at him when he gets himself wound up by something he’s read in the news. Kissing him when he loses his mind. Soothes him when life hurts. Loves him when all he can do is lie there and be loved.
“I love you,” he says out loud. Because he does. And Erik needs to hear it. Every fucking day.
“I love you too, babe.” Erik smiles. “Now, one Margarita, one Curried Prawn with extra banana and a Vegetable Supreme?”
“Lucas wants Hawaii,” Emi says, loading the app back up on her phone. “Do we want the free soft drink or the free tub of ice-cream?”
“Is there that offer where you get potato wedges?” Erik asks, leaning across the table so he can see the screen better.
“Yup, then we need to order four pizzas and you get a free side. Plus, a free soft drink or ice-cream.”
“Oskar?”
“Whatever.” Oskar smiles. He’s lost this battle already, and it doesn’t really matter as he kisses Erik’s head in passing and walks into the hallway.
Lottie is on the sofa, her thumb in her mouth watching some mindless cartoon which makes Oskar smile. He can see Lukas’ feet wriggling on the mattress in the guestroom. He’s no doubt playing something on his iPad, letting the day’s stress melt away. And Oskar strips his work clothes off, letting them fall on the floor by the entrance to the bedroom. He’ll pick them up later. Later, when he’s fed and showered and rested. When he has had the chance to get his thoughts together. When life isn’t so loud.
He showers, letting the hospital smells and dust and cold run off his skin. Towels his hair and slips into his dressing gown. The one Uncle A bought him for Christmas two years ago when they were all some kind of intergalactic Jedis with inflatable swords. He smiles at the memory, tying the multicoloured patterned belt around his stomach.
“May the force be with you, My Lord,” Erik teases, planting a kiss on his cheek. “Sorry about dinner, I promise to be more organised tomorrow.
“It’s not like we can’t afford pizza.” Oskar smiles. “It doesn’t matter. Does it?”
“Nah. As long as my Disney Prince is fed and happy.”
“You haven’t called me that for years.”
“I know. I just thought about it, you know, when we still lived in Oslo and, you know. We were poor and saved up discount vouchers for pizza and stuff.”
“We were not poor, just kind of, you know. Bad with money?” Oskar snickers. They were. The two of them had been shockingly bad with money. They had still managed to do all right. Scraped together enough money for a deposit on their first flat, and started to pay off their student loans. It hadn’t been bad. Not that bad.
“I’m so relieved I had you. Without you, God knows what would have become of me.”
“You would have been fine,” Oskar soothes, letting his lips press against Erik’s. His Erik.
“My Erik.”
“My Prince.”
“It sounds weird.”
“Stop making that grimacing thing with your face.”
“I just feel like I am all twenty-something again.”
“You are twenty-nine, babe. It’s me that is over the hill.”
“At least I pulled off a surprise party for your thirtieth.”
“It was a brilliant party.”
“All thanks to Holger, and Mathias and…”
“Shut up and kiss me.”
“Make me.”
“The pizza is here!”
They just stand there. Quietly looking at each other as Linus runs past the bedroom door, Emi shouts that dinner is on the table and Lottie is apparently fast asleep on the sofa.
Not that it matters.
Not that anything matters.
“I love you,” he says, kissing Oskar’s lips.
“Me too.”
&
nbsp; “I loved you first.”
“First one to the table gets the garlic dip.”
“Fuck. Emi? EMI? Did you order garlic dip?”
“Erik?” Oskar tugs at his sleeve. Begging him to stop. Just for a sec. Please.
“Yes?”
“One day, one day when we decide it’s right?”
“Yeah?”
He stops, and lets a breath out. Fuck it. Fuck it he thinks. Who cares about music festivals and special moments and whatever?
“Erik, for fuck’s sake, just say yes.”
“Yes. Of course. Now what have I agreed to?”
The laughter spilling out of his mouth is freeing. Soothing. Relaxing the tenseness that was building in his shoulders.
“Just fucking marry me, yeah? “
“You want to get married?”
“Of course, I want to get married. You and me. Always.”
“And I already said yes, so there is no way out now, is there?” Erik is smiling, that stupidly cute smile he does. Where his whole face lights up like the sun and makes Oskar’s insides flipflop as he pulls out the small box from the sock drawer in front of them.
“Your mum had them engraved for us, I kind of picked them out in her shop and she got the artist to, you know, fix them.”
“Fix them?” For the first time, it seems to sink in. Like Erik has lost the ability to speak.
“They have our names inside. Look? Erik, this one is mine. And this one has Oskar on the inside. They are handmade by a silversmith here in Moss, and I kind of thought they were cool.” They are just plain silver, with a delicate pattern, and Oskar shrugs his shoulders. Nervously. Hoping he hasn’t overstepped. At six in the evening on a random Tuesday.
“You are proposing to me, wearing your dressing gown, with rings from Mum’s shop and they even have our names in them?” Erik almost whispers.
“Yeah?” Oskar can’t help himself. He shoots off his most shit-eating grin, smiling like he can’t stop himself as Erik launches at him and tackles him onto the bed.
“I fucking love you,” he mumbles into Oskar’s mouth, and Oskar just laughs.
Laughs, laughs and laughs.
“And babe?”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. Yes, yes, a million times, yes.”
This story was written as a web-based Advent calendar in 2017, where I wrote and published a chapter every day through the month of December. It was a stressful experience, but it was totally worth every late anxious hour, writing the next day’s chapter, as the story just flowed, and Oskar and Erik stole my heart from the very first sentence. I always wanted to write a forced proximity story and this one was just a silly idea that somehow took root.
For the original story I drew inspiration from the amazing artwork of @elli_skam on Instagram. You can find some perhaps familiar-looking scenes among the artwork on her account. She was kind enough to let me include them in the original story and for that, I will always be grateful.
Thank you to all of you who spent that December with me, for cheering me on and laughing and giving me ideas to incorporate. A huge thank you to all of my Norwegian friends who had to endure a lot of questions about Christmas cakes and traditions and how to present them. I even made a Kransekake, purely for research of course.
Special mentions and hugs to Magni for adding about a million missing commas, and for nit-picking the Norwegian parts. Hanne-Monica for expertly guiding me through the town of Moss and for putting up with all my questions. Big hugs to Christina and Randi who named Freddie and Victor for me.
Thank you to Author Tanya Chris, who beta read the first version of this and gave me the most brilliant and useful feedback. To Jill Wexler for always having my back and Leslie Copeland for again mastering my ridiculous formatting demands. Ann Attwood for the perfect editing and Katie and Anni for so expertly proofing this story.
Miriam, Aurelia and Ulrika, my amazing team, thank you for hanging in there and making this dream come true.
To Joelle Cowley, thank you for your awesome photos.
And thank you to George, my very own Disney Prince, for letting me use you for the cover.
Sophia Soames should be old enough to know better, but has barely grown up. She has been known to fangirl over tv shows, has fallen in and out of love with more pop stars than she dares to remember, and has a ridiculously high-flying (un-)glamourous real-life job.
Her long-suffering husband just laughs at her antics. Their children are feral. The Au Pair just sighs.
She lives in a creaky old house in rural London, although her heart is still in Scandinavia.
Discovering that the stories in her head make sense when written down has been part of the most hilarious midlife crisis ever and she hopes it may long continue.
Come find me in my reader’s group on Facebook, Sophia Soames’ Little Harbour.
Miriam Latu is a Norway based artist, specialising in hand-drawn pencil portraits. She works with old-school pen and paper, and more of her work can be found on Instagram @om_hundre_ar_er_allting.
Also by Sophia Soames
With cover artwork by Miriam Latu
717 miles
717 miles Christmas special
The Scandinavian Comfort Series
Little Harbour
Open Water
In this bed of snowflakes we lie
With cover artwork by Alyss
What if it all goes right? (Jan 2020)
Come join my Facebook reader’s group
Sophia Soames’ Little Harbour
Find me on social media @sophiasoames on all platforms
In this Bed of Snowflakes we Lie Page 19
