With You

The photograph of the room had been taken from the doorway. A bed, a desk and a chair with a blue cushion. Above the bed hung a framed drawing that looked like a boat, though the photographer had probably been more interested in the plug socket. Fenna enlarged it. There was a window. No bicycle getting in the way. She tried to picture her own clothes draped over that chair.

Marten bent over the screen beside her. 'That boat looks angry.'

'That's wind.'

'You know more about it than I do.'

She scrolled back to Naja's message. The full proposal had arrived, just in time to make sure she thought about nothing else over Christmas. Nordspor was offering six months from the first week of February. Her furnished room and bills, track time, coaching and the group's normal travel were paid for separately. For her own living expenses she would have the equivalent of fourteen hundred euros a month, after the deductions the programme itself dealt with. She'd specifically asked about that last part. She couldn't spend an attractive figure at the top of a list of unknown deductions.

'And those four places?' asked Marten.

'Four funded riders. They haven't just got a spare bed they happen to need someone for.'

He nodded. She heard the sharpness in her voice and touched his arm. He hadn't belittled it. She was trying not to make more of it herself than Naja had actually offered.

The board still had to finalise the allocation of sponsorship money. That would happen before the race meeting at the end of January. Naja had already discussed her references and previous results; the final weekend wasn't an exam in which Fenna could win a room. What she was asking now was whether Fenna wanted to proceed on these terms. Once the promised confirmation came, there would be no new financial puzzle to solve.

Fenna had put a sheet of paper beside the screen. Food, phone, insurance, local transport. Even allowing nine hundred for those, she would have money left to go back now and then or visit Marten when her programme allowed. She would keep her own savings buffer. She wouldn't have to keep paying her Dutch rent out of this money too; she did actually have to arrange for it to end in January. The landlord had received her request. There was no answer yet.

'I can do this,' she said.

Marten straightened up. 'Yes.'

'I don't just mean I want to. It's possible. With work, if we finish that last month the way the shift planner said. And with this money. I won't have to hope somebody else makes up the shortfall every week.'

'Then you should tell Naja.'

She looked at him. His jumper was inside out. She'd noticed half an hour ago and saved it for a better moment. Now it was hard to send the message with him standing so close. Not because he was stopping her. Because she knew he was about to see something in her face other than a plan to stay nearby.

She typed that on these terms she would very much like to come, once the final confirmation they had discussed was in place. She checked the English sentence, deleted an excessively polite ending and sent it. Then she closed the laptop.

'Your jumper's inside out,' she said.

Marten looked at the care label by his side. 'A carefully chosen Christmas detail.'

'They won't understand that at your sister's.'

He pulled the jumper off. She watched the strip of skin between his T-shirt and trousers. She'd just prepared to make an important decision and apparently what she mostly wanted next was to see a man take his clothes off. That seemed an excellent use of the afternoon.

'Hang on,' she said.

He held the jumper in front of him. 'What now?'

She knelt on the sofa and pulled him closer by his waistband. He put a hand behind her neck. The kiss started in a hurry and slowed as he let the jumper fall. She felt him smiling against her mouth.

'We have to leave in an hour,' he said.

'You'd better get a move on, then.'

He didn't scoop her up. First he banged his knee against the table, swore softly and asked if she could possibly move over a little herself. Fenna laughed as she pulled him towards her. This was precisely what she couldn't fit into any calculation. The way he came closer when she laughed at him. His hand finding her face for a moment before he kissed her again.

Later she lay half underneath him with one sock still on. His phone made a noise somewhere among the cushions. He reached underneath, pulled it out and didn't look at the screen.

'My sister,' he said. 'She can sense the potatoes boiling too long.'

'You can't know it's her.'

'True. Perhaps the shop's full of worried customers.'

He put the phone on the table. Fenna tugged at her sock with her toes. It wouldn't come off. Marten watched, eventually took hold of the toe and helped her out of it. He held it up with the solemnity of someone who'd caught a very small fish.

'Thank you,' she said. 'You can come to Denmark for this bit.'

His expression barely changed. She saw it all the same. The joke had landed somewhere still tender. She reached out and rested her hand on his chest.

'That was a joke.'

'I know.'

She wanted to move past it, back to the warm ease of ten seconds ago. But they wouldn't find a better moment in the car on the way to his family. 'I don't want this to be something we do until I leave.'

Marten looked at her. 'That sounds good.'

'You're allowed to have something to say about it too.'

He sat up beside her. 'I think about you when nothing's happening, too. What you'd say about something I see. Then you come round and talk about something completely different.'

She laughed quietly. He brushed her hair behind her ear. 'I want you to be my girlfriend. Not just this winter. I don't know yet how to do it when you're not here.'

'Neither do I.' She drew her legs up. 'But I'm not looking for someone who fits my week better in the meantime.'

'Good. He might well exist.'

She pushed him with her bare foot. 'I'm trying to say something.'

'So am I.' He caught her foot and held it. 'Yes. With you.'

She looked at his hand round her heel. Nothing had been settled about a travel day, a weekend or the boat on that wall. But he'd just given her a place she wanted too. She leaned over and kissed him without hurrying. Afterwards they both had to look for their clothes.

On the way to his sister's Marten didn't rehearse an introduction. He asked her to hold a dish on her lap because he couldn't get it to sit level in the boot. Brussels sprouts, he told her. Fenna examined the foil.

'I could have stayed at home.'

'They'd have brought you the dish, then.'

She made him check the boot again. All the way there she felt she was transporting something fragile she hadn't ordered. At a red light he lifted the foil to see whether it was still all right. She tapped his hand.

'Leave it alone. We're nearly there.'

His sister opened the door before they'd rung. She wore a dress and ordinary thick socks, which Fenna immediately found reassuring. In the hall a pair of enormous shoes stood beside a child's coat that no longer matched its owner's height. His nephew came over, looked at the dish and said, 'We always put his back in the oven for a bit.'

'This is Fenna,' said Marten. 'My girlfriend.'

It took no more than a second. No glance at her to check it was allowed. Fenna felt her knees go weak. She shook his sister's hand, kissed her as she leaned forward, then stood laughing awkwardly for a moment because she'd tried to do too many things at once.

At the table she wasn't interrogated about her sport. His sister wanted to know whether she too always ate as if someone might take the plate away again at any moment. Marten protested. His nephew showed them a photograph of a Christmas decoration that had toppled over at school; the photograph's chief merit was that his teacher had walked past at exactly the wrong moment. Fenna wanted to see it again. She laughed too hard and had to take a drink of water.

Marten sat beside her with his forearm along the edge of her chair. He told a story in which his sister had been considerably older than she remembered. She interrupted at every point where he tried to come out of it better. Fenna hadn't often heard him laugh like this: not a story aimed at an audience, but someone who couldn't win because the other person had been there.

When Denmark came up, Fenna explained what she would be doing. More briefly than this afternoon. The dish went round, someone asked if she was taking her bike, his nephew wanted to know how you paid for things over there. Marten ate his sprouts. He didn't turn it into a move they were making together, or leave her talking alone to a wall of concern. He asked his sister to pass the dish and put his hand on Fenna's knee under the table.

When they left she was given a tub of food. She tried to say she had plenty at home. His sister looked at Marten. 'So does he. I do it anyway.'

Outside it was cold enough for Fenna to tuck her nose into her scarf. Marten took the empty dish. She slipped her hand into his coat pocket and found his. It was an awkward way to walk. Their strides didn't match, her elbow was trapped, and she suddenly felt no need at all for the car she'd left outside her flat.

'Your sister's lovely,' she said.

'She held back.'

'You didn't.'

He glanced at her. 'When?'

'At the door.'

He squeezed her hand. They walked a few more steps like that, until he had to put the dish down to find his car key. Fenna was already bending to pick it up. 'No,' she said when he bent too. 'You're driving. I'll guard the sprouts.'