Thaw Point

You'd think a guy who does pretend for a living could handle a little cold. Not my Karl. He came stomping across the ice-road at half past three on a Tuesday, all wrapped up like a parcel, complaining before he'd even reached the fence line.

"Bonnie! Bonnie, it's minus twenty-two out here! Actual minus twenty-two!"

"Hi to you too," I shouted back over the wind. I was up on the sauna frame, drilling joists, and I wasn't coming down for anybody's weather report.

He got to the ladder and just stood there at the bottom, looking up at me with his little wool hat pulled down over his ears. Twenty-nine years old, mind. Twenty-nine, and he was pouting like the site had personally insulted him.

"Where's the punch bowl?"

"The what?"

"The punch bowl! The prop! Kelli sent me, the production need it for tomorrow's scene, the big party scene, and the list says it's here at the sauna site storage and it's NOT here, Bonnie, I looked!"

"You looked for two minutes while I was mid-drill," I said. "And I'm building a sauna, not running a prop warehouse. That's not my job. Ring Kelli."

"She said YOU had it!"

"Then Kelli's wrong."

And that was how it went, basically, for the first twenty minutes of his visit. Three years together and this was what we'd turned into. Two people shouting about a punch bowl across a half-built sauna on a frozen lake in the middle of nowhere, Sweden, while the wind tried to take my hat off. Lovely.

Let me back up a bit, in case you're new here. I'm Bonnie Stockman, twenty-eight, and I fix wind turbines for a living, which means I'm up a tower in bad weather half the week and the other half I take side jobs, and this side job was a beauty. Some film production wanted a private sauna built on the shore of this lake, right on the ice edge, as a location base. Big money, tight deadline, and me with a crew of two local lads who'd already knocked off for the day. So it was just me, the frame, and about four hundred kilos of stone sitting on a sled waiting to go in.

And Karl. Karl Erikson, my boyfriend, actor, currently doing some small part in whatever this film was, which is why he was even in the country. We live apart most of the year. He's in the city doing theatre and auditions and I'm wherever the turbines are. We'd been doing the long-distance thing so long I'd almost forgotten what his face looks like in daylight. And when we did get time together lately, all we did was bicker. Mostly about this exact thing. Him feeling like a guest in my life. Me feeling like he thought my job was a hobby I'd grow out of.

So. Punch bowl argument. It ended the way these things end, with him sulking off toward the storage shed and me going back to work, both of us furious and neither of us saying the actual thing, which was that we missed each other and didn't know how to say it anymore.

* * *

The stones were the next problem. There's a stack of them, these great grey sauna stones, and you put them on the stove thing in the middle and they hold the heat. The whole point of the building. And they are HEAVY. The big ones run forty, fifty kilos, and normally I'd have one of the lads spotting me, but like I said, they'd gone home.

I got the first one up fine. Second one, the wind gusted right as I lifted and I staggered back a step with it, heart banging, and set it down hard on the sled instead of the stove.

"Bonnie."

Karl had come back out. I don't know how long he'd been standing there watching.

"Let me. Please. Two of us, easy."

"It's fine, I've got it."

"You dropped it."

"I didn't DROP it, I set it down!" I got my grip again. He came over and put his hands on the stone too and I don't know what came over me but I shoved him. Not hard. But I shoved him. Shoved his hands off my stone.

"Bonnie. Christ."

"I do this for a living! Every day! And everyone, EVERYONE, the second I'm lifting something, comes hovering like I'm going to break!"

"I wasn't hovering because you're weak, I was hovering because I wanted to HELP, because I feel about as useful out here as an ashtray on a motorbike!" He actually stamped his foot on the frozen ground, like a proper strop. "I can't drill. I can't do whatever that rope thing is. I can't lift fifty kilos of rock. I'm thirty kilos of actor in a nice coat."

"So don't help then," I dropped the stone and turned on him. "Go sit in the van. Go find your punch bowl. Go be decorative somewhere I can't see you."

And he just went quiet. That's the worst thing he does, goes quiet, and stands there with his hands in his pockets looking at the ice. The wind was howling through the open studs of the sauna and the lake was creaking out there, that deep ice sound, and the village lights were coming on across the water, all little yellow dots.

"I'm not decorative," he said, finally, quiet. "That's a horrible thing to say."

"I know."

"I feel like a spare part in your life, Bonnie. Have for months. You've got this whole world, towers and stones and ice roads, and I turn up and I'm just... visiting. Like a tourist. And you won't even let me carry one rock."

He wasn't wrong and that made it worse. I sat down on the sled, right on the cold wood, because my legs had gone a bit tired all of a sudden.

"It's not about the rock," I said. "You know it's not about the rock."

"It's a bit about the rock."

"It's a LOT about the rock, actually, but also it's not!" I laughed, I couldn't help it, and I saw his mouth twitch. "God, listen to us. Fighting over a sauna stone and a punch bowl. We're a laugh a minute, us."

He sat down next to me on the sled. Cold, both of us, freezing, and neither of us cared.

"I did look properly for the bowl," he said. "Shed, both crates, under the tarp."

"I believe you."

"Kelli's just lost it. She loses everything. She lost the sheep, Bonnie. The prop sheep. There's a whole sheep missing somewhere in this country."

I laughed properly then, big and ugly, the way I laugh, and he grinned at me sideways. That grin. Three years and it still does something to me.

"Come here," I said, and he leaned in and put his head on my shoulder, all bundled up in that coat, and we sat there on a half-built sauna watching the dark come down over the lake.

"I miss you," he said into my shoulder. "Properly. Not phone-call missing. Actual missing."

"I know. Me too."

"You never say it."

"I'm saying it now, aren't I? Don't push it."

He snorted. Then he said, "Your hands are frozen."

"They're fine."

"They're like ice, Bonnie, feel my hands, they're warm compared to yours, that's terrible circulation that is."

"They're WORKING hands, they've been outside all day, yours have been in a warm trailer getting coffee brought to you."

"See, and you wonder why I feel useless."

We both cracked up at that. It's stupid. It's the stupidest thing, that we can fight and then be laughing two minutes later, but that's us, always has been. Karl and me, bickering our way through everything since the day we met at that awful house party where he spilled an entire glass of red down my front and apologized for about ten minutes straight.

The light went. I mean properly went, that northern midwinter dark where it's four in the afternoon and it might as well be midnight. The temperature dropped again, I could feel it through my layers, and Karl was shivering next to me, actual shivering, and I knew the sensible thing was to pack up and drive back to the village.

But the frame of the sauna was up. Walls, roof beams, done. It was open to the wind, no stove lit, nothing, just timber and cold and that view of the black water. And something about sitting in it, in a thing I'd built with my own hands, with him shivering beside me.

"The van's got a heater," he said. "Come on, you're half dead with cold, I can tell."

"Five more minutes. I want to sit in it."

"In an unheated shed?"

"In my sauna, Karl. My sauna. Look at it."

He looked. Walls and roof beams and a stack of stones on a sled and the whole sky over it where the roof wasn't yet.

"Alright," he said. "It's good. It's really good, Bonnie. You built all this?"

"Me and two local lads and a nail gun, yeah."

"It's brilliant."

And I don't know, sitting there in the dark in the thing I'd built, with his arm around me and his face cold against my neck, I thought maybe tonight wouldn't be another night of separate beds and polite phone calls. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First there was still the matter of one missing punch bowl, one very cold boyfriend, and about three hundred kilos of stone that weren't going to stack themselves.

"One more stone," I said, standing up. "Just one. Then van."

"Let me hold the sled steady," he said. "You lift. I'll steady."

I looked at him. He'd got it, finally. Steady the sled. Stay out of the way of the lift but be part of it.

"Yeah," I said. "Alright. Steady the sled."

He did, too. Steady as anything.

We got the last stone on the stove, the whole heap of them sitting there in a big grey pile like the world's most patient cairn, and Karl actually clapped his hands like he'd lifted them himself. "Look at that. Full stack."

"You held a sled, love, settle down." But I was grinning. Go on, judge me. Three years and I still preen when he claps.

Then he went a bit funny. Stood there with his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels, doing the face he does when he's working up to something embarrassing.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing."

"That's your nothing face. That's a full-on something face."

"Well, it's just, and don't laugh, but I need to get to a pharmacy." He said it fast, all in one breath. "There's a rash. On my back. It's nothing! It's from the costume, the wool, Kelli says it's the wool, but I need a cream and the pharmacy in the village is shut. It shut at three. So tomorrow, maybe, if I can get a lift, because I obviously can't ask Kelli to drive me to buy rash cream, can I, she'd put it in the group chat, she'd put it in the CALL SHEET, Bonnie."

I stared at him. Then I laughed. Not at the rash, well, a bit at the rash, but mostly at the shame coming off him in waves. "You're embarrassed? Of a rash? Karl, you've got a back like a man, you're twenty-nine, you're allowed skin problems."

"It's not the rash, it's the, asking for the cream. The whole pharmacy conversation. 'Anything else today, sir?' 'Just the rash cream, thanks, and my dignity is not included.'"

"God, you're soft."

"I am NOT soft!"

"You are a bit soft. You're soft like good bread. It's not an insult, it's just a fact about you." I picked up my drill and my wire spool and headed for the heater, because I wasn't done, the element wiring still needed doing and it was minus 22 and getting worse. "Anyway. You'd have me to drive you. I've got a van with a heater and a girlfriend who doesn't care what the pharmacy thinks of you. That's me, obviously."

He went quiet behind me. I felt it, the quiet, the way you feel weather changing.

I got to work. Stripped my outer coat off first because you can't splice wire with mittens on, then the mid layer, down to my thermal top, which by then was stuck to me with sweat because I'd been hauling stones all afternoon like an idiot. My hair was flat under the hat. My hands were filthy, black grease in every