What Happened in Reykjavik – Part 2: Chicago

This story is fiction, written as a first-person confession.

Okay. I said I would tell you what happened. So here it is.

Four weeks and two days after I wrote the last part, I put on my best grey suit and my second-best shoes, put the stone from the black beach in my jacket pocket, and took the train downtown to the Lakeside Convention Center.

I had a spreadsheet, obviously.

Arrive 9:45. Talk at 10:00. Sit at the back. Leave if he doesn’t recognise you. Leave if he’s married. Leave if he says “who?”. Leave if you start crying.

There were a lot of ways to leave on that spreadsheet. There was only one line about staying.

Stay if he looks at you like he did under the lights.

---

The hall was enormous. Six hundred people. Bad coffee. Lanyards. I sat in the very last row, by the door, in case I needed to run.

Dana, my best friend, who had organised the whole conference and still didn’t know anything, waved at me from the front with a clipboard. I waved back and felt sick.

At 10:02, he walked onto the stage.

He was wearing the reindeer sweater.

I’m serious. The same wool sweater with the reindeer pattern, in front of six hundred tourism executives in suits. His red beard was a little shorter. He looked nervous. He stood at the microphone and squinted out at the audience, and for a terrible moment I thought he was looking for someone else.

“Good morning,” he said. “My talk is called Why Tourists Should Get Lost. I want to start with a story.”

---

He told them about a broken-down jeep in the lava fields. About a night in minus twelve. About a tourist with a spreadsheet who stayed behind when the minibus was full.

He didn’t say my name. He didn’t need to.

“She had planned everything,” Gunnar said into the microphone, and six hundred people laughed. “Every hotel. Every meal. She showed me her spreadsheet. There was a rule at the top in bold letters.” He paused. “It said No Men.”

The whole room laughed again. I put my face in my hands.

“And then,” he said, “the jeep broke, and the sky caught fire, and she got lost. Properly lost. For the first time in her life, I think.” He looked down at his notes. His voice changed. “That’s what I want to talk about. Not the hotels. Not the tours. The moment people stop planning. That’s when they actually see a place.”

He talked for forty minutes. It was the best talk at the whole conference. Dana told me later it got the highest rating they had ever recorded.

I didn’t hear most of it. I was holding the stone in my pocket so hard it hurt.

---

At the end, he said:

“I gave her a stone from the black beach at Reynisfjara. She didn’t give me her number. I understood. People are scared of things that don’t fit on a spreadsheet.” He smiled a little. “I started my company the week after she left. I called it Real Iceland because she made me realise the real thing is what people are looking for. So, wherever she is, thank you.”

Six hundred people clapped.

And I, Mia Kowalski, thirty years old, chartered accountant, the most careful woman in the state of Illinois, stood up in the back row of a convention hall in Chicago and held up a small, flat, grey stone.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.

He saw it from the stage.

---

I’m not going to tell you everything that happened next, because this is supposed to be a confession, not a diary, and Dana still reads everything I write.

I will tell you that he walked off the stage in the middle of the applause, down the centre aisle, past six hundred very confused people, and stopped in front of me.

I will tell you that the first thing he said was, “You came.”

And that the first thing I said was, “You’re wearing the sweater.”

And that he said, “I wear it to every talk. In case.”

I will tell you that Dana dropped her clipboard.

---

He was supposed to fly back to Reykjavik on Sunday.

He didn’t.

We spent four days in Chicago. I showed him my city. Not the tourist city. Mine. The diner on Clark Street with the best pancakes. The lake at dawn, frozen at the edges. The tiny jazz bar in Uptown where nobody under seventy goes. My apartment, which he said was the tidiest place he had ever seen, and which he made gloriously untidy within about an hour.

What happened in that apartment belongs only to us. I’ll say this much: it snowed all weekend, and we didn’t go out once on Saturday, and there were no northern lights over Chicago, but I didn’t miss them at all.

---

That was a year ago.

I’m writing this from a small wooden house by a frozen lake, forty minutes outside Reykjavik. My laptop is on the kitchen table. There is a wood stove. There are, I’m embarrassed to say, two reindeer sweaters on the hook by the door, and one of them is mine.

I still do accounts. Remotely. For Real Iceland Tours, among others. The company is doing very well. It turns out tourists love getting lost, as long as someone sensible is doing the paperwork.

I still make spreadsheets. I can’t help it.

But there’s a new one on my desktop. It only has one line. In bold, at the top.

STAY.

---

The End.

Read more real sex stories and confessions. All stories are fiction.

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