NOVEL NEXT Chapter 50: Home Cold Home
The train came to a halt in my hometown of Farncombe, the little train station lay deserted as I exited in front of my already shivering girlfriend.
“D-d-d-do we need to walk far?” Luna asked with a cold stutter.
“Not that far.” I chuckled and brought her close to me. We were the only ones who got off the train. Its doors had already closed and with a hum it started to glide off again into the dark. When it was gone, only the soft buzzing of the station lighting kept us company. I took my girlfriend into a half embrace so she was at least a tiny bit covered from the wind, and started walking off the platform into the snow covered streets.
While the snow crunched under our feet, I looked at the houses nearby. Some of them still had lights softly shining through the windows, but most had already dimmed their lights for a good night’s sleep.
“It’s your first time walking through snow, isn’t it?” I asked, trying to keep Luna’s thoughts occupied and not merely focussed on the cold. Although a subject not related to snow might have been better in retrospect.
“It is.” She nodded. “If it weren’t that cold, I’d probably be enjoying the experience.”
“You’ll be a lot happier when we buy you some thermal underwear. In the meantime, I probably have some spares you can use.”
“You are a lot better…. uhh… more endowed than me though…” She started blushing.
Her comment just straight up made me laugh out loud. “That’s definitely a way of saying that. But it’s quite elastic so it’s not going to be that bad.”
“And it’s going to help a lot?”
“It’s like the difference between night and day. Even a jacket that would fit your size would already benefit you.” I nodded. In the meantime, we’d reached the pedestrian crossroads. I guided her towards the path that went uphill.
Our conversation went a bit quiet though. I was just looking around the place to see if anything had changed, but since it was dark and I hadn’t been gone for too long, it didn’t really look like it. I could see they had finally installed the snow cycling infrastructure they had been working on last year, but that was about it when it came to changes. And that only really caught my eyes because of the cool projection they used to mark the cycle lanes with.
“Lauren?” Luna looked up at me.
“Mhmm?”
“This might be an awkward question… but are there restaurants in this city too?”
“Are you already hungry? You ate quite a lot, didn’t you?”
“I’m not hungry.” She pouted. “I was just wondering…”
“Of course there are.” I took used my arm that was around her to quickly point into a side street in front of us and to the right. “If you walk in that little street over there, you get this amazing little pizza restaurant. Very cozy. Still works with a charcoal oven. Best pizzas on the entire continent. No doubt about it.”
“Charcoal?”
“Don’t worry, he is licensed too. But if you’ve never eaten a classic oven baked pizza before. It’s going to open your eyes.”
“That sounds nice…” Luna kept staring into the direction of the street I had pointed to. “Any others?” That was probably Luna’s way of putting the cold out of her mind, and it probably was a better attempt than mine, although maybe the blushing helped a tiny bit.
I gave her practically the entire culinary guide to Farncombe as we ascended the last stretch of street to the place where my house was situated.
I stopped in front of the snowy walkway that lead to my house, but Luna almost kept walking. “We are here.” I laughed and spread my arms out towards my abode.
“Oh wow, that’s a rather big house, isn’t it?” Luna doubled back the two meters she’d walked on and looked around at the other houses nearby. It’s true that it definitely was a rather big house compared to the others around. Not that the others were small, but a family of five could quite easily live here. “And it looks modern, too.”
I smiled. “I renovated my parent’s house after the war. There was not much left standing so it’s debatable if you could even call it a renovation. I did try to keep it in its original configuration, though. The other plots around this one were mostly resized for smaller families.” I took Luna’s luggage off her and rolled it towards the front door.
“Oh.” Luna didn’t really say anything apart from that for a while until I took out my holostick to open the door for us. “Wouldn’t you rather have sold it?”
I shook my head as the door clicked. I did need to open the door myself, though, automatic sliding doors weren’t that common here. “I wanted to keep the memory alive. I’ve had very good times here, and it would have saddened me more to sell it.” I replied and let Luna get in in front of me. “You can turn the lights on with that switch over there.” I nodded towards the wall to the right.
Luna pressed the wall’s light switch and the gentle orangey light popped on. There was just this tiny layer of dust visible on flat surfaces I could see.
“Ah, damn, the auto duster must have broken.” I closed the door behind me and put the luggage against the wall next to the staircase.
“It’s not very warm in here either…” Luna looked around and stopped to gaze at the modernist painting I’d hung up to fill up the bordeaux living room wall.
“Right, let me light up the stove real fast.” I took my boots off and huddled over to the fireplace, grabbing a couple of logs. The floor was ice-cold. “Give access to Luna Moore’s holostick please.” A beep in my pocket confirmed the order to my home system. “Luna, you should be able to use your holostick now to start up the central heating. It will take a while to warm up since it’s been offline for so long, though. Probably needs to defrost itself a little first.”
“Ah, uh ok.” Luna got out her holostick while I continued trying to get us to heat the old-fashioned way. I had let the chimney be cleaned before I left so it should still be more than fine.
Once I got a flame going and it seemed like the fire would last, I turned back around to my girlfriend, she was still messing with the tablet. “Is it working?”
“Hmmm… No?” She tapped the screen a couple of times. “It doesn’t want to do anything. This is the button, right?” She showed the holostick to me. The heater did in fact not appear to want to work, the little warning triangle on the bottom right telling me why.
“Fuck, looks like I’ll need to manually defrost it.” I gave the holostick back to Luna.
“What does that mean?”
“That means I’ll need to go and give something a big whack with a big hammer.” I closed the door to the fireplace, the fire was already starting to heat up the surrounding area considerably.
“You need to go outside for that?”
“Mhmm.” I nodded. “I could do it tomorrow, but we won’t be able to use the bedroom very comfortably if I don’t do it now. The fireplace will easily heat up this room because this house is plenty well isolated. But heating up the upstairs will be a stretch on this alone.”
Luna looked over to the big sofa in the living room. “If you have blankets… this looks more than comfortable enough.”
“I do.” I headed over to the cabinet that was standing just beneath the big-screen television. Taking out a couple of thick warm blankets. We’d have enough pillows on the sofa so we didn’t have to use blankets for that. That’s also when I saw the station of the auto duster. It was empty. “I wonder where that thing flew off to…” It went on a mission and never came back, the brave little trooper it was. At least I could go and find it tomorrow and try to fix it by myself. It shouldn’t be too hard and if it was, I pretty much had a genius with me now who could provide at least theoretical tech support.
Luna took off her boots too and as the area next to the heater was already comfortably warm, she took off her jacket as well. I decided to follow suit.
I dusted off the dust from the sofa with my gloved hand, most of my cleaning stuff was hidden away in the storage cabinet on the second floor and I wasn’t anymore in the mood to go and get it. Luckily for me, the sofa itself wasn’t that dusty.
My girlfriend sat down and leant back, patting the seat of the sofa next to her. “Come, sit down a bit.” She smiled.
“Don’t mind if I do.” I practically launched myself towards her with my blankets in hand and embraced her with my free arm.
She giggled and took my beret, throwing it a bit further on the sofa instead. She then started kissing my cheek as I spread one of the blankets over us. “I’ve wanted to make out with you all day long.”
“Permission granted.” The other blanket fell on the floor as I pushed Luna down against the sofa.