As White as Snow by Salla Simukka Read Free Book Online Page A

clattering to the floor. Lumikki pressed herself against Blaze with every part of her body she could. Their mouths were one. They burned with each other’s heat. Their hands searched for new places to caress.
    Everything just happened. Lumikki was simultaneously inside what was happening and somehow outside too. She had no control over her own actions or desires. She couldn’t make herself step back. She couldn’t have stopped kissing him even if the world were exploding around her. It didn’t explode around her, though. It exploded inside of her.
    They were rushed, but they also had all the time in the world. By unspoken agreement, they knew how far they should go. Even though they were greedy for each other, they also knew how to hold back. They could leave part of the experience for next time. And part for the time after that. They were on an expedition without a map or a compass, and neither wanted the discoveries to end too soon. Everything in time.
    When they were lying side by side on Lumikki’s mattress, waiting for their breathing to steady, Lumikki thought that the journey was just beginning. And she loved that she didn’t know where it would end.
    And in retrospect, that felt so unfair to her. That her journey with Blaze had gone unfinished. Lumikki knew that they’d had so much more to show each other, so much more to teach each other, so much to experience together.

Of course Lumikki had known. From the beginning. At their first meeting, when her gaze locked on Blaze’s light blue eyes for a few seconds too long. Afterward, she could never name any single detail that had given it away. Was it the arc of his jaw? His shoulders, which weren’t terribly broad despite being so muscular? Was it his voice, which was pleasant and deep, and yet not as deep as it might have been? His fingers, which were so slender and beautiful? The way he walked, which might have been just a little too assured, a little too masculine?
    It wasn’t any single characteristic. Blaze really did look like a boy. He was a boy.
    But not completely. Not yet. His physical self was on a journey toward oneness with his inner self. Lumikki had understood immediately. And it didn’t matter to her at all. To her, Blaze was Blaze from the first moment she saw him, nota boy or someone on the way to being a boy. Not something transitional. He was whole, a perfect individual.
    That’s why it felt strange when Blaze explained it so haltingly. When it was so difficult for him. Lumikki just wanted to ask him to be quiet because there wasn’t anything to tell. He didn’t have to be brave to reveal his secret. For Lumikki, words like “transgender” and “reassignment surgery” felt totally foreign. Not because she was afraid of them. It wasn’t that. It was because they came from somewhere outside, from people’s desire to define and categorize and diagnose, to set boundaries and compartmentalize other people’s lives.
    For Lumikki, Blaze was Blaze. And at the same time, he was also Laura, the seven-year-old girl smiling her unabashed smile in the photographs Lumikki found at his parents’ cabin when they spent an entire week there that summer, just the two of them.
    Seeing the pictures irritated him.
    “Can you put those away? I hated my hair like that. How anyone ever got me to wear pigtails I don’t know.”
    “But you look adorable.”
    “I look about as natural as a pet poodle with a bow on its head. It’s humiliating.”
    Lumikki put the pictures away. But the images stayed with her, and that was why Blaze was also Laura with those wide smiles and pigtails.
    By the same token, Blaze was also Lauri, the legal name he’d have once the physical transition was complete. For Lumikki, all three could be one and the same person without any contradiction. Laura, Lauri, Blaze. For her, there wasn’tanything difficult or problematic about it. For Blaze himself, though, it wasn’t so easy.
    “Since I was a kid, I always felt like