Over the next few weeks, I find myself getting progressively quieter. I've never realised how much I've taken the power of language for granted. Until now that it has been stripped away from me, and I find myself struggling to understand even the simplest things.

I try hard at first. Stopping and starting, constantly racking my brains for vocabulary, grammatical rules, conjugation forms... It takes me ten minutes just to decipher a question like 'what's for dinner?' in my head.

Aksel, to his credit, is extremely patient with me. He waits quietly for me to figure out his words, sometimes even prompting me when he guesses that I'm struggling.

And whenever I get something right, he looks at me with those shining blue eyes of his, smiling like I've just single-handedly discovered the cure for cancer. At those times, his obvious pride in me hits like a jolt in the gut. He is so happy whenever I speak in Finnish or show an interest in Finnish things. He loves it when I try to integrate into his culture.

So I try, even as I grow frustrated with my own language-learning efforts.

I know that Aksel deliberately uses the simplest words and sentence structures when he's talking to me, but it doesn't matter. I am still unable to understand more than three words out of every ten that he says.

Theoretically, I know the root form of the most commonly used words. The Infinitiv, as we say in German. I just don't remember how to conjugate them or what different endings of the words mean. Finnish, being part of the Finno-Uralic language family, doesn't function in the way Germanic languages – or most European languages – do. It is agglutinative. The suffixes that give a word meaning are, in Finnish, tacked on at the back, instead of being separate words on their own.

Take the word auto, for example. Both German and Finnish – and to an extent English with automobile – have the same word for 'car'. But German is much more simplistic. To say 'in a car', we say in einem Auto.

'In my car'? In meinem Auto.

Whereas in Finnish, 'in a car' is autossa. And 'in my car' is autossani.

I know – what the fuck?

With Finnish, I can memorise stock phrases to ask for the time. To describe the weather; to order food. But when it comes to the suffixes, I'm completely lost.

That's why, even though Aksel has said that I can reply to him in English, I still can't make conversation with him when he speaks in Finnish. It is impossible to, when I can't even differentiate between kynällä and kynillä.

And so, after a while, I find myself saying to Aksel, over and over, "I don't understand."

He tries. I know he tries to make it simple for me. But the problem with the Finnish language lies in its structure. In how each word gets longer and longer, until it looks like something else completely but simply means several suffixes were added. No matter how hard he simplifies his speech for me, he can't change the grammatical rules.

"You're very quiet," Aksel says to me one day, a couple of days after he has first started speaking in Finnish to me. He is speaking slowly, the way he always does when he talks to me now. Every single time he speaks to me, it feels like a tedious language class I'm waiting to get out of. "Is everything okay?"

It takes me more than a missed beat to decipher his speech. I lift one shoulder in a shrug. I'm in a mood today. I don't want to understand him. Which doesn't take much anyway – I usually don't understand him.

"Okay," Aksel says. He pauses, as if waiting to see if I will start a new line of conversation, but I just dip my head and focus on my muesli.

I hear him let out a long breath through his nose. "Emilie–" he begins.

I let my spoon fall against the rim of my bowl with a clatter. If he says just one more Finnish word to me, I just might scream. "Aren't you going to work now?" My tone comes out sharper than it should have.

I suddenly want him to leave. So that I can get away from this constant stream of Finnish coming out of his mouth; so that I can have some peace.

There is silence. I look up to see Aksel's carefully blank features. I've hurt him.

I swear under my breath and leap up from the table, not wanting to look at him. Deep in my heart of hearts, I know the person I'm really angry at isn't him. It's myself. But he's the closest person around, and it's easy to target my annoyance at him instead.

"Fine," I hear him bite out from behind me, as I busy myself with clattering about at the sink. "I'll leave now, since you seem to be dying for me to go." He pauses after saying this, as if waiting for me to contradict him.

I flick on the tap and start to methodically wash my bowl. Behind me, I hear Aksel's footsteps move away, before the front door slams.

It's only then that I turn around. I find that my eyes are wet.

"I'm sorry." I'm saying it to the empty space in the apartment.

The water is still running. In a burst of temper, I hit the tap so that it shuts up. I've fucked things up with Aksel, and now he's left in a fit of anger.

Before I know it, I'm tearing out of the apartment. I leave the front door swinging behind me, bypassing the lift and going straight for the stairs that lead to the main doors of the building.

It is still dark outside – it's barely seven in the morning, and in winter the sun doesn't rise until a few hours later. The freezing wind hits me the moment I burst out of the building, and I realise that I have forgotten my coat. My fingers are frozen stiff within an instant. I swivel my head this way and that, but the flickering street lamps are not helping my sight any.

"Fuck!" I stamp my foot on the ground, feeling the squishiness beneath the sole of the shoes I had thrown on before running out into the cold. This damned Helsinki slush – it was melted grey snow of the most annoying kind, and it was everywhere. I'm angry at the fact that I ran out like a headless chicken, without a plan in mind, and I had still missed Aksel anyway.

Well, the pessimistic part of my brain tells me, now you've gone and done it. You're going to die out here, out in the cold, all alone, in a foreign country where you have no friends or family. But maybe they'll ship my frozen body back to Germany, where I can at least have a decent turnout at my funeral. My friends and family are all there.

I watch the white puff of air dissipate in front of my eyes as I huff. I can no longer feel my nose, or my ears. I should head back in.

Then I hear footsteps heading towards me, before something thick and warm drapes itself over my shoulders. I turn and meet Aksel's impassive gaze. He looks underdressed now without his coat. I look down and notice a cigarette hanging loosely between his first two fingers.

"I didn't know you smoked," I say dumbly. It's the first thing that comes to mind. Not thank you or I'm sorry, but an involuntary jerk of surprise. I have never seen him smoke, not even in Edinburgh.

He dropped the cigarette and crushed it with the sole of his leather shoe. "I don't." When I continue to stare, he allows, "I only smoke when I'm stressed."

Unspoken is the fact that I was the one who stressed him out this particular instance.

When I say nothing, he takes another step forward to tug at the coat he has wrapped around me. "Put on the fucking coat."

He's speaking to me in English again, I realise. A part of me rejoices, but a deeper part of me is ashamed.

"It's your coat," I say.

Aksel doesn't say anything for a moment. Then, "Why are you out here? You didn't even put on your coat. It's cold."

I reach out, shakily, and place my hands over his chest. I can feel his heart pumping beneath my right hand. I didn't dare to look up into those blue eyes that I knew are trained on me.

"I wanted to..." My mind is a blank, but I know I am supposed to say something. I came out after him to apologise. But now that he's standing right in front of me, my tongue suddenly won't release the words.

I feel his hands moving on the coat, buttoning me up inside it. My hands come up to cover his, stopping them in their tracks. He stills and looks at me.

"Don't," I say. "You should wear it – you're going to work."

His eyes chill. "Ah, yes. You can't wait for me to leave."

I feel a flare ignite within me. "Don't be stupid! That's not true."

He shrugs; turns away. He's still upset about what I said in the apartment.

"Aksel." I catch him by the cuff of his work shirt.

"Why did you run out after me, Emilie?" He asks this softly, not looking at me.

"I'm sorry, okay?" The words burst out of me. "I was..." I trail off, then bravely forge on, when Aksel stands unmoving. "It's hard for me, okay? Finnish is hard for me."

He slowly turns back around. "So that's the problem? Because I keep speaking in Finnish to you?"

I press my lips together. "Well... yeah. It's hard for me to understand Finnish. It makes me not want to talk to you anymore, because it's so hard for my brain to figure out everything you say. Even an easy sentence gives me a headache."

He shrugs again. "Then I don't do it anymore," he says, like it's the simplest thing in the world. "We can speak in English, like we did before."

I open my mouth, then snap it shut.

He seems to read my mind. "If it stresses you out, I won't speak Finnish to you anymore. That solves the problem. Right?"

I frown. "It's that simple?"

"Why does it have to be difficult?"

We both stare at each other, letting his question fade off in the early morning air.

I can feel the tears falling out of my eyes chill against my skin. I hear him sigh. He lifts his hand and rests his fingers against my cheek – his touch brings with it a shock of the cold.

And that does it. I push myself up onto my tiptoes and throw myself into his arms. He catches me so that we don't both tumble to the ground.

"I'm sorry," I whisper, pressing my lips to his skin, kissing his neck, his jaw, his face. My eyes are closed now, glued shut by the wetness between my lids. "I'm sorry, Aksel."

I no longer know what I'm apologising for. Perhaps it's for sniping at him before, when he was only trying to make conversation. Or perhaps it's for something bigger, like my inability to master his language, to fit into his culture.

He says nothing; just holds me in his arms, gently rubbing my back. He's going to be late for work if he doesn't leave now, I know, but he doesn't push me away, or hurry me, or blame me like I did to him. Even though he must still be hurt, he doesn't say anything. He doesn't let it out on me. Instead, he bundles me tighter into his own coat to make sure I stay warm. And it has never been clearer to me than in this moment that I don't deserve him.

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A/N: Check out this awesome cover that MilkweedSintheSky has created for this story (and a bunch of others XD)! I'm so stoked about it :D