Karolina in the Harvest Hall

The community hall in the Podhale highlands had been swept for the adult harvest dance, and the windows stood open on late summer air that still held the heat of the day. I was twenty-nine and three villages from the house I had grown up in, a sound archivist with a recorder on the sill and a lie I kept telling myself about why I had walked the dark road to get here. The lie was work. The truth sat lower, in the chest, and I would not name it yet. Karolina Nowak was twenty-two, already on the floor in her embroidered skirt, dancing the set her grandmother had taught her, the one that belonged to grown women and not to anyone younger. I had known her face from the work she posted, the modeling and the kitchen clips she made from old recipes, but I had not expected her to look so unguarded among people who had watched her learn these steps. She belonged to the room, flushed, intent, a little fierce around the mouth.

She moved with the other women in a circle that tightened and opened, her dark hair pinned, her mouth slightly open with the effort. Sweat shone at her temples. The floor answered every stamp. I recorded because that was my trade, the old verses and the way a room remembered them, and I recorded because I could not take my eyes off her. When the musicians paused she came toward the wall where I stood, flushed and bright, and I sang back a verse her grandmother had never allowed online, a private turn of the harvest song that lived in kitchens and at funerals and nowhere else. Karolina stopped as if I had put a hand on her.

“You should not know that,” she said, her voice plain, almost blunt. “Babcia never let me put it anywhere.”

I kept the recorder running a moment longer than I needed, and I hated the part of me that did it. I wanted her mouth and I wanted the song, and I could not yet tell which hunger had brought me. Karolina looked at the machine and then at my face, and a tease arrived late, as if she had decided I was worth the trouble of reading.

“If you came for the verse, you already have it,” she said. “If you came for me, the break is ten minutes.”

I did not answer with words. I nodded once, and she saw it, and something in her shoulders eased as if she had been waiting for that small, stupid honesty.

---

We went to the unlit side of the hall while the others poured cider and argued about the next set. The side door stood a little open on the yard, and anyone who wandered for air might have seen the pale edge of her skirt. Karolina wanted that. I saw it in the way she did not pull me farther into the dark, in the way she lifted the heavy fabric herself and set my hand on the inside of her thigh, already wet through the cotton. She watched my face while she did it, as if she wanted to see the moment I understood I was being allowed and also being used.

“Do not talk,” she said. “Just do it.”

I went to my knees on the worn boards and put my mouth on her cunt before I explained anything. I dragged the soaked cotton aside with my thumb. She tasted like salt and heat. I licked her open with the flat of my tongue and then found her clit and sucked, two fingers sliding into her because she was already pushing down onto me, greedy and quiet. She took me without hesitation. The music started again in the main room, a fiddle finding the tune, and Karolina’s breath caught against it. I fucked her with my fingers in a slow, filthy rhythm and kept my mouth working, and she held my hair hard enough to sting. I could hear the stamp of the circle through the wall, and her swallow of a sound that wanted to be a moan. I curled my fingers and sucked harder, and her hips stuttered, and I thought of the recorder still sitting on the sill, of how none of this would ever belong to an archive.

She came with her skirt still up around her waist, her cunt clenching on my hand, a sound she swallowed so the hall would not have it. I licked her through the last of it until her thighs shook and she pulled my face up by the jaw. Her eyes were dark and furious with pleasure.

“You still have not said why you know that song,” she said, and then she kissed the taste of herself off my mouth as if the question could wait. The kiss was a claim, and I opened for it. She bit my lower lip once, lightly, as if to mark the pause, and then she let me go.

---

Karolina dropped to her knees without asking, which was how she decided things, by doing them. She pushed my skirt up and dragged my underwear down and put her mouth on my cunt as if she had been thinking about it through the whole first set. I hit the wall with my shoulder blades. She sucked my clit and then licked lower, messy and intent, and when I made a sound she looked up with that same late tease.

“Quiet,” she said. “They can hear if you are loud.”

I was not quiet enough. She fucked me with her hand against the plaster, two fingers and then three, her mouth still on me, and the door to the yard let in a slice of night and the possibility of anyone. She found the place inside me that made my vision go white at the edges and she stayed on it, ruthless and careful at once, while her tongue worked my clit in small, filthy strokes. I came on her tongue with my fist in her pinned hair, wet enough that it ran down her wrist. She kept her fingers in me through it, curling them, watching my face as if she were taking notes of a different kind than mine.

When she stood she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked almost sweet, which was worse than if she had looked triumphant. I wanted to tell her I had come back for her and not for the archive. I did not. She smoothed her skirt and mine as if we had only been talking. Her fingers lingered a second too long at my hip, a private correction, and then she was ordinary again, a woman at a dance, except that I could still feel her inside me.

“Last dances,” she said. “Then you can decide if you are still recording.”

---

We went back under the lights. Karolina took her place in the circle and I stood at the wall with the recorder off, which felt like a small honesty and also like a cowardice. I could still taste her. She glanced at me between figures, and the glance said she knew I had not answered her. The musicians played the long closing set, the one that used to mark the end of bringing the fields in, and the hall filled with the smell of sweat and cider and late flowers someone had put in jars.

During a turn she passed close enough that her sleeve brushed mine.

“You turned it off,” she said, not looking at me, as if she were commenting on the weather. “That is something.”

I almost said her name the way I wanted to say it. Instead I told her the musicians would pack soon, and that the hall would empty, and that I was not leaving yet. Karolina’s mouth tilted.

“I hum when I want someone to ask me to stay,” she said, and then she was gone into the next figure, and I heard it, a thread of the private verse under her breath, offered and not requested. I did not ask. I watched her dance as if watching could count as choosing her.

When the last tune ended, people clapped and gathered coats. Karolina did not put hers on. She waited until the room had thinned and then she waited a little longer, standing near the stage with her hair coming down, looking like a woman who had already decided and was only giving me time to catch up. A few of the older women kissed her cheek on the way out. She smiled for them, polite, and then the smile dropped the moment they turned, and what was left was the same blunt hunger I had felt against my mouth in the dark.

---

The musicians left through the front. Karolina sat on the stage bench in the emptied hall and crooked a finger at me, and I went because I had been going toward her all night. The overhead lights made everything too clear. She pulled her skirt up again and set her bare cunt over my mouth, and I held her hips while she used my face. Anyone coming back for a forgotten shawl would have seen her riding my tongue, her head tipped back, her hands in my hair. I thought, this is what she wants, to be seen and not collected, to be taken in the bright and left unfiled.

“Look at me,” she said, and I did, or as much as I could with her wet against my mouth. She fucked my tongue in small, filthy circles and told me when to suck. “There. Harder. Do not stop.” I put two fingers in her from below and she came on my tongue with a sound that filled the empty room, her come on my chin, her thighs shaking around my ears. The sound was not swallowed this time. It belonged to the hall now, to the rafters, to me.

She stayed there a moment after, breathing, her weight honest on me. I could have said it then. I licked her slowly instead, and she laughed once, quiet, as if I had told a joke I did not know I was telling. She stroked my hair, almost tender, and I closed my eyes because looking at her while she did that felt more dangerous than anything we had already done.

---

We ended on the floor because the bench was too narrow for what she wanted next. Karolina stretched out and pulled me over her in the opposite direction, her mouth on my cunt again while I put mine back on hers, and we stayed like that in the middle of the hall with the side door still unlatched on purpose. I licked her clit and she moaned into me. The open door kept a thin current of cool air moving over our legs. I could have stood and shut it. I did not.

She came first, again, her hips lifting, and I did not stop. I held her down by the thighs and licked her through the shaking until she cursed, softly, in the old dialect, a word her grandmother would have known. Then she rolled me and threw a leg over my thigh and rode it, grinding her cunt against me until her skirt was soaked and my skin was slick with her. I got three fingers into her while she moved and I bent to lick her clit through it, and she came a third time with her forehead against mine, saying my name like a fact.

“Irena.”

I came from that, from her voice and her cunt on my hand and the open door, shaking under her, holding her too hard. Afterward we lay on the boards and she traced a circle on my wrist, not looking at the recorder I had left on the sill. I wanted to ask her to stay the night, to walk the dark road with me, to sing the verse into nothing but the air between us. I watched her finger on my wrist instead, and I said nothing.

---

We left the side door unlatched when we finally stood. Karolina put her underwear in her pocket instead of back on, which was a kind of answer I had not earned in words. She hummed a bar of the village song while she found her shoes, and I heard the invitation inside it, and I let it pass because I was afraid that if I asked her to stay I would also ask her to sing it into the machine. She looked at me once while she did the last buckle, as if giving me a final chance, and I failed it, standing there with my mouth still tasting of her and my reason still locked behind my teeth.

She left before dawn, walking out into the thin light with her hair down and her mouth still dark from me. At the door she paused, and I thought she might turn and force the truth out of me.

“I have a job next,” she said. “Two brides. Styled like a vow. I will look like I am promising something.”

Then she was gone into the lane, and the hall held the smell of us, and I stood there with the unposted verse still in my throat and the recording I had not made. She wanted to be taken without being filed away. I had given her my mouth and not my reason, and the door she had wanted left open swung a little in the early air, as if even home were a set that could wrap when the light came.