Astrid After Closing

The contemporary art museum in Oslo had already gone dark when I arrived for the overnight campaign, late autumn rain ticking against the high glass and the galleries emptied of everyone except the two of us. Astrid Hansen was twenty two and standing in the middle of the main hall as if the marble belonged to her, coat still on, hair damp from the walk in from the waterfront, looking at the boards I had hung as if they were an insult rather than a brief. I was twenty nine, the art director who had said in print that her nature girl brand was a pose, and we both knew the museum contract and her fee depended on getting through this night without walking out.

We already disliked each other. That was the only honest thing in the room.

“You want me looking at the fjord print as if I miss it,” she said, and the tease arrived first, bright and unbothered, before she let the rest of the thought catch up. I watched her unbutton the coat and drop it over a bench that was not meant for coats, her cheer still intact even while she refused the pose I had marked on the floor in tape. She told me she still went home, that I just did not like that the pictures sold, and I told her posing was not the same as living in a place. The argument ran through the lights and the marks and the credit line the way it had run through every email, about who owned the look of wet rock and cold water, about whether she was selling a landscape she no longer lived in.

I said the campaign needed her face and not her biography. She laughed, not unkindly, and said I had never walked a real shoreline long enough to know the difference.

The lock clicked at nine. A timer, no override from inside, security at dawn. We both heard it, and for a moment neither of us pretended it was professional any longer.

The side gallery held a single hanging piece and a wall of untreated plaster, and that was where she followed me when I went to check the second light. Astrid stopped in the doorway with her hands in the pockets of the thin sweater she had worn under the coat, still smiling as if the locked doors were a joke she had decided to enjoy. I told her we had eight hours and a shot list and that I was not going to spend them listening to her defend a brand I had already called fake. She came closer instead of answering, close enough that I could smell rain in her hair, and she looked at my mouth as if she were still deciding whether the dare was worth it.

“You talk like you hate the work,” she said, and then she went to her knees on the gallery floor without waiting for me to finish the insult. Her hands opened my belt with a steadiness that did not match the cheer in her face, and when she drew my cock out she looked up once, as if to make sure I was watching, before she put her mouth on me. The heat of it was immediate and filthy, her tongue along the underside, her lips sealing as she took me deeper than a dare required. I had one hand in her hair before I meant to, not pulling, only holding, and she made a small pleased sound around me that I felt more than heard.

She sucked me as if she had all night and as if she wanted me to know it. I told her she did not have to prove anything on her knees in a locked museum, and she only took me farther, slow and wet, until my voice went rough. The plaster wall was cold against my shoulders when I leaned. Astrid kept her eyes up when she could, playful even then, and when she pulled off to breathe she said I could keep talking if it made me feel like the director. Then her mouth was on me again, messier, and I swore because she was good at this and because I had spent months pretending I did not want her.

I lasted longer than pride suggested I would. When I told her to stop she did, lips wet, and she sat back on her heels as if we had only been arguing in a different register.

I pulled her up and turned her to the plaster and she went willingly, still that same unapologetic brightness, as if being shoved against a wall in a closed museum was a continuation of the joke. I got her jeans open and down far enough, my hand between her legs, and she was already wet, cunt slick against my fingers when I pushed two inside her. Astrid made a sound that was not a tease. I worked her that way until she was moving on my hand, then I took my fingers out and put my cock where they had been, one hard thrust that seated me to the hilt, and she gasped against the wall with her cheek turned so I could see her face.

For a few strokes I still talked like the man who had called her a pose. I told her this was the product, this heat, this easy wetness, the girl who sold cold water and then opened in a gallery for the man who said she was fake. She took it. She pushed back onto me. Then she stopped smiling in that light way and her voice went straight.

“Use me as if you meant every public insult,” she said. “I want that. Do not be careful.”

I did. I fucked her standing against the wall the way the insult had always wanted to, deep and unkind in the rhythm only, never in the harm, my hand at her hip hard enough to bruise and my mouth at her ear telling her she was exactly what I had written. Astrid came first. It took her by surprise, I think, or it took me by surprise, the way she clenched and shook and said my name as if she had not planned to give me that. I held her through it and kept moving, slower then, because I could feel every pulse of her around my cock and I was not ready to be done with the proof of it.

When she could speak she told me not to look so satisfied. I kissed the corner of her mouth and she let me, which felt more dangerous than the fucking.

We made it as far as the bench in the next room, the one she had thrown her coat over, and I sat and pulled her into my lap facing me because I wanted her mouth again and I wanted to see her. Astrid stripped the sweater and the rest with a practical speed that still managed to look like play, and then she was naked in the dim gallery light, twenty two and unbothered, climbing on as if the locked museum were a room we had rented. I was still mostly dressed. That felt like the imbalance and we both knew it.

She sank onto my cock with a long breath and started to move, not performing, just taking what she wanted, and I put my hands on her ass and let her. Between the rise and fall of it I reached for the bag I had left under the bench, the one that was not only lenses, and I drew out the packet that had been waiting in my studio mail that morning with no note I trusted. I held it up while she rode me. Old unpublished photographs, printed, not files. Astrid in the fjords, younger in the face, wet rock and real cold, a body I had only ever seen styled.

“Someone sent these,” I said, and I heard how thin my voice went when she clenched around me in the middle of looking. “I do not know who. They arrived with the boards.”

She did not stop moving. She looked at the top print the way she had looked at my campaign boards, as if it might be an insult, and then she laughed once, quieter, and told me she was not going to narrate a small town for me while I was inside her. I put the packet on the bench beside her coat. She took my face in both hands and kissed me properly for the first time, deep and unhurried, and the argument about credit went somewhere I could not reach. I fucked up into her from below until she broke the kiss to breathe, and I told her she felt like the only true thing in the building.

The floor was colder than the wall. I laid her down on her coat because I was not a complete bastard, and then she rolled me and sat astride again so she could set the pace, which she did with a concentration that made her cheer look like focus. Astrid took me in slowly this time, all the way, and rested there with her palms on my chest as if she were deciding how much of the night she intended to spend using me. I talked. I could not help it. I talked as if she were a product, the campaign girl, the face that sold a life, the body the museum had paid to lock in with me, and I watched her eyes to see if she would flinch.

She did not flinch. She told me to go harder. She told me not to record anything, not a clip, not a still, not a joke for later, and I said I would not, and I meant it, because the thought of a file of this felt like a different kind of theft than the one I had already committed in print. I held her hips and let her slam down until the sound of it filled the empty gallery, wet and shameless, and when I reached between us to rub her clit she swore at me in a way that was almost fond.

I felt her start to go again and I pulled out because I had decided I would not come inside her unless she asked, and I came on her stomach in thick stripes while she watched, breathing hard, one hand still on my chest. She looked down at the mess as if it were another dare she had won. I used my shirt to wipe her because it was what I had, and she caught my wrist and told me we were not finished, which I already knew.

The packet sat on the bench like a third person. I asked her if she wanted to look properly. She said later, or never, and then she kissed me again with come still on her skin, which did more to ruin my professional line than the lock had.

The plinth in the far gallery was meant for a sculpture that had not arrived. Astrid bent over it because I asked and because she wanted to, cheek to the painted wood, ass up, and I stood behind her and pushed into her cunt in one long slide that made her groan into her own arm. I fucked her like that with a hand in her hair and the other at the small of her back, and the power of it sat in the room with us, director and booked face, older and younger, the man who had called her fake and the woman who had told him to mean it. She pushed back onto every thrust. She told me again to go harder, and I did, the slap of it loud in the high space, and I reached around to work her clit until she came with her mouth open against the plinth and her cunt milking me in helpless pulls.

I did not last long after that. I came in her that time because she said to, a raw instruction, and I held myself deep and shook through it with my forehead against her spine. We stayed like that until our breathing slowed. I pulled out carefully and she stayed bent a moment longer, as if the pose were hers now, and then she stood and turned and put her arms around my neck with a softness that had nothing to do with the campaign.

I asked her about the photographs. I said they were not styled, that whoever sent them had known her before the content, that the light on the water was not a brand. Astrid changed the subject the way she always did when a person tried to make her climb out of a small town in conversation, and she asked instead whether I still thought she was selling a life she did not live. I told her I thought she was selling something true and wearing it like a joke so men like me could not get a clean hold. She smiled at that, really smiled, and said I was still an ass, which I accepted.

Dawn came grey through the glass, late autumn and no kindness in it. Astrid dressed first, sweater and jeans and the coat that still smelled like the floor, and she left the packet on the bench when I held it out. She would not take it. She said she had a clean story about not wanting men who saw through her, and that walking out before security opened the doors was cheaper than revising it. I watched her go down the long hall toward the timed exit as if I had not been inside her an hour before, and the dislike we had arrived with was still there, only now it had a body.

I sat with the prints after she was gone and turned the envelope over in the thin morning light. When I was sure of what I was looking at I messaged her from the gallery, still in the shirt I had used on her stomach. The return address on the packet was in Nordfjord. The sender had used the name she had before the content.