Astrid at Low Tide

I had been standing on the empty evening quay long enough for the late summer light to go thin and copper on the water when Astrid Hansen walked toward me with a packet held against her ribs. She was twenty-two, home from the work that had taken her out of this Nordfjord village, and I was Magnus Dahl, twenty-three, still the boatbuilder who had known her before any audience existed. The photographs I had mailed were in that packet, and they had done exactly what I meant them to do.

She stopped two paces from me and tore the envelope open in the wind, holding the prints up so I could not pretend they belonged to anyone else. “You sent these,” she said, and the brightness in her voice had a blade under it, and she did not bother with hello. “Not a photographer from the city. You wanted me back here. Say it plainly.”

I looked at the fjord path, at the shot of my own water-doors, at a picture of light on the mountain she used to climb without asking permission. I had not written a letter because a letter would have been easier to refuse. “I wanted you here,” I said, and I did not look away from her face. “Not a campaign. You.”

She made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had lasted. “You wanted the girl who left. That is not a small thing to want, Magnus.”

My name in her mouth still did work I had not outgrown. The harbor behind us was quiet enough to hear the water slap the pilings. My working boathouse sat at the end of the quay with the land-door shut and the smell of pine tar coming off the boards.

“If we are going to fight, we are doing it inside,” I said. “I will not give this village the rest of us.”

She walked past me toward the boathouse with the packet still open in her hand, and I followed her in and closed the door on the quay.

Inside, the light was the color of old varnish. Tools hung in their places along the wall, and the unfinished hull took most of the floor. Astrid set the photographs on the workbench as if they were evidence and turned on me with her chin up, close enough that I could smell the road on her coat.

“You do not get to pull me home with pictures of a life I already left,” she said. “You knew what that would do to me.”

I stepped into that last foot of air between us. “I knew you would come. I did not know you would be this angry about wanting to.”

Her mouth opened on an answer and I kissed her instead, hard, and she made a sound that was not protest. Her hands went to my shirt and pulled. I got her coat off her shoulders and then her sweater, and she was already working my belt as if the argument and the wanting had been the same weather all the way north. I had her jeans open and my hand between her legs before she had finished with mine, and she was wet, soaked through the cotton, and she pushed against my fingers with a small helpless noise that wrecked whatever speech I had prepared.

“Say you sent them to help some photographer,” she said against my mouth, teasing first even now, the joke arriving before the straight line. “Go on. Lie to me.”

“I sent them because I could not stop thinking about fucking you in this building,” I said. “That is the whole of it.”

She laughed into the kiss and then she bit my lower lip, and I lifted her onto the workbench. Her jeans and underwear came down together. I shoved my own trousers just far enough and I was in her in one hard push, standing between her knees, and the sound she made went through the rafters. She was tight and hot and already clenching, and I held her hips and fucked her like the four years had been a single withheld breath. The bench shuddered. A chisel rolled and hit the floor. Astrid hooked her heels behind me and took it, her mouth open against my neck, and when I shoved my thumb against her clit she came fast, shaking, swearing my name into the pine.

I did not last much longer. I drove in deep and spent inside her with my face in her hair, and for a moment neither of us moved except to breathe.

We did not stay on the bench. She slid down and kicked the rest of her clothes away and walked naked across the boards to the narrow bunk I kept for late nights, and I followed her because there was nothing else in the world I was going to do. She sat, then lay back, then pulled me down by the wrist, and when I stretched out she climbed over me and took my cock in her hand with a look that was all decision.

“I am not the girl who left,” she said, and she sank down on me slowly enough that I felt every inch. “You are going to fuck the woman who came back. That is the deal, Magnus.”

I put my hands on her waist and let her set it. She rode me with her palms on my chest, hair falling forward, and I watched her take what she wanted, watched her mouth go slack when she found the angle that made her thighs shake. The bunk creaked in a rhythm older than either of us. I reached up and rolled her nipple between my fingers and she cursed, genuine and unpretty, and ground down harder.

“Look at me,” I said.

She did. Her eyes were wet at the edges already and she did not hide it. I thrust up into her and she met it, and the heat of her around me was so complete I could have forgotten the village, the photographs, the years. She came again with her forehead dropped to mine, making a broken sound she did not try to turn into a joke, and I held her through it with both arms around her back while she pulsed and pulsed and finally went still.

I was still hard inside her. She felt it and gave a breathless laugh that had no distance in it.

“We are not done,” she said. “Do not you dare be done.”

I turned her. She went onto her hands and knees on the bunk without being asked, and I stood behind her and pushed back into that wet heat with a groan I did not bother to swallow. From here I could see the water-doors, the wide pair that opened onto the harbor when a hull needed the tide. I left her for three steps and hauled them open. Late summer air came in off the water, cold enough to raise the skin on her back, and the quay beyond was empty except for the possibility of a late adult worker on the far side of the harbor, someone who might look and understand exactly what he was seeing.

I put my hand on the nape of her neck. “Tell me to shut them.”

Astrid looked over her shoulder at the open dark and at me, and her voice was steady. “Leave them. I want the air. If someone sees, they see.”

I believed her. I fucked her from behind with the night coming in and the water slapping the pilings, and I did not keep it gentle. My hips slapped her ass. One of my hands stayed in her hair and the other reached around to work her clit, and she pushed back onto my cock as if she could climb it. The exposure sat in both of us like a second pulse. I felt her get tighter, felt the shake start in her thighs, and I did not slow down.

“Come,” I said against her spine. “Let me feel it.”

She did, hard, and she cried through it. The sound was not pretty and it was not small. It tore out of her while she clenched around me, while her arms nearly gave, and she did not turn it into a laugh or a subject change. I kept moving, kept my fingers on her, and I came with my mouth open against her shoulder and my come filling her while she shook and the harbor air moved over our skin.

I stayed in her until the shaking eased. When I pulled out, she folded onto her side on the bunk and I lay down behind her and put my hand on her stomach, feeling the aftershocks.

We went slower once the crying had somewhere to go. I cleaned us with a cloth from the shelf and I kissed her mouth, her throat, the salt on her cheeks, and when I entered her again it was facing, my weight on my forearms, her legs around me. There was no performance left in it. I moved as if we had all night, which we did, and she touched my face as if she were checking I was still the person she remembered.

“You asked me something,” she said after a while, her voice rough. “Before. About home.”

I had not asked it yet, not in words, but she had heard it anyway. I kept the rhythm easy and I looked at her while I spoke. “Are you home, Astrid.”

She did not change the subject. Her eyes filled again and she let them. “I am in the building. That is not the same as being able to stay.”

I kissed her while I fucked her, slow and deep, and she came a last time with a quiet broken sound and her nails in my shoulders. I followed her over the edge and held there, buried, my forehead against hers, until the world came back as boards and tar and the open water-doors.

After, we lay under the thin blanket I kept on the bunk. Her head was on my chest. The harbor made its small night noises. I told her I wanted her to stay. I told her I wanted her to drop the public work, the posting, the version of her that belonged to strangers, and come back into a life that fit this village and this boathouse and me.

She was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, the cheer that was truly hers had gone somewhere I could not reach. “You want the girl who left to come home for good. I want to be wanted as the woman I am now, including the work. Those are not the same wish, Magnus.”

“Staying does not have to erase you.”

“Staying the way you mean it does,” she said. “I will not become small to be loved. I built something. I will not put it down so this town can recognize me again.”

I had no good answer that was not a smaller version of the same ask. I held her anyway. She let me. That was the tenderness we had, and it was real, and it was not an agreement.

Morning came in gray through the open water-doors. We dressed without much talk. She found her sweater under the workbench and I made coffee on the little stove and we drank it standing up like people who had work elsewhere. The photographs were still on the bench. She left them there.

I walked her as far as the quay. The village was waking in the ordinary way, a boat engine somewhere, a door, the late summer smell of wet wood. I asked her once more, not as a speech, just as the thing I could not keep in my mouth. “Stay.”

Astrid looked at the water for a long moment, and when she spoke of it her sentences ran on the way they did when she was still walking a landscape in her head, the fjord and the path and the light she had refused to give back to me in a letter. Then she looked at me and the running stopped.

“I am leaving,” she said. “Not because I do not want you. Because I will not marry a private life that erases what I made. You knew me before. That has to be enough to want the rest of me, or it is not love. It is homesickness with my name on it.”

I did not stop her. I watched her walk the quay with her bag on her shoulder, and I knew what was in it because she had told me the night before in one tired line. A brand contract waited in that bag, the Bergen paper that still required a spouse, and she was going toward it without having agreed to stay.

She left the village without looking back long enough for me to pretend it was a pause. It cost her the fantasy that home would fit the woman she had become, and it cost me the story I had been building boats inside of for four years. She would not marry me for love or for the town. The contract in her bag still required a spouse, and she was angry enough, I thought, to use it as paper only.