Astrid Takes the Long Way

I parked the van on a gravel spur above a forest lake in Innlandet, and Astrid Hansen climbed out before I had even killed the engine. Gravel popped under her soles and she stretched her arms over her head as if she had been waiting the whole drive for that first breath of pine. She was twenty-two and still the person I had met two winters ago, the one who laughed at my terrible coffee and never once asked me to hold a camera. I was twenty-four, a climbing instructor with a weekend off and a van that smelled of rope and rain, and I had spent the drive watching her bare feet on the dash as if they were a conversation I was not allowed to join. Her toenails were unpainted. A thin white scar ran across the top of one foot from a winter crampon, and I had looked at it more than I had looked at the road. She wanted a lake and a fire and no one who treated her like a feed. I wanted her. I had wanted her for a long time, and I had been careful not to say it. She had been hiding from a packet that had arrived from the north, and I had not asked.

The water was cold enough to make her shout when she went in, a bright sound that carried across the pines. Early summer had not warmed the lake yet. She went in anyway, shirt and all, and the fabric went dark and heavy against her as she swam out past the first ring of reeds. I followed her because I always did. The shock of it took my breath and then gave it back in pieces. We swam until our teeth hurt and then we cooked pasta on the little stove with the doors open to the trees. Midges hung in the last of the light. She sat on the step with a towel around her waist and her hair dripping onto the metal, and she watched me stir as if the small domestic work of it amused her. She teased me about the way I salted everything twice. I told her she would freeze if she kept wearing that wet shirt. She did not change it. The cotton clung to her, and I could see the shape of her nipples through it, and I looked away and then I did not look away, and she noticed and said nothing, only passed me the pot lid with her fingers cold from the lake.

Night came down through the spruce. The fire we had meant to build stayed unlit because the wine was already open and the seats were already warm. We sat in the front seats with the windows cracked and a bottle of cheap red between us, and the old jokes kept arriving the way they always had, easy and unthreatening, until they were not. A moth beat against the glass. She had her knees up and her wet shirt still on and she looked at the black water as if it might answer something for her. She looked at me without smiling. Then she put her hand on my cock through my trousers, and she did not laugh.

I made a sound I did not recognize. Astrid’s palm was warm and certain. She did not fumble. She pressed along the length of me as if she were confirming a route she had already chosen, and the pressure of her hand through the cloth made my hips lift without my meaning them to. She worked the button and the zip with the same unhurried attention she gave to tying a knot, and then my cock was in the open air of the van and she was looking at it as if she had decided something hours ago.

“I have wanted this,” she said, and it was not a joke.

The words sat in the small space between us and I had no answer that would not have been too much. She leaned over the console and took me into her mouth. The wet heat of her made my head drop back against the rest. I could smell the lake on her hair and the cheap wine on her breath and the faint soap she always used, something green and ordinary. She sucked slowly at first, her tongue flat along the underside, one hand holding the base, and I could see the wet fabric of her shirt clinging to her breasts as she moved. I put my fingers in her hair. It was still damp and cold at the ends. She took more of me, enough that I felt the back of her throat, and she stayed there, breathing through her nose, until I swore under my breath. Spit ran down my shaft and over her knuckles. She pulled off long enough to look up at me, her mouth shining, and then she went down again with a hunger that had nothing left of our two years of careful friendship in it. I watched her cheeks hollow. I felt her throat work. She made a small sound around me that I felt more than I heard, and her free hand braced on my thigh as if she needed the purchase. When I warned her I was close she only hummed around me and took me deeper, and I came in hard pulses against her tongue while the lake sat black and quiet beyond the glass. She swallowed. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat back in her seat as if we had only shared the last of the wine.

“Van bed,” she said. “Now.”

The mattress in the back was narrow and familiar, the same one she had slept on a dozen times with a pillow between us like a joke that had stopped being funny. I got her shirt off and her shorts down and I spread her on the quilt with her knees open toward the little roof vent. Her skin was still cool from the swim except where it was not, and I put my mouth to the inside of her knee first because I needed a second to believe she was letting me. The smell of lake water was still on her skin. I put my mouth on her cunt without asking, because she had already answered, and she made a sound that went through me like a rope going taut.

I licked her slowly at first, mapping the wet heat of her, the way her clit swelled under my tongue when I stayed on it. She tasted of lake and salt and herself. She held my hair and did not pretend to be quiet. Her hips lifted to meet me and then she told me, in a voice that had gone low, that I could go harder, that she had waited long enough for careful. I slid two fingers into her and she was so slick I could hear it. I fucked her with my hand while I sucked, and she came the first time with her thighs shaking against my ears and my name in her mouth like something she had been keeping. I did not stop. I kept my mouth on her while she tried to twist away and then while she stopped trying, and the second climax took longer, a lower thing that made her grab at the quilt and say please as if please were a place. When she finally pulled me up by the shoulders her face was wet and open and she looked at me the way she looked at a cliff she meant to climb.

“Come here,” she said. “I want you inside me.”

We lay on our sides because the bed would not allow much else. I hooked her top leg over my hip and pushed into her from behind and slightly above, and the first full stroke made both of us go still. She was tight and soaked and I could feel every inch of her around my cock. The fit of it stunned me. I had imagined this and the imagining had been nothing. I kissed the back of her neck. She reached back and found my hip and pulled me deeper.

“Jonas,” she said, and then she laughed once, a real laugh, the kind that had always undone me. “Do not be gentle just because we used to be friends.”

I was not gentle. I fucked her in that cramped space with my chest against her back and one hand on her breast and the other between her legs, rubbing her clit in time with my thrusts. Her nipple hardened under my palm. She made a noise into the pillow and then turned her face so I could hear her. The van rocked on its springs. She pushed back onto me as hard as I gave it, and the wet sound of us filled the dark. I bit her shoulder, not enough to mark her for anyone else, enough that she clenched around me and swore. When she came again it was with her face in the pillow and her hand covering mine, holding me against her clit as if she were afraid I would stop. I lasted through it by thinking about nothing except the heat of her and the fact that she had reached for me first. I came inside her with my mouth open against her hair, and for a long minute we stayed joined and breathing like people who had run.

Later she sat on my face because she said she was not finished and I was not either. I held her hips and let her use my mouth. She ground down with a shameless rhythm, her cunt wet against my tongue, her hands on the ceiling for balance, and I could see nothing except the pale underside of her breasts and the dark of the van around us. She told me I was good at this. She told me she had thought about it in my kitchen, in my car, on belays when I was looking at rock instead of at her. I licked her until her thighs shook and she had to come down, and then I turned her onto her knees on that same narrow bed and took her from behind.

I held her by the waist and drove into her hard enough that she had to brace on her forearms. She was dripping, open, still clenching from the last orgasm, and she looked back over her shoulder with her hair in her mouth.

“Do not be careful,” she said. “I mean it. I want to feel you tomorrow.”

I gave her what she asked for. I fucked her deep and without the old courtesy, my hips slapping against her ass, one hand in her hair, and she met every thrust with a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob. The emotional weather in the van had changed. We were not pretending this was nothing. I could feel how much she wanted the filth and the comfort and how little she wanted to name what came after. I came with my cock buried in her and my forehead on her spine, and she reached back and held my wrist as if to keep me there.

Dawn came in grey through the pines. We did it again because the night had not used us up. I was on top this time, her legs around my waist, the quilt kicked to the floor, and I moved in her with a slower, heavier stroke that made her eyes stay on mine. She was sore and still greedy. I could feel it in the way she winced and then pulled me closer. The lake outside was a sheet of dull silver. Birds had started. I was still inside her, still moving, when the thing I had been carrying for two years came out of my mouth without permission.

“I love you,” I said.

She did not look away. She put her palm on my cheek and left it there while I finished, while I shook, while I stayed joined to her because leaving her body felt like the beginning of a loss. She was kind. She kissed the corner of my mouth. She did not say it back. The silence after the words was not cruel. It was worse than cruel. It was honest. I understood, in that grey light, that she had wanted the weekend and the heat and the person who did not consume her, and that love was a future she would not give me because giving it would turn me into someone who needed her in a way our friendship had never required.

We lay there until the sun cleared the trees. She traced the line of my shoulder as if she were memorizing a route she did not plan to climb again.

She booked the trip on her phone while I made coffee on the little stove, the doors open to the morning and the lake already warming. Nordfjord. A date close enough to feel like running. I saw the unopened packet on the passenger seat when I went to check the tire pressure, the same brown envelope she had been carrying like a stone, and I watched her put it into her bag without breaking the seal. She came up behind me and pressed her face into my back for a long time, and when she spoke her voice was the cheerful one I had always believed, the true one, not a cover.

“Thank you for the lake,” she said. “I am going to keep this. I am not going to keep the word. That is not fair, and I know it.”

I told her I had known before I said it. I had said it anyway. We drove south with the windows down and the jokes trying to come back and failing, and every mile felt like the easiest friendship I had ever had folding itself into something I would not be allowed to touch again. She kept the weekend. She did not keep me. Before Oslo she touched my knuckles on the gearshift, once, as if that were a kind of answer, and then she looked at the road and not at me, already gone north in her head, the packet still unopened in her bag.