Leif stood in the doorway like a man unsure if he was welcome in the warmth he'd helped build.
The bread he held was still hot, swaddled in linen, its scent thick with rosemary and something almost lemony — not zest, but oil. Something slow.
"Did you bake it for me?" Astrid asked, lips curled, hair damp from the fjord.
"No," he said, then paused."But I kneaded it thinking of your hips."
She smiled.Held his gaze.And stepped aside.
"Then come eat what you've already touched."
They didn't rush.
Astrid poured tea. Leif sliced the bread with care. The knife caught a raisin and smeared it across the crust like a bruise.
They sat by the fire. He didn't ask about her night. She didn't volunteer it.This was not jealousy.
This was presence.
"You haven't written about me yet," he said quietly, eyes on the flames.
Astrid froze slightly.
"How do you know?"
"You write about everyone. I see how they move after being in your book."
She tilted her head. "And how do I move?"
He looked up.
"Like a woman who makes myths out of moans."
The silence between them turned heavy, but not uncomfortable. Like snowfall before the collapse of a roof.
Astrid set her mug down.
"You think I haven't written about you," she said."But I have. Just not with ink."
She leaned forward, took his wrist, and placed his hand between her thighs — through her robe, still warm and damp from her earlier encounter with Emil.
"This is where the lines are. You just haven't read them yet."
He knelt before her.
Slid his hands up the back of her thighs.
Did not kiss her mouth —kissed her knees instead.One. Then the other.
Then whispered:
"Tell me where to begin."
She undid the sash of her robe and said:
"Start with the scar.Then trace outward."
He found it — small, half-moon shaped, just below her rib cage.The memory of a childhood accident, a fall from a bike, her grandmother's hands shaking as she stitched the wound with a needle and herbal paste.
Leif didn't ask for the story.
He just kissed it as though it belonged to him, too.
Then he traced his mouth outward — over her ribs, her belly, the gentle swell of her hip, and the space beneath it where she had always kept something hidden.
He made love to her like reading braille.
No thrusting. No grabbing.
Just feeling.
Astrid didn't moan. Not at first.
She exhaled — long, like smoke. And as he entered her, slow as the tide, she whispered:
"Don't fill me.Surround me."
And Leif did.
When she came, it wasn't fireworks. It wasn't thunder.
It was a cathedral collapsing in slow motion.
Silent.Graceful.Irreversible.
He held her afterward, fingers grazing her scalp, lips on her hairline.
And only then did she murmur:
"You're not a man who waits.You're a man who builds silence like a house.And I just moved in."
The next morning, Åse appeared at her door.
Not smiling.
Not alone.
Beside her stood a woman wrapped in a hooded cloak, face mostly hidden — but Astrid felt something sharp uncoil in her gut.
She knew that scent.
Moss. Smoke. Rain on scorched stone.
Åse simply said:
"You'll want to sit down.This is Margit."
Astrid froze.
The name pulsed through her like a thunderclap underwater.
Margit.
The woman Åse had once loved.The woman thought long-gone.
The woman who vanished the last time someone tried to write the village down.
Astrid stood in the doorway, heart pounding.
And Margit pulled back her hood.
Her face was older. Weathered.But her eyes — sharp, lake-colored, recognizing.
She said one thing:
"You're not the first to write our story."