Vastervik: Chapter 3

Toby was going to die on Skalavik.

Not in any of the ways he’d half-imagined during the crossing. Not swept off a jetty by a rogue wave, not poisoned by whatever root vegetable passed for fine dining on these rocks, not bored to death by another of Guðmundur’s lovingly detailed histories of herring quota management. No. He was going to die on a cliff path in a pair of Hunter wellies he’d bought at Heathrow, wearing a Barbour he’d oiled himself with a YouTube tutorial and a tin of dubbin, because he’d decided after three days on Skalavik that he was a country person now.

He’d petted a horse that morning. A Vasterviksk stallion, black-coated, the muscles in its neck like knotted rope. It had stood at the field gate near the castle, and Toby had walked up to it with the confidence of a man who’d once been to the Cheltenham Festival and watched other people interact with horses from a well-catered hospitality tent. He’d put his hand on its nose. The horse had pushed into his palm, warm breath on his fingers, and Toby had stood there in the grey morning light feeling something approaching rugged.

That feeling had carried him out of the castle grounds, past the harbour, along the cliff path that Guðmundur had pointed out on the first day and specifically told him not to walk alone. The path was marked, Guðmundur had said. But the marks were for people who knew what they were looking at, which meant lichen-covered stones that looked identical to every other lichen-covered stone on the island. Toby had followed them for about an hour. Then the path had forked, or possibly hadn’t, and he’d chosen what he thought was the wider option, and now he was standing on a headland with no path in any direction and the wind coming at him sideways with genuine hostility.

The sun was dropping. It didn’t set properly this time of year. Guðmundur had explained the midnight sun phenomenon twice, both times at length. But it dipped low enough now to change the quality of the light, turning the sea from grey to something darker, something with weight to it. The temperature had fallen with it. Toby’s Barbour was doing more than the Loro Piana had, he’d grant it that, but his hands were numb and his ears felt like they belonged to someone who was already dead.

He turned a slow circle on the headland. Sea. Cliffs. Grass. More sea. Below him the coastline dropped away in jagged folds, black rock slick with spray, the water churning white where it hit the base. Behind him the island rose to a ridge he didn’t recognise. There were no rooftops, no chimneys, no sheep, no path. Just grass and wind and the growing conviction that he had comprehensively fucked this.

His mobile was in his pocket. He took it out. No signal. He’d checked four times in the last twenty minutes, the screen bright and useless in the grey light. He put the useless rectangle back in his pocket.

Something moved in the grass to his left. Low, heavy, gone before his eyes could fix on it.

The rams. Guðmundur had warned him about the rams. Tupping season, which Toby now understood to be a polite Vasterviksk term for an island-wide frenzy of aggressive sheep sex. The rams were territorial, Guðmundur had said. They would charge. They had skulls like battering implements, which was exactly what they used them for. Toby had watched two of them go at each other on the first day. Their lowered heads made sounds like a car door slamming upon contact, while the ewes had stood there chewing, unmoved, with the thousand-yard stare of creatures who had seen this performance before and would see it again the next tupping season, and so were just waiting for it to be over.

He scanned the hillside. No rams. Not yet. But the grass was tall enough to hide a crouching sheep, and Toby had spent enough time in boardrooms to know that the things you couldn’t see were the things that got you.

He started walking downhill, because downhill meant he’d hit the coast eventually, and the coast meant he’d reach the harbour. Presumably. If he walked long enough and didn’t fall off a cliff first. The ground was uneven and boggy, the grass hiding dips and hollows that caught his boots and jarred his ankles. His Hunter wellies, which had looked so sturdy in the terminal at Heathrow, were letting water in at the left seam.

Twenty minutes. Thirty. The light continued its slow, reluctant descent. The wind didn’t drop. Toby’s fingers had stopped hurting, which he remembered from a survival programme he’d once watched on a private flight to Monaco, was not a good sign. He could still feel his feet, but only in the abstract sense that he knew they were down there, doing their job, attached to legs that were doing theirs.

He came over a rise and the land dropped away to a cove.

It was small, sheltered, cut into the cliff face in a deep U-shape with dark rock walls on three sides and a crescent of pale sand at the water’s edge. The sea here was calmer, protected from the open water by the arms of the headland. It moved in long, slow swells that pushed up the sand and pulled back, unhurried.

There was a figure in the water.

Toby stopped. The wind pushed at his back. He watched.

The figure had been swimming, and was now walking out of the shallows toward the beach. Pale skin, white-blond hair slicked flat to the skull. Naked. Completely, comprehensively naked, the water running off bare shoulders and a narrow back and legs that were lean and long for the body they belonged to.

Casper Halvorsen walked out of the North Sea the way other people walked out of a bath. Unhurried. Unbothered by the temperature of water that would have stopped Toby’s heart upon contact. His body was exactly what the linen ceremonial clothes had suggested: slender, clean-lined. He had the musculature of someone active, but who never laboured. His ribs showed when he stretched his arms above his head to push the water from his hair. His stomach was flat, the skin over it so pale it was nearly translucent, and below it—

Toby’s gaze dropped before his brain could intervene.

The omega’s cock was small. Genuinely, startlingly small, sitting soft against the vee of his thighs like an afterthought. Pink. Barely there. Toby’s brain, which had been occupied with the very real possibility of death by exposure not thirty seconds ago, abandoned that thread entirely and supplied him instead with a detailed and unhelpful analysis of omega anatomy. Male omegas were smaller. He knew that. Everyone knew that. The designation channelled development elsewhere, into the slick glands, the pelvic flexibility, the cunt that sat behind the cock, hidden from this angle. But knowing it intellectually and seeing it were different things. The cold would have shrunk it further. He was looking at a cock that could disappear entirely into a closed fist, and the thought arrived complete and fully formed before he could stop it.

Casper reached the sand. His feet left shallow prints, narrow, delicate. He walked to where a pile of fabric sat on a rock above the tideline and picked up a cloth, rubbing it over his hair without urgency.

“Hello,” Toby called down. His voice came out rougher than he’d intended. He cleared his throat. “I’m lost.”

Casper looked up. The cloth was in his hands, draped over one shoulder, covering nothing of consequence. His face was pink from the cold water, his lips darker than the rest of him, and from this distance Toby could see the pale line of his collarbones, the hollow at the base of his throat where a pulse would be beating.

“You’re not lost.” Casper’s voice carried up the slope with that quiet clarity, the vowels stretched long by the Vasterviksk accent. He smiled. Toby watched it happen, the way it changed the geometry of his face, lifting the sharpness into something softer. Younger. “You’re here with me.”

Toby stood on the ridge and the wind pushed at him and the omega stood naked on the beach below with a drying cloth over one shoulder and a smile that was doing something to Toby’s chest that he could not, at this moment, stop to interrogate.

He picked his way down the slope. The grass was slippery, the ground treacherous, and he arrived at the sand with all the elegance of a man falling down a hill in stages. Casper watched him come. He hadn’t moved to cover himself, hadn’t reached for the linen tunic that Toby could see folded on the rock. He stood there, bare, with the seawater still beading on his skin, completely at ease in his own body in a way that Toby — who spent six hundred pounds a month on a personal trainer specifically to feel at ease in his — had never managed.

Up close the omega’s scent hit him. Salt and cold skin and that green, crushed-herb undertone. The wind was behind Casper now, pushing it directly at Toby, and he breathed it in before he could decide whether that was a good idea.

“I went for a walk,” Toby said. “Off the path.”

“There’s only one path.”

“Yes. I see that now.”

Casper bent to pick up something from the rocks at the water’s edge. He turned away from Toby to do it, reaching down, and the movement opened his body with the carelessness of someone who had never learned to guard it. Toby saw it then. The slit, between the omega’s thighs, behind the soft weight of his cock and balls. A seam in the pale skin, pink at its centre where the cold had flushed blood to the surface, the lips of it puffy and tight from the water. The deep interior colour was visible for just a moment as Casper shifted his weight, brighter than the skin around it, shockingly vivid against all that white paleness.

Toby’s mouth went dry.

Casper straightened and turned back. In his hand was a makeshift stringer of fish, three of them, silver-scaled, threaded through the gills on a twist of cord. He held them up.

“Saithe,” he said. “I caught them on the rocks before I swam.” He looked at Toby’s face with that same quiet composure from the harbour ceremony, his head tilted slightly, the wet hair falling across his forehead. “You’re cold.”

“Freezing.”

“I have a fire. Up past the rock.” He gestured with the fish toward a point beyond the cove where the cliff wall folded back. “I’ll share, if you want.”

He was flirting. Toby considered the possibility and then dismissed the consideration, because there was nothing here to wonder about. Yes, the omega had walked out of the sea naked and smiled at him and bent over in front of him, and was now offering to feed him by a fire, and the accent made every sentence sound like an invitation. But this was a sacred virgin. He wouldn’t.

“I’d like that,” Toby said.

Casper picked up his tunic from the rock, slung it over his arm without putting it on, and walked barefoot across the sand toward the far end of the cove. The fish swung at his side. His back was a pale line against the dark rock, the knots of his spine visible, his shoulder blades moving beneath the skin with each step. Toby followed him, his Hunter wellies sinking into the wet sand, the left one leaking steadily, his hands numb, his ears raw, his throat still carrying the phantom smell of herb-steeped seal fat from three days ago.

He followed the naked omega around the rocks to where a thin line of smoke rose against the darkening sky.