Vastervik: Chapter 6

Toby couldn’t sleep on Skalavik.

He couldn’t sleep in most places that weren’t his own bed. The Mayfair penthouse had a Hästens mattress, blackout blinds operated by a wall panel, and a white noise machine calibrated to the exact frequency of distant rain on glass. The bed in Svartborg had a mattress stuffed with lumpy tufts of straw and a blanket that weighed roughly the same as a small adult. The pillow smelled of lavender and lanolin. The window didn’t close properly, and the draught carried the smell of the sea and the distant sound of sheep doing whatever sheep did at two in the morning, which turned out to be a great deal based on the sounds they made.

He lay in the dark and thought about Casper Halvorsen’s forearm.

Specifically, the goosebumps. The way they’d risen under his fingertip in a trail from wrist to elbow, the fine pale hair lifting, the skin prickling with a response that Casper hadn’t tried to hide. The omega had sat there by the fire with a half-eaten fish in his hand and his lips parted around a breath, and he hadn’t pulled away. Toby had touched many people. In hotel rooms that cost four thousand pounds a night, on yachts anchored off Sardinia, in the back seats of cars with tinted windows. He had never felt a comparable thrill to seeing Casper respond to the featherlight touch of his finger against his bare skin.

He got up at five. The light was already grey, the midnight sun doing its strange half-set, half-risen trick that meant the sky never fully darkened. He dressed in the Barbour, the Hunter wellies, a jumper that cost more than the fishing boat he’d arrived on, and went downstairs.

The castle was quiet. Toby let himself out through a side door he’d discovered on his second day, the one that opened onto the walled garden without passing through the main hall where the Ri’s household gathered for breakfast.

The garden was silver with dew. The kale beds stood in dark rows, heavy-headed, the soil between them black and damp. Herb troughs lined the wall, stone-built, and the thyme and rosemary released their scent as the early light warmed the leaves. Beyond the garden wall, the hillside dropped to the harbour, and beyond that, the sea, flat and grey to the horizon.

Casper was kneeling in the herb garden.

He had his back to the gate. He wore the same undyed linen tunic, the hem dark with dew where it touched the ground, his hair loose around his shoulders, uncombed, white-blond against the grey stone of the wall behind him. He was pulling weeds from between the thyme plants. His fingers worked quickly, pinching the stems at the base, drawing them out with roots intact, shaking the soil free before dropping them into a wooden bucket at his side. His feet were bare, tucked beneath him, pale on the cold ground, the toes curled slightly against the damp stone edging of the bed.

Toby stood at the gate and watched him work. The omega’s shoulders were relaxed, his head bent forward, the line of his neck exposed where his hair fell to one side.

“You’re up early,” Casper said, without turning around.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

Casper pulled out another weed, shook it, dropped it in the bucket. “The mattress did not suit your soft city back?”

“Among other things.”

“Agna can stuff it with fresh wool. If you ask her.” He sat back on his heels and pushed his hair off his face with the back of his wrist. His fingers were dirty, the nails dark with soil, and the gesture left a smear of earth on his forehead. He turned his head and looked at Toby over his shoulder.

Toby’s breath caught somewhere behind his sternum. The early light caught the omega’s pale eyes, turned them translucent, and picked out every freckle dusting his face. “You could also try not wearing London clothes to bed. The wool blankets are better against bare skin.”

“Are you telling me to sleep naked?”

“I’m telling you wool breathes. You don’t need me to explain the rest.”

Toby came through the gate. His wellies left prints in the dew-wet grass. Casper went back to the weeds, but the line of his shoulders had shifted, a fraction less relaxed. Toby stopped a few feet behind him.

“The fish was good,” Toby said. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“The five-hundred-pound fish man, thinking about my free saithe.”

“It was better.”

Casper’s hands stopped moving. The silence held for a beat, two beats, and then he dropped the weed he’d been holding into the bucket and stood. He turned to face Toby, brushing the soil from his knees, and the movement brought them close enough that his scent reached Toby in its full complexity. Salt, green herbs, cold skin, and underneath it all, something warmer. Sweeter. Richer. The omega’s body, waking up to proximity with an interested alpha.

“Leif told me to stay away from you,” Casper said. His voice was level. His eyes were not. They kept moving, touching Toby’s face and then sliding sideways to the garden wall, the herb troughs, the grey sky. Anywhere that wasn’t directly at him. “He said you only want to get under my robes because I’m rare. A male omega. A novelty.”

“Leif’s not wrong about everything.”

Casper’s gaze came back to him and held.

“He’s not wrong that I want to be near you,” Toby said. “He’s wrong about the reason.”

“What’s the reason, then?”

The honest answer involved the goosebumps and the fire and the laugh and the way Casper had said is it magic fish? with genuine, startled outrage. It involved a feeling in Toby’s chest that he’d spent three decades not having and wasn’t sure he could name even if pressed.

“You made me eat a fish with my fingers,” Toby said. “And I liked it.”

Casper’s mouth twitched. He looked down at the soil between them. His bare feet on the cold stone, Toby’s wellies on the wet grass. The proximity thickened the air, charged it with a current that Toby could feel against the skin of his face and hands.

“You should go,” Casper said quietly. “Leif will be up soon. He runs the hounds at first light.”

“Is that what you want? For me to go?”

The question sat between them. Casper’s jaw tightened. His hand moved to his forearm, his fingers finding the exact place Toby’s finger had traced the evening before. He pressed his thumb into the skin there. Held it.

“What I want hasn’t been relevant for a very long time.”

Toby closed the distance. He did it slowly enough that Casper could step back. The omega didn’t. His chin lifted as Toby came close, the angle of his face tipping up to compensate for the difference in their heights, his lips parting the way they had by the fire.

Toby kissed him.

Casper’s lips were cool and dry and slightly chapped from the wind. They didn’t move for the first second, didn’t respond, and Toby had time to think he’d misread everything before Casper’s mouth opened against his and the omega made a sound in his throat that Toby felt to his core.

The kiss was clumsy. Casper didn’t know what to. His mouth moved against Toby’s with the uncertain pressure of someone who understood the theory, but was only now confronting the reality for the first time. His teeth caught Toby’s lower lip. His tongue touched Toby’s and then withdrew, tentative, and Toby chased it gently with his own and felt Casper shudder from his mouth to his bare feet.

Toby brought his hand up to the side of Casper’s neck. The skin there was cool and smooth and the pulse beneath it was hammering away. Casper’s hands came up to Toby’s chest, the fingers spread, pressing flat against the waxed cotton of the Barbour. Holding him there. Holding him close. Toby tilted Casper’s head back with his thumb under the omega’s jaw and kissed him deeper, and Casper’s hands fisted in the front of his jacket.

The scent of the omega was everywhere now. It poured off Casper’s skin in waves, that salt-and-green base note submerged beneath something denser, headier, a sweetness that Toby could taste at the back of his tongue. Slick. The omega was producing slick. The scent hit the hind part of Toby’s brain and stayed there, pulsing, a signal that predated language by several hundred thousand years.

Toby slid his hand down from Casper’s neck, along the line of his ribs where the linen tunic hung loose, to his hip. Casper’s breath stuttered against his mouth. Toby’s fingers found the hem of the tunic, lifted it, touched the bare skin of his waist. The omega’s stomach contracted under his palm. Toby spread his hand flat, feeling the warmth of Casper’s skin, the fine tremor running through the muscles beneath.

“Tell me to stop,” Toby said against his mouth.

“Don’t stop.”

His hand moved lower. Under the waistband of the loose trousers, over the smooth plane of his lower belly, down to where the heat was concentrated. His fingers found the mound first, the soft rise of it, plump with blood, the skin so fine and so warm that it felt like touching the inside of a mouth. Casper’s breath stopped entirely. His whole body locked rigid, his hands white-knuckled in Toby’s jacket, his head tipped back, his eyes closed.

Toby cupped him. His palm over the mound, his fingers resting against the seam of Casper’s slit where the flesh was swollen and slippery with the first wave of slick. The heat coming off Casper’s sex was extraordinary, searing against his palm, the tissue engorged beneath the thin skin. He could feel the soft weight of the omega’s cock pressed against the heel of his hand, small enough that his palm covered it entirely, and behind it, the lips of the slit, puffy, sealed shut by the pressure of Casper’s thighs.

Casper whimpered. The sound came out of him high and broken, wrenched from somewhere deep in his chest, and his hips pushed down into Toby’s hand in a single, involuntary roll.

Then his hand shot down and closed around Toby’s wrist.

The grip was hard. Harder than Toby expected from those delicate fingers. Casper pulled Toby’s hand out of his trousers with a force that bent Toby’s wrist back, and the loss of contact pulled a second sound from the omega, this one bitten off, strangled behind his teeth.

Casper stepped back. One step. Two. His chest heaved. His hands went to the front of his own trousers, pressing flat over the place Toby’s hand had been.

His thumb and forefinger closed on the soft mound through the linen, compressing the swollen tissue, and his face tightened with a pain that was clearly deliberately caused. He held the pinch. His knuckles went white. A tear spilled from the corner of his left eye and tracked down his cheek to his jaw. He held it longer.

“Casper.” Toby’s voice came out steady, which surprised him. The rest of him was shaking. “Casper, stop.”

Casper pinched harder. His teeth were clenched, the tendons in his neck visible, his breath coming in short, controlled bursts through his nose. His other hand was balled into a fist at his side.

“Casper. Look at me.”

The pale eyes opened. The omega’s tears were running freely now, two lines down his face, but his breathing had steadied. He was inflicting the pain like a task he’d performed many times before.

Toby reached for Casper’s hand. He didn’t grab. He placed his palm over the back of Casper’s hand, over the white knuckles, and held it there.

“Let go,” he said. “Please.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me.”

Casper’s hand trembled beneath Toby’s. The pinch loosened by a fraction. His mouth worked, the lips pressing together and then apart, and the breath that came out of him was ragged.

“It has to learn,” Casper said. His voice was raw but certain. “If it wants things it can’t have, it has to learn not to want them. The punishment goes to the place. So the place knows.”

The words landed in Toby’s chest and stayed there.

“Who taught you that?”

Casper said nothing. His jaw tightened. His eyes moved to the castle wall and then away.

“I’m the only one,” Casper said, barely above a whisper. “The only male omega Vastervik has had in three hundred years. The Sea God chose me. If I break the covenant, if I let someone—” His breath hitched. His hand convulsed under Toby’s. “Every boat. Every fisherman. Every family that depends on the sea. It all falls to me. The whole of Skalavik. Every net that comes up full, every man who comes home safe. It’s because I’m whole. Because I’m untouched. If I let you touch me there—”

“Casper.”

“—then I’m nothing. I’m just a body. And the sea takes what it’s owed.”

His hand went limp. The pinch released. Toby caught the hand and held it. The fingers were cold against his palm.

Toby looked at him. The tears drying on his cheeks. The dirt smear on his forehead. The white-blond hair falling across eyes that held the flat, resigned composure of someone who’d repeated this insane belief to himself over and over again until it became ingrained in his way of thinking.

Sex, for Toby, was freely give to him by people who understood what it meant to be in bed with an Everett. They behaved accordingly. He lay back. They came to him. Omegas who smelled of Jo Malone and tasted of champagne, worked his cock with their mouths or their cunts and looked up at him with eyes that said thank you for this.

He let go of Casper’s hand and sank to his knees on the wet stone.

The cold went through the denim immediately. The dampness soaked into the fabric at his kneecaps, and a sharp edge of flagstone dug into his right knee. Casper stared down at him. His composure cracked, confusion moving across his face, his red-rimmed eyes widening.

“What are you doing?”

Toby looked up at him. The omega stood above him with the grey sky behind his head, his hair lifting in the morning breeze, his cheeks flushed and wet.

“I’m going to make you feel good,” Toby said. “I’m not going to touch you there. Not inside. Just the outside. Just the part you’ve been hurting.” He put his hands on Casper’s hips, his thumbs resting on the points of bone beneath the linen. “And you’re going to let me. Because that part of you doesn’t deserve to be punished for wanting something. It’s just a body. It’s your body. And it hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Casper’s mouth opened. Closed.

“I’ve never—” he started.

“I know.”

Casper’s hands hovered at his sides, his fingers opening and closing on nothing. His breathing had gone shallow, his ribs moving visibly beneath the tunic. Toby waited. He stayed on his knees, his hands on Casper’s hips, the wet stone grinding into his kneecaps, and waited for the omega to decide.

Casper nodded. A single, small movement.

Toby hooked his thumbs into the waistband of Casper’s trousers and drew them down to his thighs. The linen tunic still covered him. Toby pushed it up slowly, gathering the fabric, until the omega was bare from the waist to the knees.

The omega’s mound was flushed dark pink beneath sparse hair so pale it was nearly white, fine as down. The tissue was hot where Casper had pinched it, plumped up with blood, and tender. Toby could see the indentations from the boy’s fingers, two pale crescents pressed into the skin where his nails had dug in. Below it, his cock sat soft against the junction of his thighs, small and pink, the foreskin drawn tight over the head. Below that, the slit, the seam of it visible between his closed thighs, glistening faintly where the slick had gathered along the sealed lips.

Toby leaned in and pressed his mouth to the mound.

Casper’s entire body jolted. His hands flew to Toby’s head, fingers gripping his hair, and for a second Toby thought he was going to pull him away. The grip tightened. Held. He didn’t push or pull. He just held Toby in place, his fingers trembling in Toby’s hair, uncertain of what they were allowed to do.

Toby kissed the bruised skin gently. His lips moved over the swell of Casper’s mound, feeling the heat of the abused tissue. The scent here was overwhelming, salt and slick and something deeper. Toby breathed through it. His tongue found the skin, tasting salt, tasting the salt, and beneath it, the clean animal musk of him.

He licked a slow, flat stroke up the centre of Casper’s mound. The tissue was swollen enough that it gave under his tongue, the flesh yielding, the nerve-dense skin responding with a shudder that started between the omega’s legs and travelled up through his stomach to his chest. Casper’s grip in his hair tightened convulsively.

“Oh.” The word fell out of him like something dropped.

Toby did it again. A long, flat lick, broader this time, the width of his tongue covering the whole surface of the mound from the base where it met the upper edge of the slit, to the soft peak where the tissue crested. Casper’s hips rocked forward against his mouth, a movement the omega tried to stop and couldn’t, the muscles in his thighs trembled with the effort of restraint.

Toby settled into it. He took his time. The mound responded to his mouth the way a tuning fork responds to a struck note. Every pass of his tongue drew out another sound. Casper gasped when he licked broad and slow. Casper whimpered when he sealed his lips over the peak and sucked gently, drawing the swollen nub into his mouth and pressing it against the roof with his tongue. Casper made no sound at all when Toby circled the shape of him with the tip of his tongue, tracing the perimeter where the nerve endings clustered densest. He just fell into a sudden, rigid stillness, his hand in Toby’s hair gripping hard enough to sting.

Toby Everett did not do this. He didn’t kneel. He didn’t service. He was an alpha with two hundred million in personal assets and a surname that opened doors across four continents. He fucked people who were glad to be fucked by him. He lay on his back and let omegas ride his cock and do all the work. He’d never considered that there might be something on the other side of that equation worth discovering, and the fact that he was finding it now, on his knees on wet flagstone in a kitchen garden on a rock in the North Sea, with sheep shit on his wellies and his mouth on a teenage mystic’s cunt, was either the most pathetic thing that had ever happened to him or the most honest.

Casper’s thighs were shaking. He’d widened his stance without seeming to decide to, his feet braced on the cold stone, his trousers stretched between his knees. The tunic was bunched at his waist where Toby’s hands held it, the fabric crushed in his fists. The omega’s hips moved in small, helpless circles against Toby’s mouth, no longer trying to hold still.

“I can’t—” Casper’s voice came from above him, breathless, cracked at the edges. “Something is— I don’t—”

Toby pulled back enough to speak. His lips were wet. His chin was wet. The slick had run down from the slit and coated his jaw.

“It’s all right. Let it happen.”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“You do. Just let go.”

He sealed his mouth over the mound again and sucked, harder this time, his tongue pressing a firm, rhythmic stroke against the peak where the nub was hottest and most swollen. Casper’s hands clamped down on his skull. The omega’s hips stuttered, the rhythm breaking apart, becoming jerky, urgent. A sound built in Casper’s chest, low at first, gathering force, rising through his throat until it came out of his open mouth as a sob.

The orgasm hit him like a wave breaking. Toby felt it under his tongue, the mound pulsing, the tissue contracting in rapid, involuntary spasms. There was a sudden flood of slick that ran warm over his chin and down his neck. Every muscle seized, his fingers digging into Toby’s scalp hard enough to draw blood, and the sound he made was not a moan or a cry. It was a long, broken exhale, all the air leaving his lungs at once, as if something held compressed inside his ribcage for nineteen years had finally been allowed to expand.

Toby held him through it. His mouth stayed on the mound, gentler now, the pressure softening as the spasms slowed, his tongue making long, soothing passes over the oversensitive skin. Casper’s grip in his hair loosened. His body unlocked in stages, the rigid tension dissolving from his thighs first, then his stomach, then his shoulders, until he was standing loose-limbed and trembling above Toby with his weight mostly held by the hands on his hips.

Toby pulled back. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The slick was clear and faintly viscous. It tasted of salt and nothing else, clean as seawater. He looked up.

Casper was looking down at him. His face was open in a way it hadn’t been before. Not at the harbour, not by the fire, not in any of the moments where his ceremonial composure had cracked and been rebuilt.

His eyes were wet. His cheeks were flushed from his jaw to his temples, a deep, spreading pink that made his freckles stand out. His mouth was swollen where he’d bitten it. His hands still rested on Toby’s head, the fingers moving through his hair, slow and wondering.

“Thank you,” Casper said.

The words came out formal, almost ceremonial, and then his face crumpled into a laugh that was half a sob. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. His shoulders shook.

Toby got to his feet. His knees ached. The damp had soaked through the denim to the skin, and the flagstone had left a bruise on his right kneecap that he’d feel for days. He pulled Casper’s trousers up, settled them at his waist, tugged the tunic down over his hips.

He cupped Casper’s face in both hands. The omega’s cheeks were hot under his palms, the tears cooling on his skin. Toby rubbed the dirt from his forehead with his thumb.

“Don’t pinch yourself,” he said. “Never again. Will you promise me that?”

Casper looked at him. His pale eyes moved across Toby’s face, slow, thorough. His hand came up and covered Toby’s where it held his jaw.

“What if the Sea God—”

“The Sea God doesn’t own your body. He doesn’t get to decide what it does or doesn’t feel. You’re not a covenant. You’re a person.”

Casper’s fingers tightened on his hand. His mouth opened around something he didn’t say. Toby waited for it, but the unsaid thing stayed a secret between them. For now.

From the castle, a door banged open. Voices carried across the courtyard, Agna calling to someone, the clatter of pots. Morning was arriving in Svartborg.

Casper stepped back. He wiped his face with the hem of his tunic. He picked up the bucket of weeds, then brushed the soil from his knees.

“Breakfast is at seven,” Casper said. His voice was almost steady. “Agna makes porridge. It’s better than it sounds.”

He held the bucket against his hip and looked at Toby with eyes that were still red, still bright, still holding the weight of whatever had shifted between them out here in the garden.

“When you eat the porridge,” Casper said, “put salt on it, not honey. You’re in Vastervik now.”

He turned and walked barefoot across the garden toward the kitchen door. The tunic swung against his thighs. He didn’t look back.

Toby stood among the herbs with his knees aching and his chin drying in the morning air, the taste of the omega still on his tongue.