by Jagger, Kait
‘I must say,’ Luna observed, shivering slightly as the sun set behind the mountain, ‘you’re being a remarkably good sport about losing.’
‘Well,’ he pointed out, only the slightest trace of a Nordic lilt in his otherwise impeccably British accent, ‘I did give you a sixty-second head start.’
‘Oh no,’ Luna disagreed. ‘You can’t use that as an excuse.’
‘Are you accusing me of being competitive, Miss Gregory?’
‘Are you denying it, Mr I-never-lose-at-Scrabble-soz-isn’t-a-word?’ she laughed. And shivered again.
‘Come,’ he said, rising from the swing and pulling her up.
It was as warm as he’d promised inside the cottage, Stefan having come that morning to turn on the heat. ‘And, of course, the entire building is insulated to Swedish standards,’ he assured her whilst helping her out of her boots and hanging her jacket on a wooden peg beside the door. Luna pursed her lips to conceal a smile. Although they’d made their life in England and Stefan loved it there, he was proud of his homeland and not above pointing out its many, many superiorities.
Padding along behind him into the living room, she prepared to launch into a tongue-in-cheek litany of praise for Swedish craftsmanship, only to be both awestruck and humbled by the sight that awaited her. The entire room was dominated by a glass wall overlooking the frozen expanse of Lake Åresjön, majestic in the twilight. To offset the stark, stunningly scenic view, the room was furnished in a cosy mixture of worn leather furniture and colourful rugs and throws, as well as a wall devoted to photos of Stefan, his father Sören, and the wider Lundgren family.
She walked toward the window and surveyed the twilit ice. ‘Oh, Stefan,’ she breathed. ‘It’s beautiful.’
His arm slid over her collarbone. ‘You like it?’ he murmured, lips pressing into her temple.
‘I love it,’ she said, adding earnestly, ‘Your dad has the best taste of any man I know.’
Stefan’s chest rumbled against her. ‘Ah, the Luna-Sören Mutual Appreciation Society strikes again.’
He made coffee then, and curled up beside her on the sofa, answering her questions about which Lundgren uncle or cousin was which in the photos. ‘How old were you when you and your dad built this place?’ she asked.
‘Ten,’ he said. ‘And it’s exaggerating a little to say that “we” built it. I hammered a few nails, mixed some cement, but it was really Pappa who did the work.’
‘Did your—’ Luna hesitated. ‘Did your mum ever come here?’
‘Under great sufferance,’ he joked. ‘Only three or four times before she and my father split, and my memories are of her spending the entire time on the phone to her friends in Stockholm, wishing she was there. Although that didn’t stop her from trying to get the cottage in the divorce settlement.
‘And then,’ he went on, ‘Pappa decided that the best way for me to get to know Christian was for the three of us to spend a holiday here. Me, my newly gay father and his boyfriend…’ His voice took on a wry tinge. ‘Suffice it to say, it did not go well. I spent the entire time in an adolescent strop, refusing to talk to either of them. And we didn’t come here again for a long time after that.’
He studied his coffee mug, and Luna put her hand on his knee. ‘Is it sad for you now, being here?’
He looked at her with genuine surprise. ‘No. I mean, obviously, I regret being such a little wanker back then, but…’ And laughed.
Shortly thereafter, Luna lay on her stomach in Stefan’s wood-panelled childhood bedroom, paging through one of his Arne Anka comic books under the watchful gaze of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on one wall and Scully from The X-Files on the other. ‘I like the nineties vibe you’ve got going on in here,’ she observed as he divested her of her socks. ‘It’s like a time capsule or something.’
‘Sadly,’ Stefan replied, running his hand up her bare calf to her thigh, ‘there were no naked ladies in here at the end of the millennium. You are the first naked lady to grace the Cousin Stefan Memorial Bedroom.’
‘I’m honoured.’ Luna rose up on her elbow and crooked her finger. ‘Come here, Cousin Stefan,’ she purred. No further coaxing required, he lay down beside her on the narrow bed, removed the comic book from her hands and tossed it across the room. Then rested his hand on her hip bone, his bright blue gaze travelling from her throat to where her long brown hair trailed between her breasts.
He rubbed his nose against hers and dropped a gentle, almost chaste kiss on her lips. And then another. And another. Luna reached her hands to the back of his neck and returned his kiss, letting the world slip away for a while, focusing on his mouth and his breath and his nose and… a light whisper ran along her upper lip and Luna snorted involuntarily, disengaging from him. ‘This tickles,’ she said, running her fingers over his four-day blonde beard.
Stefan reached up and rubbed his jaw. ‘Should I shave it off?’
‘No,’ she replied, nudging her face back into his. ‘No, I like it.’ And met his lips again, sliding her tongue between them, shivering in anticipation as his mouth widened against hers and his tongue, his lush, lovely tongue, answered hers.
She ran her hands down his torso, pausing briefly to flick his nipples with the sides of her thumbs, rewarded by a little noise of arousal vibrating from his mouth into hers. Her hands continued their downward journey to his stomach, along hard muscles encased in smooth, warm flesh; to the fly of his jeans, and the straining length beneath.
Stefan rolled on top of her and Luna wrapped her legs around him, clamping her palms on his arse and lifting her pelvis towards his. He responded by rhythmically flexing his hips against her, and so they continued for some time. Luna was struck by the almost poignant restraint of it, making out with him here on his boyhood bed. Under normal circumstances, the forfeit she’d have insisted on for his loss in the forest would have been long and kinky, culminating in some begging from him. But something about being with him here…
‘Switch positions,’ she murmured against Stefan’s mouth, and he promptly rolled over till she was on top of him. ‘Close your eyes, älskling,’ she whispered, gratified by his immediate compliance and the sight of the hair rising on his arms at her use of the Swedish endearment. Mouth against his, tongues sliding together, she began to fondle him, first through his jeans, then inside his jeans, waiting till he’d kicked them off to sit up and straddle him.
She reached for his hands, then, and drew them up to her breasts. Grasping his hair and sidling back and forth atop him, Luna briefly surveyed the shelves behind his bed, crammed full of old Game Boy cartridges and CDs, till her eyes were drawn to a plastic case with handwriting she recognised. Sitting up straight, she reached for it, a smile spreading across her face. ‘Is this a vintage Mika Salonen mixtape?’
‘Hmm,’ Stefan confirmed absently, fingers toying with her nipples as she flipped the case over and studied the playlist, most of which read like a disaffected millennial teenager’s manifesto. A little heavy on the Nine Inch Nails for her taste, but, ah, all was not lost.
‘Oh yes,’ she grinned. ‘This is Mika alright.’ She removed the disc from its case.
Popping it into thirteen-year-old Stefan Lundgren’s well-worn CD player, Luna advanced it to track eleven and turned the volume all the way up. A crackle and hum of electricity pumped through the speakers, followed by a squeal of strings and jangling guitar. Stefan smiled in recognition, then sighed in pleasure as Luna snaked her way down his body to the soundtrack of Garbage’s archetypal ode to misogyny. Positioning herself between his legs, she rubbed her cheek against his hard length, ran her fingernail underneath the rim of his glans. Then, as Shirley Manson growled the song’s opening lines, Luna took him into her mouth.
The key to performing outstanding fellatio, she had found, was pacing. Start off too quickly, without the necessary preparatory work to ensure that your subject was primed and ready, you could
soon find yourself with a serious case of lockjaw and nothing to show for it. This was a particular issue with Stefan, who, rather sweetly, had reservations about coming in her mouth. Which Luna viewed as a desirable and highly gratifying outcome, but which he considered bad form. Getting him past this mental hurdle had become an avocation of hers – a mission, as it were – and, like the ultra-organised ex-PA she was, she’d come up with a helpful list of rules for going down on Stefan.
Rule 1 – Diversion is key
Stefan listened to music while he ran, while he drove, even sometimes while he worked. He said it helped to take his mind off laborious tasks. Which, well, Luna didn’t class receiving oral sex as a chore, but she had discovered that music had a way of minimising distractions, focusing his mind on what her mouth was doing to his cock.
Up until now, she had only experimented with classical music, Dvořák having been a particular success. But Manson’s derisive snarl was surprisingly apt for what she was doing right now, teasing him, sucking his head lightly, moving down to suck his balls too. All the while lightly stroking his length, watching it twitch and strain.
Rule 2 – Build up slowly
Helpfully, Mika had included running times for the songs in his playlist, and Luna used the entirety of track eleven’s 4.32 running time on further foreplay. She waited till the next song by Nirvana, running time 3.40, to get a bit more serious, gripping the base of Stefan’s member in her fist and increasing the suction on his head, pleased to be rewarded with a sudden exhalation from him, his fist twining in her hair.
Rule 3 – Act like you enjoy it
Fortunately, this wasn’t a problem for Luna. She absolutely loved sucking Stefan’s cock and she made sure he knew it, pausing occasionally to simply hold it in her mouth and let out an appreciative ‘Mmm…’ or disengaging entirely, gazing down at his rock hardness and giving it a brief hungry lick before covering it again with her mouth like a starving creature. Because he was watching her all the time, she knew, and visual stimulation was all part of the process of getting him to the top of the mountain.
Rule 4 – Play dirty
Cheating was sometimes required to reach that summit, and Luna wasn’t above employing every weapon in her arsenal. Now, for example, feeling his eyes upon her, inspired by the fact that his arousal had her own sex fluttering in sympathy, Luna reached her free hand down to her mons. Stefan let out a little squeak at this, his stomach muscles tightening as he sat up in bed to get better sight of what she was doing.
Touching herself, that was what she was doing, rubbing her labia, circling her clitoris, inserting her middle finger into her aching wetness. She lifted her hips slightly to allow him to watch her finger-fucking herself, and then removed her hand, trailing it up his stomach, over his chest, up to his waiting mouth. She inserted her middle finger and he sucked convulsively on it, groaning at the taste of her.
And, sweet Lord, who knew that the final song on Mika’s CD, Radiohead’s iconic elegy to some cold-hearted bitch making you feel like a loser, could be so perfect for oral sex? The building intensity of it perfectly matched the narrative arc of Luna’s assault on Stefan’s last vestige of self-control, starting slow and soft, building to an explosion of electric guitar in the chorus. And Luna built with it, revelling in his hands, digging into her scalp, his hips twisting beneath her, the head of his penis smooth and ripe beneath her parted lips.
‘Luna, please,’ Stefan moaned, pushing at her forehead in one last desperate effort to halt the unstoppable force that was her mouth pumping up and down on his immovable object. Jesus wept, how she loved it when he begged her to stop! Loved it even more when his eyes slipped shut, as they were doing now, because what she was doing to him was just so good. So good the time had come to give in, to give himself to her.
They timed it just right, between them, a tiny foretaste of pre-ejaculate swirling through Luna’s mouth as Thom Yorke broke into a falsetto in the middle eight. She took Stefan all the way in then, opening her throat and sliding her mouth down to his very base. And that broke him. He let out three loud, pained cries that sounded like they’d been ripped straight from his core, followed by a paroxysm of release, his thighs trembling and hips pumping as his come flooded into her mouth. The taste of victory.
Ever the gentleman, he made to rise the minute she loosened her mouth on him, ready to respond in kind. But Luna simply placed her hand on his heaving stomach, patting it once to indicate he shouldn’t move. And kissed his still-hard cock as Yorke sang his final, muted coda.
She was trying to think of some joke to make, about mixtapes or Gillian Anderson or christening his bedroom, when Stefan sighed, ‘You give the best head of any woman I have ever known. There is no luckier man than me.’ And every thought of levity went out of her head.
They walked the half-mile back to the car in darkness, Stefan carrying a torch to light the way. It began to snow again just as they reached his Volvo 4x4 parked beside the road. ‘You know,’ Luna said as she hopped into the passenger side, ‘we probably could have all fit in the cottage. You didn’t have to rent a chalet.’
‘You’re joking, yes?’ Stefan said, turning the key in the ignition. ‘You think I’d let those animals loose in my family’s house?’
*
The animals were in residence when the two of them got back to their chalet in the shadow of the mountain shortly thereafter, laden with provisions. Standing on the drive outside their three-storey Nordic lodge, Luna could hear shouts and screeches of laughter from within, underscored by a rollicking Nitty Gritty Dirt Band bassline so powerful the icicles hanging from the upstairs porch were shaking in time.
Luna ran ahead of Stefan, who was lugging a heavy box of groceries, opening the chalet’s pine front door only to be confronted by a pile of wet boots mired in a large puddle of water. With a sigh, she deposited her bags and squatted to tidy the boots as Stefan carried on into the house.
‘We’re home, kids!’ he shouted.
‘Thank God,’ came Kayla’s voice. ‘We’re starving!’ Followed by a loud chorus of echoes.
Stefan’s original plan, revealed to Luna three weeks ago, had been for a relaxed pre-Christmas ski break pour deux. The minute news broke among their mutual friends, however, suddenly everyone wanted to ski: Luna’s best mates, Jem and boyfriend Rod, Kayla, fresh from her successful West End run in Cats, and even Nancy, who’d flown in from New York via Stockholm just that morning. Stefan’s boyhood chum Mika Salonen, too, reckoned he fancied breaking out his snowboard, and took it upon himself to invite a few other guests.
Two of Mika’s guests, doppelgangers with long blonde hair and baby-blue eyes, stumbled headlong into the hallway just as Luna finished mopping the floor. ‘Say mercy!’ Kimi Salonen grunted, tightening his headlock on twin brother Kiki, who unleashed a volley of Finnish invectives, then raised his shaggy blonde head to Luna’s.
‘Hallå, Luna!’ he grinned. ‘Did you bring beer?’
Luna gestured toward her bags and the twins promptly abandoned their fight, picking them up and following her like a pair of amiable golden retrievers into the chalet’s open-plan living space, which was a complete contrast to Stefan’s family cottage, tricked out with every gadget known to man and luxuriously appointed with Scandi-chic furniture and a sleek, ceiling-mounted wood burner.
Any doubts Luna might have had about how the Anglo-American and Nordic contingents would get along were immediately put to rest by the sight that awaited her in the sectional seating area, where Rod and the two eldest Salonen brothers, Matthias and Timo, were sprawled in front of a television the size of a small cinema screen, hard at it on the Xbox.
‘Yes!’ Timo shouted, gripping his handset as his onscreen avatar blew the heads off a cadre of Nazis, splattering blood across a highly realistic recreation of Arborage’s portrait gallery.
‘See the bloodstain pattern?’ Rod gestured eagerly toward the scr
een. ‘You only get that with a Kalashnikov. That’s a new weapon choice in this version.’
At the nearby dining table, meanwhile, thirty-one-year-old Mika, the baby of the Salonen clan, was playing cards with the girls, clad in nothing but his socks and Calvins. ‘Really, Mika?’ Luna arched an eyebrow. ‘Strip poker this early in the night?’
‘We’re teaching him,’ Jem said sweetly, her kohl-rimmed eyes widening innocently under a luridly violet fringe. Her apparent guilelessness was only slightly undermined by the fact that she, Nancy and Kayla were still fully clothed.
At Luna’s dubious expression, Mika raised his own white-blonde eyebrow and shrugged eloquently, Slow learner. Meanwhile Kayla pointed furtively to his chiselled six-pack and mouthed to Luna, Fucking hell!
‘Look what I found at Stefan’s cottage,’ Luna said to Mika, tossing him the CD case.
‘Ah, the Scully mixtape.’
On her way into the kitchen she passed the twins coming the other way, several bottles of beer laced between their fingers and a mountain of groceries in their wake on the work surface. Luna was on the verge of protesting to Stefan when she realised that he wasn’t in the kitchen either. No, he was sitting between Matthias and Timo in front of the television, holding his hand out impatiently for the games handset.
‘No, it’s alright,’ Luna addressed the living room, ‘I’ll put the food away.’ And then the dining table. ‘I’ll make dinner. I insist.’
Not that Luna was complaining, not really. Not as she made a meal of chicken jambalaya and served it up to a raucous, ravenous table. Nor as she refilled bowls and poured drinks and brokered arguments between the girls. Nor even as she and Stefan cleared the table at the meal’s end, their eyes meeting warmly over the heads of their friends.
She knew he understood what she was feeling, another only child from a family background that could best be summed up as ‘complex’. It made her feel almost painfully happy, standing over a sinkful of soapy water, scrubbing pots, listening to the girls gossip, and Mika laugh his goofy laugh, and the other Salonen brothers take the piss out of Stefan and each other.
