Chapter 4

The snow had been slowly melting, but the skies remained cloudy. The gnarly branches of the trees in the forest behind my cottage looked like bare bones, and the meadows were covered with matted, dead grass—a monotone, gray, bleak world.

I'd gone running before dinner, and my muddy clothes now hung in the kitchen, drying in the heat from the wood-burning stove—I had firewood now! But not even the run and the sight of the flames dancing happily were enough to lift my mood.

Work was great, sure…and then I went back to the cottage, feeling like Robinson Crusoe as I pushed on through my never-ending list of chores, and when the night fell, I was prone to making bad decisions.

Hence, halfway through my second glass of wine, I found myself on Grindr.

I told myself not to do it.

It was a bad idea. Bad.

But if I weren't identifiable, no harm done, right?

I couldn't use my old pictures. Too much face and too much skin. I uploaded one where I wore a baseball cap and sunglasses with a slim T-shirt that hugged my torso in a moderately flattering way, then one from the back with a part of my profile showing.

Vers. Looking for friendship and a relationship. Like that was realistic.English. Swedish.

I took a deep breath.

Here we go.

I scrolled. Gulped wine. Scrolled.

There was nobody in a thirty-kilometer radius. Literally, no one.

Not a single gay man in my area was on Grindr on a Saturday night.

Wow.

The ones from the surrounding towns were almost all anonymous. Scrolling through faceless pictures felt familiar, but it would have been hypocritical of me to expect them to show their faces when I went out of my way to look unrecognizable myself.

"We're not in Stockholm anymore, Toto," I grumbled.

When a profile suddenly popped up one kilometer away, I almost jumped. The name proudly stated RumpLasse178, which I figured would translate into ButtLars178. The picture showed a bespectacled skinny guy in his late twenties with a lip piercing and tattoos on his chest. There was an impressive list of tags underneath it.

Bottom. Looking for sex. DTF. Dirty. Nipples. Rough. Quickie. Car play. Toys. Spanking. FF. FWB.

I didn't even know what some of those meant. FF…wasn't that girl on girl? That didn't make sense. I did a quick search. Nope. Apparently, on Grindr these days, it meant fist fucking.

I was about to close the app when it pinged with a notification. This is a bad idea. But instead of quickly deleting my profile and never looking at Grindr ever again, I opened the message with a sense of impending doom.

RumpLasse178: You're the new teacher! OMG! Hiii!

My stomach turned, rose, and got stuck somewhere in my throat while blood pumped in my ears.

You're in Sweden. It's okay. You're not going to lose your job because of your sexuality.

While I was talking myself out of a panic attack, another message arrived.

RumpLasse178: Don't freak out. I'm Lars. Welcome to Gryta :) Not hitting on you.

Inhale. Exhale.This didn't have to be bad. I wasn't interested in anything the guy was on Grindr for, but a friend would be great to have.

Me: Hi. That's comforting. Not here to hit on someone either. Just checking the area.

RumpLasse178: That's awesome. Nice pics. We're having a queer club meeting at the parish hall tonight. Do you want to come?

At first, I got stuck on the queer club and parish hall combination. Then I tried to put the guy's messages together with the profile description and list of tags. Was he genuinely being friendly, or was this a ruse to get me into a car for a rough and dirty quickie fisting?

Me: There's a queer club?

RumpLasse178: S? klart. The meeting has just started.

Me: Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm not sure it's a good idea.

RumpLasse178: Come on. Everybody in the village already knows you're gay. We're having a game night. You must bring your own beer, though. The café only serves soft drinks.

Everybody knows.I had casually come out to my boss and colleagues in case my appearing at the village school on my first day in Chelsea boots and a suit didn't tip them off. The rumor mill worked fast around here.

Me: How many of you are there?

RumpLasse178: Four. You coming?

My own chuckle startled me in the absolute quiet of the cottage. Four people. Well…that was a good number. Considering the size of the municipality, four out queers wanting to socialize was just about right.

I looked out of the window at the darkening sky and listened to the quiet humming of the wind outside. The house was entirely still—not a creak of a plank, not a peep from a single mouse.

My fingers flew over the screen, and I hit send before I could back out.

Me: Okay. I can be there in thirty.

RumpLasse178: Awesome!

I woremy dark-blue skinny jeans as a token. Otherwise, I dressed reasonably, considering I had to walk more than a kilometer through drizzle in mud and gravel along the road. When I entered the dimly lit community building, the noise made me pause. That didn't sound like four people. Unzipping my wet jacket, I passed through the hallway and peeked into what had to be the main room.

The crowd was divided into smaller groups around several tables, and most people looked to be sixty or older. The tables were decorated with plastic flowers and bowls containing chips, nuts, and what looked like but couldn't be Cheetos. At one of the tables in the back, I recognized Eva from the school. My neck heated. Had I come to the wrong place? But there was only one café slash library slash community center in Gryta.

"Hi!"

The bright voice came from behind me, making me jump.

When I spun around, I recognized Lars from his Grindr picture. He wore a black hoodie, and his floppy bangs were dyed bright blue.

"Hi. This isn't four people."

"Ha. No." He threw an arm around my shoulders and tugged me into a corner. "That's the eighties music quiz. Ignore them."

Ignore the entire room of people, some of whom are staring at me and waving.Sure, that was easy. I waved back as Lars pulled me toward a table that was partially hidden behind a coat rack.

"Guys, this is Eric, our new English teacher."

Two men blinked up at me. One looked to be in his fifties, with a round, smiling face and a sizable belly stuffed in a pink-and-black checkered flannel shirt. A small diamond stud adorned his left ear. The other guy couldn't be more than twenty-five, and he looked tiny with narrow shoulders and a boyish jawline. A baseball cap sat on his head, turned backward, and indecipherable letters were tattooed on his fingers. He was shuffling a stack of green cards, his hands moving with the swift elegance of a croupier.

Lars pointed at the younger man first. "This is Theo."

The little guy gave me an impressive glare, scanning me up and down more thoroughly than a border patrol.

"Hi, Theo. Nice to meet you." I smiled. He didn't look impressed.

The other man pushed his chair back and stood, tugging his flannel shirt down over his love handles.

"Hi, Eric. I'm Olaf. How lovely you could come."

"Thank y'all for inviting me."

I glanced around, looking for the fourth person, but Lars was already dragging my jacket off. He hung it on the coat rack. From the other side of the room, the intro to "What a Feeling" blared, only to be cut off after five seconds. I frowned in the direction of the speakers.

"What film is this song from, and which year did it premiere?" someone asked in Swedish. The microphone crackled, the voice bounced off the walls, and I winced, rubbing my ear.

Theo put eight green cards in front of me with cartoon pictures of what looked to be dead cats.

"Film Flashdance, 1983, music by Giorgio Moroder, lyrics by Keith Forsey, performed by Irene Cara," Olaf muttered quietly, sorting the cards in his hands.

"Sorry. It's going to be loud," Lars said. "But they should be done in half an hour."

I picked up the cards automatically and looked at the variety of morbid, arguably hilarious illustrations.

"We're playing Zombie Kittens. Do you know it?"

"No. Sorry."

"You'll pick it up quickly. I'll play the first round with you. You didn't bring anything, right? Do you want a beer?"

From the scratched linoleum floor under the table, Lars lifted a white plastic bag with the unmistakable logo of the Swedish state liquor store, Systembolaget. It was bulging with cans and bottles.

"Thanks. I had some wine at home. I'm good for now."

I had a sneaking suspicion that when Lars said the queer club had four members, he'd already included me in the number.

"So…uh…do you meet often?"

"Every few weeks," Olaf said. "Then on birthdays, for Melodifestivalen at my place and, of course, the Eurovision finals."

"It's your turn," Theo told him.

"Here you go." Olaf placed two identical cards on the discard pile and stole one from Theo's hand.

"Faaan," Theo swore. He made the common Swedish curse sound way more powerful than it was.

The speakers boomed with a few loud piano keys, and Olaf tsked, shaking his head, eyes on his cards.

"A-ha. ‘Crying in the Rain,' Countdown. But that's 1990, so technically, not the eighties."

Lars winked at me. "They banned Olaf from the music quiz two years ago."

"In their defense, after I won four times in a row, they asked me to organize it instead," Olaf said. "Which I refused because that's work. And I have enough of that in my life, thank you very much. So they politely asked me not to compete anymore."

He picked a card from a pile and nodded at me.

I stared at the pictures, having no clue what to do with them. Lars leaned over my shoulder and pointed at one green card in my hand. "Each turn ends with taking a card from the pile. If you pick up one of the exploding kittens—there are three of them in the pile—you die. Unless you have a zombie kitten, which is this one…"

The unmistakable tones from "What's Love Got To Do With It" by Tina Turner interrupted him for a few seconds.

I glanced at Olaf, but he just scoffed, not even bothering to name the song.

"Nineteen eighty-four," Theo mumbled.

Olaf beamed at him. "Not bad, kid. Considering you weren't even alive." He patted Theo's back, and the younger man grimaced, jerking away from the touch.

"You can decide to use the zombie kitten card immediately, or you can die and save it for later. When you're dead and somebody else uses the zombie kitten, they have to revive you as well, unless…"

Lars broke off mid sentence. I followed his gaze only to see Bj?rn walking into the main room in a wet, unzipped jacket, a thin blue hat, and carrying two exceedingly heavy-looking crates of soft drinks, one under each arm.

He deposited the crates onto a counter that spanned the back wall and paused to talk to Eva.

"The one who got away," Olaf singsonged.

"Oh, shut up," Lars groused and looked at his cards studiously.

"Lars hit on him like twelve times," Theo said. For the first time during the evening, I noticed him grinning. He had a sweet smile. "It's like a tradition. Every Midsummer and every New Year's at least. It's getting pathetic."

"I just don't get it. What self-respecting single gay man says no to a no-strings-attached blowjob?" Lars looked at me questioningly. I stared back, probably looking bewildered. "I'm not going to hit on you, chill. You're a teacher. One of the pillars of the community. That would get weird. But him? We went to the same high school. He knows me."

"Maybe that's why," Olaf suggested.

"He just thinks he's better than everybody else." Frowning, Lars reached under the table into his Systembolaget plastic bag and pulled out one of the beer cans. He cracked it open and took a deep swig.

Flummoxed, I stared at Bj?rn's impressive figure. With his broad shoulders and long legs, he took up three times as much space as anyone else in the room.

He's gay? The Viking lumberjack is gay? And single.

"You've met him?" Olaf asked me, sounding too innocent.

I cleared my throat and glanced at my cards. I still had no idea what the goal of the game was.

"Um. He came by with a tractor and brought me some firewood. He was nice. Helped me stack it on my porch."

The table was silent. I looked up. My three companions were staring at me.

"The tall, unfairly hot, stuck-up dude over there came by your place and brought you firewood?" Lars repeated, enunciating clearly. "And then he helped you stack it?"

Did I say something wrong? "Yes?"

"Listen to Your Heart" by Roxette shook the building, then abruptly quieted.

Lars looked at Olaf, then at Theo, and slumped in his chair, despondent. "F?r helvete fan ocks?."

"I'm pretty sure Madeleine sent him," I tried to explain even though I had no idea what I'd done wrong. "My headmaster."

"That makes sense," Theo remarked.

Taking a deep breath, Lars put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. "Anyway. Eric is now a member of the Gryta queer club. Welcome, Eric."

"Do you want to pee around him too?" Olaf quipped.

Theo snickered, and Lars glowered at them both.

"Is Bj?rn not in the club?" I asked.

"No," Lars replied. "He thinks himself above us."

"You've never invited him," Theo said. Olaf gave a grave nod.

"I did! Last year. He didn't come."

"Was that before or after you asked to blow him?" Olaf said.

I laughed even though my mind was going a hundred miles a second. The three men couldn't be more different, but they had the easy familiarity of longtime friends who knew each other inside out. Despite the bickering and the macabre card game I'd still not learned the rules of, I was having the most fun since I'd left Stockholm. And Bj?rn was gay!

Lars threw his hands in the air, releasing me from his grip. "Again. No-strings-attached, casual sexual encounters don't have to in any way affect a friendship or work relationship. That bullshit is what the heteronormative culture makes you believe. But between two consenting gay men, where there's no risk or biological investment on either side, the sex doesn't mean anything. I could blow each and every one of you, and it wouldn't make me more or less of your friend."

"Thanks, but no thanks," Theo said.

"Fredrik and I are exclusive," Olaf announced proudly, winking my way.

Then I noticed the thin gold band around his ring finger.

"Y'all are married?" I asked.

Olaf smiled, his apple cheeks gaining a warm pink color. "We've been together for twenty-four years. It'll be our twenty-fifth anniversary in October. We met at a Halloween party in my sister's student apartment in Gothenburg in 1999."

My undignified, dreamy sigh made Olaf beam brighter. "Congratulations."

"Fredrik and Olaf run an antique shop in a barn on their property behind the chapel," Theo said. "They have people coming here from Gothenburg and even from Oslo."

"That's"—I was about to say adorable but stopped myself at the last second—"impressive."

"Fredrik usually comes to the club meetings too," Olaf explained, sounding apologetic. "But he's a veterinary anesthesiologist, and tonight they needed him in Trollh?ttan."

An electric guitar and synthetic keyboard wailed from the corner. "Final Countdown" by Europe.

Theo groaned. "Fucking tack och lov, the last song."

I was about to ask Olaf about the antique shop because I'd love to visit, but Bj?rn turned around, about to leave, and our gazes met.

He smiled, taking a step my way, but then he noticed my companions. His smile wilted. He gave me an awkward wave from across the room and strode out.

Lars glared after him. "See? He wouldn't even say hi. Snob."

Despite being Swedish himself, it seemed Lars might benefit from Lizzy's and my guide to dating Scandinavian men.

"Let it go already," Olaf said. "He's not interested."

Flipping Olaf off, Lars leaned over to look at my cards. "It's still your turn, Eric."

Right. "I have no idea what I'm doing."