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hivemuthur · 3 days ago

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Coucou - Ch.1.: June 11th – July 1st, 1992

viktorxfemale!reader SFW, Modern AU (90s), set in France, friends to lovers soft summer romance.

MASTERLIST next chapter ->

word count: 5K

author’s note: Grab the playlist link. As usual, this is a short setup chapter. I'm not sure about the warnings yet, as it's all still in the writing. The initial outline is for eight chapters. Author of the art is ofc @petitesieste and @doggrowth actually proof read this, thank you ♡

In French, "coucou" is used as an informal, friendly greeting, similar to "hi" or "hello" in English. It's typically reserved for close friends, family, or people you know well.

AO3

—

June 11th, 1992, 4:32 p.m.

“Jayce!”

It all happened in slow motion. Jayce slammed on his bike’s brakes to avoid a child frozen in the lane; his front wheel struck a small rock, buckled, and he flew over the handlebars farther than you would have thought possible. A screaming mother swooped in to snatch the child away only after Jayce hit the ground, twisted into an angle that shouldn’t have been physiologically possible.

You skidded to a stop, abandoned your bike while its front wheel still spun, and rushed to him—ready to tease him and laugh it off—until you saw Jayce panting, face flushed red, clutching his shin through gritted teeth.

“Jayce,” you said, pressing a sweaty palm to his forehead. “Are you all right?”

“Ah, it hurts,” he groaned when you tried to touch his knee. It was already swelling, blood ballooning beneath the skin where the bone had snapped and threatened to break through.

“Jesus Christ, Jayce,” you squealed. “Don’t move. I’ll call an ambulance.”

After barking quick instructions to the disoriented mother to keep watch over him, you sprinted to the nearest restaurant to find a phone. Thirty long minutes beneath the scorching sun later, an ambulance finally arrived and whisked Jayce to the hospital. His leg had been broken in two places and required an emergency surgery.

Two days later, he was discharged with a cast that reached his thigh—and with a three-month sentence of house arrest under Ximena’s benevolent care. There went Jayce’s summer internship; there came yours. Jayce, once again, vowed he would never challenge you to race back to the academy again, which was, of course, a lie.

Which is exactly how you have found yourself sprawled on an iron berth that bites into your back, rattling south on a twenty-four-hour train to Nice—drafted into Jayce’s place for a month-long, PhD marine-biology stint under Professor Moreaux, Heimerdinger’s wily old crony.

July 1st, 1992, 3:25 a.m.

You try to sleep, but your eyelids crack open every time the opposite cot groans—Viktor wrestles the same tin-rigged mattress, sighing like a ship in fog.

The two of you have been circling each other since first year, caught in the bright gravitational pull of Jayce Talis. Friendly, never intimate; sometimes rivals when marks go up, but never enemies. Jayce is the buffer, the chatter, the mortar that plugs every threatening silence. Without him, your contact shrinks to the odd, awkward study session or a 2 a.m. stagger out of a campus bar when only the jukebox and cheap beer are still awake.

You’ve cycled through phases with Viktor—first judging him an uptight martyr with a taste for self-imposed gloom, then suspecting a misunderstood genius, then enduring a brief, blistering crush that burned itself out before finals upon realising that he is entirely unapproachable and you are better off without the maladies of unrequited affection. What’s left is a courteous, arm’s-length détente that works only when Jayce is on hand to grease the social gears.

And Jayce, poor fool, is back home with his mother, trussed in plaster. Which leaves you here, locked in a rattling sleeper with Viktor, bound for four weeks of salt air, plankton nets, and unfiltered proximity. The whole endeavour feels as if someone has kicked the switch beneath your life and sent the carriage clattering down a wild, unmapped line.

You sigh into your pillow and roll over, earning yourself a displeased grunt. “Can you be less loud?” Viktor groans, treating you to the panoramic view of his back.

“Viktor, I’m just breathing,” you mutter, tugging the scratchy blanket higher over your shoulder. “Jayce said you’re gonna be a bit grumpy on the train, but so far it’s been you grumbling like an old man all the way through.”

“Because it’s just so vastly uncomfortable,” he whines, levering himself upright to punch the frustration out of his pillow. “And the sounds you are making are not helpful.”

“If I only could, I would hold my breath for your benefit, but alas I might not survive the journey,” you sigh, flopping onto your back to stare at the water-stained ceiling. “Just try to go to sleep, we still have a couple more hours.”

“Just try to go to sleep, she says, like it’s that simple,” he grumbles, knees knocking the cabin wall.

“You melodramatic beanpole,” you whisper, a sleepy laugh ghosting the words.

A chuckle—just the ghost of one—slips out of Viktor’s mouth; you could swear it. He says nothing for the rest of the night, and eventually his breaths, his tossing and turning taper into the slow rhythm of sleep as he rolls onto his back, one arm and one leg dangling off the cot.

Drifting in and out of shallow, lucid dreams, you watch him through sandy eyelids. His shirt has ridden up, exposing a narrow strip of taut stomach. His face, still marked by a faint frown, has slackened just enough for his mouth to fall slightly open. His lashes are long—impossibly long—you note, then curse yourself, rolling away and stamping out the tiny glowing embers of that old crush.

When you arrive in Nice, your backs are stiff, and the southern sun knifes through the flimsy blinds. The compartment air tastes of hot metal and yesterday’s coffee; your feet throb from a night spent curled against the wall. Viktor tries to stretch, but he’s too long for the berth and cracks his toes against the carriage door.

“Damn this tin hole,” he hisses, cradling his foot in both hands.

“Good morning, sunshine. Or should I say salut?”

He rolls his eyes, but the glimpse of the city waking below—pink roofs, palms trembling in first light—lifts his mood for a beat. “God, at last. A normal bed on the horizon.” His gaze slides to you, all rumpled clothes and sandpaper eyelids. “Did you sleep at all?”

“A little bit. You snore,” you say, half-mocking.

“That I do not.” Viktor tilts his head, voice dry with disbelief, a scholar dismissing bad data. “Proof, or I deny everything.”

“It’s nasal,” you tease. “Very old-man like, suits you.” You drag out a wet, throttled hrrrrk—his alleged symphony—just in time for a pillow to smack your face.

“Hey! We’ve barely arrived and you’re already violent.”

“Old men get that way when cornered,” he chides, lips twitching. “Speaking of—may I ask your assistance?” He sits upright, the ceiling so low he must fold himself in half, eyeing the narrow ladder that felt twice as steep on the way down.

“Of course,” you whisper. You swing off your berth, knees soft, and offer both hands across the gap. His fingers lace with yours—warm, gentle—and you guide him, step by careful step, until his feet find the floor.

“You don’t have to look that concerned,” Viktor murmurs, still holding on. “One of my legs is perfect.”

You smirk, reach past his hip, and fish out the cane wedged between mattress and wall. “That I can see,” you say, twirling the polished wood before handing it over. “It’s a very good leg.”

“Thank you.” He plants the cane, steadies himself, and glances down the corridor. “We should probably get ready to disembark.”

“That we should. Last one gets the crappy bed.” You crouch to wrestle your bag from under the cot; the scaffold groans in protest.

“Ah, there it goes—” Viktor drawls, one hand waving around as if pointing out something obvious. “Taking advantage of the cripple.”

“Viktor!” You straighten, scowl sharp enough to slice paper. “You know I hate the C-word.”

“You can hate it all you like, but it’s my secret weapon.” He smiles, unapologetic, and swings his bag over one shoulder. “Allons-y, mon ami.” With a flourish he slides the compartment door open.

You huff, shake your head, and follow him into the passage, where the Côte d’Azur morning floods the narrow train corridor with salt-bright light.

The platform breathes heat even at this hour: a kiln-warm draught rolling off the tracks, spiced with diesel and sea salt. The June sky is a rinsed blue that promises nothing but fiercer light once the sun clears the station roof. You fan your collar and step down onto concrete already warm enough to prickle bare ankles. Viktor follows, cane ticking against the slabs, eyes narrowed to slits.

A man in a battered straw hat waits beyond the ticket barrier, holding a sheet of copier paper that says HEIMERDINGER in biro. Stocky, sun-torched forearms, a faded Breton-stripe shirt—a career handyman who can splice wires or gut a fish without changing knives. He touches the brim of his hat when you approach.

“Bonjour, salut! Gérard Arnaud,” he says, English wrapped in a Provençal drawl, then peers from you to Viktor and back again, bafflement pinching his face. “Il devait y avoir deux garçons?”—there were meant to be two boys? The words skim right over you. Viktor lifts a shoulder, equally lost. No idea how to tell him Jayce couldn't make it. Gérard shrugs, resigned, and waves you after him with a twirl of wrist that means come, no time for this.

The car is a sun-bleached Renault 4L Fourgonnette, paint the colour of old parchment, roof rack lashed with dusty rope. Gérard wrenches open the rear door; the hinges cough. Your rucksacks barely fit—one wedged in the boot full of miscellaneous items, the other jammed upright between you and the door on the cracked vinyl bench, making your knees knock on Viktor's each time the vehicle shudders.

Gérard coaxes the Renault north-west out of Nice, tyres whispering over dawn-damp asphalt. Blocks of concrete and neon fall away; oleander hedges rise in their stead, pink petals slapping the open windows like damp confetti. The road narrows, melting into pale limestone that snakes uphill, lavender paddocks stitching violet squares across the slopes. Each bend kicks a plume of dust that drifts back and powders the windscreen until Gérard wipes a clear stripe with a rag and mutters at the smear. From the tinny dashboard a crackling radio offers La Ballade des gens heureux—all sway and optimism in mono.

The higher you climb, the less the road bothers with civility: hairpins stacked like coiled rope, guard-walls shrinking to ankle-high stone or vanishing to bare sky. Now and then the Mediterranean glints between pines, a distant sheet of hammered tin. Viktor’s thigh brushes yours whenever Gérard stamps the brake—which is often. He murmurs apologies you can’t quite hear over the wash of old chanson he hums in counter-melody.

Heat thickens inside the cabin like poured syrup. You tug your shirt from your back, salt collecting on your upper lip, while Gérard shifts gears with a butcher’s precision. No conversation—just engine drone, toolbox rattle, cicadas sawing somewhere beyond the glass.

Villages dwindle to shuttered farmsteads, then to nothing but drystone terraces and stubby olive trees clinging to shale. In the mirror you catch Viktor tracing the topography with his eyes—equal parts wonder and calculation, already drafting some private map. The Renault bumps across a cattle grid at the ridge; suddenly the plateau opens below, quilted in lavender, wheat, and stray stripes of sunflower, all stitched together by a single chalk track Gérard takes without lifting his foot.

Dust gulps the car, tawny and choking, scented with thyme, warm stone, and engine oil. Ahead, blurred by glare, a farmhouse shoulders into view—bleached walls, blue shutters, a plane tree stretching like a green umbrella. Beside you Viktor lets out a breath, half-laugh, half-sigh, as though he too has just realised how narrow—how intimate—this summer is about to become.

You tumble out first, joints crackling, sweat already darkening the collar of your thin undershirt; the heat is thick enough to taste, half-earth, half-olive leaf. Viktor takes longer—cane, step, hiss through his teeth—and stands blinking at the house.

It’s the colour of baked clay, shutters washed a Provençal blue so pale they might once have been sky. Two storeys, then a scattering of outbuildings stitched to it like thoughts added after a long pause. A belt of olives hems the land; beyond that, lavender blurs purple under the sun.

From the wide front door shaded by on old plane tree emerges a compact man with rough silver curls, linen sleeves rolled past the elbow. At his side, a woman in espadrilles wipes flour from her palms.

“Bienvenue! Welcome!” he calls, accent seesawing between Marseille quay and Oxbridge quad. “I am Professor Moreaux, you can call me Quentin. And this—my wife, Odile. I received the letter from dear Heimerdinger about the change just yesterday.” He taps his temple, mock-aghast. “Storm last week—pfou!—telephone lines cooked.”

You exchange a glance with Viktor: so time does move slower here. The professor claps his hands. “You must be exhausted. Come, let me show you your new home for a month.”

Inside, cool shadow and the lemon scent of old wax wrap round you. The tiles underfoot are sage green, their grout a mustard yellow, sunlit even in gloom. To the left a lounge sprawls—books colonising every surface, armchairs sinking into themselves. To the right the kitchen opens on the back garden, a zinc sink muttering under a slow trickle of water.

“Lunch at noon sharp,” Moreaux says, guiding you through. “Apero and dinner six or seven, whenever all of us gather. Breakfast—help yourselves, same for drinks. If you find it, you may eat it or drink it.” His wife laughs, low and warm, and disappears toward the pantry.

He leads you to a varnished staircase in the heart of the house smelling of pine sap. On the right an old wooden door is swung open, revealing a vast sunken room with concrete floor. “Laundry room. We also keep ice cream there," professor says, waving his hand. "The rest arrived yesterday, so I had no chance for a room swap,” he explains, beginning to climb the stairs. Viktor plants his cane and ascends carefully; you hover behind, ready to catch.

On the first landing, Moreaux pauses, both hands on the banister. "If you can't find me anywhere, you will find me here—" He points a finger to a door marked with a small white plaque that says bureau. "There—" a nod to small blue twin doors on the opposite wall, "is where other students sleep, and there—" another point, this time to a little bridge conjoining the two parts of the first floor over the staircase, "is where me and my kids live. You will meet everyone over lunch."

What is left unattended is narrow white door. Moreaux opens it on to another stair—steep, corkscrewing, banister nothing more than a rope chafed smooth by decades of palms. You and Viktor both exhale a resigned breath—the higher you go, the hotter the house. Plus the vision of battling two sets of stairs every day is something that Viktor probably haven't anticipated.

The professor eyes him with a glimpse of worry. “I hope it won’t trouble your leg, dear boy—,” he says, voice echoing up the chute. "You’ll sleep in the séchoir, last free room left."

The attic greets you with the still heat of a forgotten loft: two small windows, a chaise-longue sagging between, a heavy wooden door, something hidden behind a curtain, and an open shower corner shielded only by a folding screen made of tatty wood. The floorboards complain under every footstep; the walls are rough round stone set in cement, cool to the knuckles. The space is decorated with dried lavender in handmade vases and rustic pictures.

You and Viktor trade looks—open shower, hardly ideal. Little do you know worse waits. Moreaux tugs aside a heavy yellow curtain: a solitary loo, squeezed into a nook like penance. “It is crude, yes, but these are old-house caprices. You two will arrange yourselves.”

He lifts the final latch on a barn-door plank and swings it wide. Behind it, the bedroom reveals itself: a modest chamber, lime-washed, a rickety bookcase, two narrow desks pressed together, a fan in the centre that turns with the enthusiasm of a tired priest. Three tiny windows gaze east over the olives. Against the far wall squats a single bed, mattress slightly concave, sheets white as surrender.

The professor beams, oblivious. “Voilà. Settle in, splash your faces, come down when you are refreshed, or have a nap. First day is for you to rest and recuperate!”

The door clicks behind your host; his footsteps fade down the rope-railed stair. Dust motes swirl in the weak breath of the ceiling fan, drifting like tiny satellites round its lazy blades. Beside you Viktor releases a sound that is half-laugh, half-prayer. Your pulse keeps tempo with the fan—one bed, four weeks—and you swallow a mouthful of dry tar, pasting on a smile braver than it feels.

“I’ll take the chaise,” you concede after a long beat of silence. It seems only fair: Viktor has groused enough on the train, and you can picture the opera he’ll stage if condemned to something narrower than a sofa. “Just… warn me when you need the loo—or the shower.”

“No. No.” He halts you with a neat flick of the cane, as if drawing a line on the boards. “Give me a second.” Fingers dig into the muscle above his knee; he winces, thinking. “Could we move the chaise in here?” Eyebrows lift, all hopeful architecture.

“It’s too big. Hardly room to breathe as it is.” You shake your head, hair sticking to the back of your neck. “It’s fine, V. We’ll be so wrecked after lab days I could kip on the floor and never notice.”

“That’s hardly fair.” He scratches his chin, a rasp of stubble. “We could switch—every day?”

“That’s ridiculous. Every week makes more sense.”

“Every three days, then. Or we could just—” He stalls, gaze snagging yours, an idea obviously not worth speaking out hanging between. We could just what? Before you can prise it out, he clears his throat. “Every three days seems reasonable.”

You puff a breath through unkempt hair framing your face. “Fine. But I’m taking the first chaise shift.”

“You don’t have to,” he says, swinging his rucksack down with a thud. The softness in his tone is almost a dare.

“Viktor, you spent a full day and night folded on a train bunk and climbed two flights of stairs. I’m honestly fine.”

“That’s exactly what you did,” he counters, cocking his head, challenging—baiting you to admit you’re going easy on him.

“I know, but you’re—” You turn; his stare is bright, daring you to finish.

“What?” he prompts, mouth twitching in wicked amusement.

“Oh, sod off and take the bloody bed while I’m still offering, you prick.”

“So vulgar.” Viktor chuckles outright, the bastard—head tipped back, cane tapping the boards in triumph.

“You’re impossible,” you mutter, dropping your rucksack with a thud and rummaging until your fingers snag a towel that seem to have sucked in all the moisture from the air. Clothes, notebooks, tube of sun-cream—everything spills onto the boards. “I’m taking the first shower, though.”

“Quite alright,” Viktor says, easing onto the mattress with a creak of springs, then letting himself down flat, boots still planted on the floor as if he doesn’t trust the bed to hold him without witness.

The séchoir’s shower is a stone alcove scarcely wider than your shoulders. The pipe sprouts straight from the wall; someone has jammed a brass rose on the end and tied a bunch of dried lavender upside-down from a nail overhead. You twist the tap: a cough, a spit, then a stream that never decides between ice-cool spring and boiling hot. Bliss all the same. You stand there until the train grime swirls away, lavender scent swelling in the damp heat, salt lifting from your skin in slow surrender.

Fresh swimsuit, loose cotton over the top, damp hair pinned up. You pad back across the creaking floorboards and find Viktor half-gone to the world, cane propped like a sentry beside the bed. His arm sprawls across his eyes; the fan nudges a curl of hair across his forehead.

You lean in, close enough to feel his breath feather your cheek, and blow a quick puff of air. He snorts, jerks, blinks at you in bleary accusation.

“Rise and shine, professor’s pet,” you whisper, grinning. “Your turn before lunch, unless you fancy meeting everyone wearing eau de wagon-lit.”

He groans something unprintable in Czech and pushes himself upright, but a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth as he reaches for the cane.

"No peeking," he tells you, towel swung over his shoulder.

"Dream on," you snort, sinking onto the floor to sort out your bag. And there you find yourself lost—should you unpack your bag to the wardrobe and into one of the desks? Should you take essentials? How on earth are you two going to navigate the every-three-day switch without invading each other's privacy?

Groaning, you kneel on the boards and begin triage—the always-within-reach heap goes first: two pairs of clean knickers rolled tight, a spiral notebook furred with graphite smudges, the dog-eared paperback you read on the train, and a fountain pen tucked inside its own sock. These live on the chaise with you for the next three days.

Then, the only-when-the-room-is-free mound: the rest of your clothes folded into rough rectangles, spare canvas shoes, a tiny bottle of jasmine hair oil, and an emergency post-sun remedy that is neither a lotion, nor an ointment. You stack them in your half of the wardrobe, that you allow yourself to pronounce yours during Viktor's absence.

Last, the bathroom cache: toothbrush wrapped in a tea-towel, travel soap, shampoo, a half-tube of SPF 50, and a crinkled paper bag of period essentials. You corral the lot into your canvas wash-bag and plant it by the door, ready for the next skirmish over the screen-walled shower.

Unbeknownst to you, Viktor is going through an identical dilemma. He finds himself in trouble the minute he steps into the nook, discovering that there are no handles, of course. Feet carefully padding, he wedges his cosmetics onto one half of an in-wall shelf, and steps out of his sweaty clothes, in what he notices, if not for the screen, would be nearly the middle of the room.

Having an option of either scalding or cryo temperature—given the heat—he settles for the latter, letting the water punch the air from his lungs in the initial few seconds. About ten shallow, open-mouthed breaths later it becomes a relief, ridding him of a sticky layer of perspiration and cooling his skin to a level that Viktor naively thinks will last for longer than a few minutes.

There, he finally allows himself to think. So far, everything has been simultaneously far from ideal and idyllic. The train ride? Awful, but oddly romantic, in that nostalgic, once-in-a-lifetime endeavour kind of way. The cot should be outright burned or serve as an instrument of torture in some high-security prison, but the view along the way almost made up for it. Viktor has never seen the land shifting so quickly from rain-slicked cramped cities to sun-baked opulent terrain with a sparkle of the sea glittering on the horizon. Another pleasant sight were your warmed-up cheeks when you napped slumped against the glass, your hair tossed around in the wind. He tried to read on the journey, but his eyes wandered onto both sides of the window so much that he ended up making pathetic progress—only one chapter.

Then, there is the suspicious location of this prestigious summer internship. The university with all its labs and open ocean access is in Nice, which, by his calculations, is about thirty kilometres away as the crow flies from where he is currently. Viktor senses some kind of trickery, where you will all have to do the professor’s silly bidding before the man even thinks about letting students into the lab. Both the house and the overall landscape of Courmes are full of narrow pathways and fucking stairs—either wooden or shaped by nature in limestone. But then, the prospect of homemade meals and accommodation away from the city with a private pool and endless fields of aromatic plants brings the promise of something Viktor hasn't done in the longest time—rest. Well, at least for three days straight, after which he has to take the chaise.

Yes, the one-bed dilemma. He feels bad for making you take the first shift on the shitty mockery of a couch (who even came up with this type of furniture? It's no good for sitting, let alone trying to get a decent sleep. It's just another instrument of torture, beloved by therapists). He feels bad, but at the same time, his leg is giving him so much grief after the journey, no amount of gaping upon pretty landscape or pretty legs will calm down the throbbing muscle.

Which brings him to you—or rather, your presence here. Equally preposterous, given that Jayce had to break a leg to make it possible in the first place, and swell, given Viktor’s fluctuating infatuation. Perhaps infatuation is too big of a word, but Viktor is definitely not blind, and he can spot and appreciate pretty from afar. He can also quickly catalogue which parts of pretty he considers attractive, and upon a thorough check on the train, he remembers that you possess a lot of parts that fall into that category.

He wonders whether it is possible—let alone ethical—to chase a thing so shot through with doubt when the chase itself is confined to a Provençal bubble both of you can disown the moment French summer shuts its ledger.

Your history? Polite and largely orbital. Long weeks of parallel study punctuated by rare collisions: a midnight pint after finals, a god-forsaken house-party where the stereo bled Jeff Buckley and someone’s cat got stoned by proximity. Across a scatter of late-night libraries and half-lit bars he kept catching what felt like slivers of permission—your knee ghosting against his under a seminar table, fingers brushing when you handed him a lighter, an eyebrow arched as though leaving a door ajar. He stacked courage like coins, meaning to spend it on one clear, impossible question, but each time he reached for the moment it had already folded itself away: you were back to rumpling Jayce’s hair, laughing about some dawn bike ride, and Viktor filed the whole notion under wishful misreadings and tiptoed away, retreating to the safe tundra of proper academic friendship.

Still, when all three of you landed PhD places, he’d felt a fierce, molten gladness. More time with people he likes, less with those he does not; more room to reinvent himself under the forgiving umbrella of research grants and late library hours. Doctoral life delays the cold independence the outside world demands, keeps adulthood’s paperwork at bay, and wraps ambition in corduroy and chalk dust. For all its impediments, Viktor is grateful that he gets to share it with two—no, his—best friends.

Yes, friends, he reminds himself under the hiss of icy water. Friends. So he resolves to keep the truce intact: three nights on, three nights off, no martyrdom, no squabbling.

The internship offers deeper waters—sensor rigs, plankton counters, a crack at results solid enough to buy him a year’s grace on the stipend committee. That is where his attention belongs. If, in the margins, he happens to glimpse you gliding pool-side in a swimsuit, that will simply be logged—purely for completeness—into the ever-growing catalogue of pretty, sub-folder attractive, never to be spoken of outside the sealed archives of his skull.

He shuts off the water and gropes for a towel. Only then does Viktor realise he hasn’t brought a single stitch of clean clothing from the bedroom. After a moment’s debate over boundaries, he opts for the half-measure: slips into the same crumpled, travel-stale shirt—unbuttoned—and knots the towel tight around his hips. The moment he steps from the cool alcove, sweat blooms between his shoulder-blades.

Back in the room you’re perched on the desk chair, knees hugged to your chest, a pocket dictionary open across one thigh. The fan toys with the wisps of hair at your crown while you mutter conjugations and scribble notes in the margin. Viktor tries for stealth, but the floorboards betray him—one loud creak under the cane—and you spin, pen cartwheeling from your fingers to the boards.

“Why the hell are you naked?” you blurt, scrabbling for the pen while staring determinedly at the wall.

“Half-naked,” he corrects, rummaging in his rucksack with a lopsided grin. “I forgot clean clothes, and every manoeuvre in this sauna is either dangerous or sweat-inducing. I didn’t peg you for a prude.”

You puff a strand of hair off your forehead. “I’m not, but usually there are a few steps between we are colleagues and the said colleague flashing me.”

Viktor chuckles, fishing out a pair of bathing shorts. “Forgive me for befouling your innocence; I’ll be decent in a second.”

“I—” The word breaks, the same small stammer that once convinced him the pull might be mutual. He hesitates, listening. You flick a dismissive hand, cheeks warm, and turn back to the dictionary. “Oh, do whatever you want. We’ll probably be half-naked most of the time anyway.”

“I suppose we will,” Viktor murmurs, tugging on the shorts and reaching for a clean shirt. “There—decent,” he announces, fastening the last button.

“Great,” you say, pushing yourself up. “It’s almost noon; I guess we should head downstairs?”

“Absolutely.” Viktor opens the wooden door for you. “Let us descend Golgotha for lunch.”

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