The Longest Day
A Jam-Packed Visual Passionate Encounter from The Naked Viking
The feast had been burning since noon. That was the custom at Áki’s hall for the midsummer games: a fire lit at midday, not to be extinguished until the sun touched the water again twenty hours later. By the time the wrestling began, the logs had been renewed twice, and the sky above the longhouse was that strange, pale gold that only existed at this latitude in these few weeks of the year. It was a shimmering, restless light that made men stay awake for days until the restlessness felt like a fever in the blood.
Hákon had won the wrestling three years running. He was not arrogant about it; he simply knew his own body the way a ferryman knows every eddy of his river. He knew the exact limit of his own endurance. He knew the way his muscles coiled before a strike. He had been fighting since he was twelve, and he had yet to meet a man who could outlast the steady, grinding pressure of his grip.
He first saw the stranger when the ale was being served at the long tables. The man was seated three places from the end of the bench opposite, drinking slowly. He wasn’t cheering or boasting like the others. He was watching. He catalogued every movement in the hall with an attention to detail that Hákon recognised as professional.
He was big and wide across the shoulders and thick in the neck, with a beard that was dark at the roots and lightened at the tips by years of sun. He wore a plain, undyed tunic, but the silver arm rings on his forearms were heavy and bit into the muscle. When he finally looked across the table and found Hákon watching him, he did not look away. He raised his cup in a slow, deliberate challenge. One corner of his mouth moved into the ghost of a smirk, and Hákon felt a sudden, heavy throb in his gut that had nothing to do with the ale.
“That’s Ulf Hávarðsson,” his friend Gísli whispered, leaning close. “He’s won at three other halls this spring. They say he didn’t come for the silver. He came specifically for you.”
Hákon looked back. The summer light through the smoke-hole fell across the column of Ulf’s throat and the old rope scar across his knuckles. He could almost feel the weight of those hands on his own skin. The air in the longhouse suddenly felt too thin, too hot. He knew, with a certainty that made his pulse thunder, that by the time the sun touched the horizon, one of them would have the other pinned to the dirt.
Ulf’s gaze travelled slowly down Hákon’s frame, lingering on the width of his thighs beneath the table, an unmistakable promise of the violence and the passion to come once the tunics were stripped away. He watched the way Hákon’s breath hitched, the way the pulse in the younger man’s neck jumped. Ulf didn’t just want a match; he wanted a conquest.
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