Page 56 of Top Shelf

I count to ten in my head and exhale slowly, then open the door before I can make this any weirder.

Viktor’s already in bed. Shirtless.

For fuck’s sake times two.

He’s sitting against the headboard with an arm bent behind his head, reading something on his phone. I pause in the doorway and cross my arms. My eyes dart down to the blankets bunched at his waist, which feels deliberate even though I know it isn’t.

He looks up. “Are you okay?”

“No.” His brows draw together as I wave a hand toward him. “You’re shirtless.”

“Yes, I sleep shirtless.”

I step into the room and close the bathroom door behind me with a little too much dignity for someone wearing an oversized sleep shirt with tiny cherries on it. “Aren’t you Swedish? Shouldn’t you be adapted to, like, snow and icy winds and sleeping in eleven layers of wool?”

“I am from Sörmland, not the Arctic Circle.”

“Is that near where your family place is?”

“Yes.” He nods. “Outside Malmköping, near Lake Båven.”

The names sound familiar in his mouth, though I’ve never heard of these places. The Sweden I’ve seen is from online tourism, with red houses and snowy streets and Midsummer tables covered in flowers. “So no alpine mountains?”

“No, but there is forest. Lakes and fields. People from other countries think all of Sweden is snow and Vikings.”

My gaze drops before I can stop it, drifting over his tattoos as he speaks. I’ve seen glimpses of them before, everyone has. Black lines and the tips of branches curving beneath the collar of his T-shirt, the suggestion of something larger always disappearing beneath fabric. But with the lamplight catching his skin, I see the whole sweep of it properly for the first time.

A sprawling treeline moves across his chest and up toward his collarbone, branches reaching over muscle and curling around the tips of his shoulders. It’s beautiful without trying to be pretty. And there are flowers worked into it too, different types nestled among the trees and shadows, delicate enough that I have to step closer to see them clearly.

I should make a joke. About haunted forests or Swedish lumberjacks, but the words fade in my throat.

“The treeline,” I say instead. “That’s your home?”

His eyes shift from my face to the tattoo and back again. “Yes.”

My fingertips twitch at my side, which is rude because nobody invited them to. “And the flowers?”

“For my family.” He looks down at the ink as he gestures to each one. “This, for my mother, and here for my sister. These ones for my grandmothers.” His thumb brushes a smaller bloom near his ribs. “This one is for Ebba.”

“Favorite person Ebba.”

“Yes.”

A fuzzy feeling swirls in my chest, because it’s one thing for a man to say his grandmother is his favorite person, but it’s another to see proof of her rooted beneath his skin.

“That’s very sweet,” I murmur.

He shrugs a shoulder. “It’s just a tattoo.”

“No, it’s not.”

His gaze holds mine for a beat, but I turn away first as my brain remembers there’s only one bed in this damn apartment.

I reach for the pillows I dumped to the side earlier. “Okay. Border negotiation time, before one of us causes an international incident.”

I construct a line down the middle of the bed, and Viktor watches me build it as though he’s a man observing engineering works.

“It is crooked.”