Erotic Refugees (2 page)

“
So you will need to
develop a successful Internet idea in … how long was it
again?”

Rob swallowed. “Before the
unemployment insurance runs out. End of the year, pretty much.”

“
Well then you’ll just
have to get to work. I’m sure you have lots of ideas.” She leaned
closer and bit his ear. “It can’t be that hard, can it?”

“
Hard?” Rob said
helplessly. “No, no, it’s not hard at all…”

Those delicious circles on his
belly shifted downwards and began to decrease in diameter. Soon
they were barely circles any more and her hand came to a halt. She
gave a sound of happy surprise when she found something there and
eased her fingers around her discovery. Rob gave a groan and tensed
his whole body in helpless anticipation.

Her voice was a harsh whisper.
“Not in a hurry Rob?”

“
Fuck no,” he said as he
shifted closer to her, giving her enthusiastic fingers more to play
with. “Not goin’ anywhere near that office today. It’ll be a
nightmare, with the cryin’ and the worry and then someone will try
and hug me, I just fuckin’ know it. Oh crap, yeah, just like
that…”

Kajsa got to her knees, her
fingers not loosening their grip. She swung her right leg over Rob
and straddled his thighs. Rob wasn’t sure he could have moved even
if he'd wanted to. He moved his hands behind her and shifted her
hungrily forward. She was more than happy to comply.

Her hair hung in Rob's face as
she moved him about, trying to direct him into just the right
position. When she found it she hovered there for a moment, making
the tiniest of excruciating movements, before sinking down onto him
with a hard grunt of satisfaction. Rob closed his eyes and sucked
in a chestful of sour indoor air. He pushed a hand around the back
of her head and gripped her hair. She grinned at that and arched
her neck back before starting to move with a rhythm that matched
his hammering heart.

Guilt be damned, Rob wasn’t
missing this for anything. As his logical mind began to reach for
its cigarettes and put its feet up for a while, he realised there
really weren’t any problems. All he had to do was look at it the
right way.

This thing with Kajsa was just
fucking, pure and simple, and he was probably imagining that she
wanted more. And sure, he was unemployed, but he was determined to
get this project off the ground—for the sandwich, if nothing else.
Yeah, everything would get sorted out, no worries.

With his free hand he shifted
Kajsa slightly and then started to set the pace himself. Her breath
came fast, interspersed with small urgent sounds, and he squeezed
her hair harder. She pushed a thumb into his mouth and moaned as he
bit on it. Rob sighed and closed his eyes.

Tomorrow he’d start working on
his new life. He had, after all, eight months to play with, and
eight months of tomorrows should be enough for anybody.

Right?

Chapter
3

“
So she's making it
difficult for you?”

Eoin nodded. He had one eye on
the kids as they bounced around happily inside a playground jeep
that was suspended on springs, and the other on the swarm of
thirty-something mothers in their immediate vicinity.

“
She's threatening to
take custody. And she's coming up with all sorts of weird things,
like she'll report me for child abuse, or drugs.”

Alice spluttered into her
coffee. She placed the plastic mug carefully on the park bench and
tried to regain her composure. “Drugs? Eoin, you get a guilt
complex about breathing other people's cigarette smoke. Is she
really planning to paint you as a junkie?”

“
Yeah. Maybe. Crap, I
don’t know.”

Alice patted him on the arm,
shaking her head in amusement. Eoin, despite wallowing in his own
misery, could not help being distracted by the fruity scent of her
perfume and the way the sun caught her streaky blonde hair.

No, he had to remind himself
sternly, Alice was out of bounds! Female friend good, but shag that
moves friendship with female friend to a new and complicated level,
most definitely bad. Even if there was a shag possibility there,
which he very much doubted.

Eoin so needed sex. Just a nip,
just to perk him up for the summer and make him feel that he still
remembered how. Things with Jenny had been bad for quite a while
before the end, and the last real sex (not involving a
reconciliation of some kind) had probably happened some time before
Christmas. It had probably involved alcohol. And had probably been
rubbish.

Just not with Alice. She was
tall and dramatic even for Sweden, where a good many of the women
were already too tall and dramatic for an average-sized Irishman.
She worked with him and had impeccable English thanks to her years
at an American university. In fact she always made a point of using
it even when Eoin was doing his best to speak Swedish with her. She
had also been divorced for a year and her youngest child, Nils, was
only a few months older than Damien, which made hanging out during
their kid weeks a lot easier.

Plus—and a rather big plus
too—she was the best female friend he had. There were a few other
women he'd once been able to count as friends but they'd all been
claimed by Jenny after the separation. Along with the furniture,
the stereo, the car, the house and the moral bloody high
ground.

He watched as Alice broke open
a Tupperware box and handed him a sandwich without asking if he had
his own (which he hadn't). He accepted it with a nod, dropped his
sunglasses back down over his eyes and munched quietly.

Nytorget was awash with
Stockholmers on this unexpected spring afternoon. Any serious
appearance of the sun early in May was cause for celebration and
half the city had shed their jackets and piled into the parks and
outdoor bars. There was a chilly edge to the air but they were
cheerfully defying it by showing off their bare shoulders, and
wearing their summer shoes, and eating picnics wherever there was a
patch of green big enough to sit on. After being largely indoors
since the previous October, the Swedes were again living at full
speed, as if they had to pack a whole lifetime into this single
delirious afternoon.

Damien was happily playing on
the jeep and Eoin found his gaze wandering again to the young
mothers standing nearby. They were all classic early-thirties
Swedish mums from the Södermalm district, with trained limbs and
swishy hair and way too many teeth. He gazed at them longingly as
he chewed his sandwich and was only brought back to reality when
Alice prodded him with a mug of coffee, freshly extracted from her
thermos. He mumbled his thanks.

”
And how is it having
Damien by yourself?”

He shrugged. “It's only four
days every two weeks at the moment. So it’s basically day-care,
parks, home, food, you know the drill. Not many babysitters though,
she kept the friends and the family as well as the house.”

“
The house? She's still
there? But you bought the house together, right?”

“
Not really. Her family
fronted us most of the deposit since I didn't have a good job when
we bought it. We agreed to sell it, but it kind of hasn't happened
yet. I suspect her parents are helping her with the
payments.”

A few small cinnamon buns made
an appearance, and Eoin took one of those too. “Plus she guilts me
out for even bringing up the idea of her leaving it—”

“
Oh don't give me that!
You paid for the loan every month and you fixed the place up. Now
you're living in a one-room and paying through the nose for it.
That's your house as much as hers! You have to be tough with her
Eoin!”

He gave a lukewarm nod. Sure,
being tough was a great idea in theory, but when it came to Jenny
it never seemed to stick. It was never a case of just Eoin versus
Jenny in any discussion. It always seemed to turn into Eoin the
family-smasher against Jenny and Innocent Child. And constantly
trying to squirm out of that position in every discussion was more
exhausting that anything else he knew.

He flipped up his sunglasses as
a cloud slid across the sun. He realised they had just been talking
about him and nothing else all morning.

“
So how are things with
you?”

Alice paused in her chewing and
thought for a moment. Her face lit up. “Oh, I was on a date! Here,
wait, I'll show you.”

She shoved her coffee mug at
Eoin, reached for her bag and pulled out a big notebook. She
flipped to a page somewhere in the middle and spread it open on the
bench between them.

“
This one.”

Eoin leaned closer, not really
sure what he was looking at. On the page was pasted a couple of
printed-out photos of a man along with a long text.

“
Nice to look at,” Alice
said. “Just one fatal problem—complete asshole. Plus his photo was
five years out of date and in those five years he had expanded, in
all the wrong directions.”

Eoin shook his head. “I thought
you were on a dating site? So what’s all the paper for?”

“Just for my records.” She
flicked the pages of the notebook and Eoin saw that there were
several dozen men in there, all with photographs and texts and her
own handwritten notes in red ink.

“
Okay, fine,” Eoin said.
“But why keep them all in a book like that? It's a bit, you know,
stalkerish.”

“Well forgive me for making the
whole nasty process as efficient as I can. I need to remember who's
who, for a start. It also removes the danger that I meet the same
guy twice and not realise it. People have profiles on many sites,
you know. And some days, when there's not much to choose from, I
can go back and maybe give one of this lot a second chance.
Assuming they weren't total morons.”

Eoin slid a little closer on the bench
(ignoring her fruity perfume as best he could) and paid careful
attention as she turned the pages of her intriguing notebook.

“
There's a lot of men in
there, Alice. How many dates do you go on?”

“
A few, but never more
than two or three a week.”

“
What?” Eoin said, almost
choking on half a cinnamon bun. “Two or three a week?”

Alice gave him a stern look. “Eoin,
it's the twenty-first century. This is how people meet these days.
There's nothing weird about dating a lot of rubbish to find the few
good ones. Plus I need a good system to keep tabs on them because
of my particular … tastes.”

Eoin couldn't let that go.
“What tastes?”

She gave a sly grin. “Well, I
like English speakers. It's my thing. Those accents get me
horizontal pretty easy. And there's not that many of you guys in
Stockholm, so I have to keep track of who I've seen and when. It's
embarrassing to meet the same guy twice and not remember. Or his
friend. Or his uncle.”

“
Right,” Eoin said,
trying not to blush. She patted his arm.

“
Oh you're so cute when
you get flustered. But don't worry, you're off the menu. Oh look, I
think you're needed over there.”

Eoin looked up. Little Damien
was clinging to the rail of the jeep and crying. A trio of cute
mums were looking around with quizzical concern. Eoin jumped to his
feet, brushed off a few crumbs and sauntered on over. Damien,
seeing him coming, reached out a little hand and gave a plaintive
“Pappa!”

Nice job kid, Eoin thought as
he hurried up. Couldn't look cuter if I had trained you
specially.

“
Oh no, what's happened?”
He pulled Damien from the jeep and wiped the tears away. Damien
gave him a blubbery hug, giving Eoin the chance to look around. His
gaze alighted, quite by accident, on the three mums.

Go on, came Alice’s voice in
his mind. Say something!

“
I'm sorry,” he managed, slowly,
and in English. “But did you see what happened?”

Left Mum exchanged a few
whispered words with Middle Mum, who then took a step forward.
Eoin's chest fluttered ridiculously. Middle Mum had deep brown eyes
and her dark hair was cut in a severe and sexy bob. She wore a
flimsy green summer dress that showed off her cappuccino skin and
carved limbs to perfection. He tried not to stare and felt himself
failing quite dramatically.

“
I think he banged his
head on … the side,” she said, in a light and bouncy voice. “On
that thing, there.”

“
Oh, you mean on the
rail?” Middle Mum nodded and Eoin nodded back, aware that he was
grinning just a little too much.

She smiled and turned towards
Damien. “He's a cute one.”

“
Um, yeah, I suppose he
is.” Eoin stared at the woman for a few seconds, wondering what he
should say next. It quickly became too many seconds and he felt his
moment slide away.

Middle Mum saved them by
nodding before the swelling discomfort became unbearable. “Well,
goodbye then,” she said and returned to the clutches of her
sisters.

Eoin spun around as if his
heels were on fire and legged it back to Alice, who was watching
the whole thing with naked amazement. She shook her head.

“
So those were your best
moves? Because they weren't very good ones. She called you cute for
God's sake, and you didn't do anything!”

“
No she didn't,” he
snapped, “she called Damien cute—”

“
Can you be any dumber?
Of course she couldn't call you cute directly, but when your kid is
cute, then so are you, obviously!”

“
Ahh,” he said slowly. He
looked around and saw the three mums were now packing up their
things and inserting small children into a fleet of hi-tech child
carriers. Middle Mum was leaning over and the sunlight shimmered
around her contours in a way that made Eoin stare far too intently.
He sat down heavily, with still-blubbering Damien on his
knee.