Page 38 of Daddy's Muse
He turned, smiling at me. “Yes?”
“I… Your phone number! Could I get it—or, uh, I can give you mine…”
He walked back to me, pulling his cell from his back pocket. I watched as he opened up a new contact and passed the phone to me. Hastily, I entered my number and handed it back to him.
“There,” I whispered.
He gave me a call so that I’d have his number as well, then pressed a chaste kiss to the top of my head, making me swoon.
“See you soon,” he said. “Sleep tight.”
As he walked away, I pictured him standing in my doorway, tall and steady, like a wall I could lean on. The thought made my chest tighten, but it was the kind of tightness that felt like it could protect me from all the loneliness I’d grown used to.
The wordDaddyslipped through my mind, soft and fragile.
Bodin was out of sight by the time I murmured under my breath.
“Night, Daddy.”
10
Colby
I slid into my usual seat in the lecture hall, flipping open my notebook just as Dr. Stratfield dimmed the lights and turned on the projector.
“Alright, let’s get started, folks. We’ll be getting into a new unit today,” she said, her voice echoing across the tiered rows. “The Vikings—traders, raiders, explorers… and, for our purposes, a culture of striking complexity.”
A few heads perked up atraiders. I wasn’t immune either. My mind drifted—uninvited—to Bodin and his long blonde hair, the carved line near his right eye, his striking eyes. The way his presence felt… old. Not in years, but in something else. Like you could drop him into the ninth century and he’d never miss a beat—maybe even thrive.
On the screen, Dr. Stratfield pulled up a map of the Nordic countries: jagged coastlines, icy fjords, routes marked in curling lines across the sea.
“These were not merely marauders,” Stratfield continued. “They were farmers, craftsmen, poets, sailors who could navigate open water with uncanny precision.”
Uncanny. Yeah. That fit Bodin too.
Slide after slide of reconstructed longhouses, iron tools, and brooches hammered into intricate knotwork played. My pen moved without much thought, but I wasn’t just copying notes—I was imagining Bodin in those spaces. Hauling in nets heavy with fish, standing before a roaring hearth, and laughing with people who spoke in the same low, rounded vowels he used.
Bodin with his shirt off and his hair done up in braids. Bodin’s abs…
Bodin chopping firewood with an axe.
Bodin lying in a bed of furs… maybe naked…
Then came the next slide. Gone was the warm firelight, and in its place was a stone platform smeared with dark red.
“And here,” Stratfield said, “we reach an element often sensationalized—ritual. The Norse had complex religious practices centered around the honoring of gods such as Odin, Thor, Freyja, and Freyr. Seasonal feasts. Offerings. And, in some cases… blót rituals.”
“Blót,” she repeated, “were sacrifices—sometimes animals, sometimes, according to certain sources, human. These were rare, but notable enough to be recorded by Christian chroniclers. Whether those accounts are entirely accurate… well, that’s debated.”
The projector clicked to the next image, but I didn’t follow it. My brain snagged on that word—on the smear of red, on the steady grip of a pale, rough hand holding a knife in my mind’s eye.
I shoved the thought away, forced myself back to the drone of the lecture, back to neat bullet points and timelines.
Blót.
“Colby?” Dr. Stratfield called.
I jerked my head up from my notebook, startled. A glance around showed me that I was the last student left in the hall.Had I fallen asleep?
