The villagers believed the tongue was a muscle of memory.
That when you kissed someone, you tasted not just them, but every kiss they'd ever survived. That bodies remembered pleasure, yes — but mouths remembered need.
And there were no mouths more remembered in Løvlund than Linna's.
Linna hadn't been seen in a week.
After the midsummer festival, after the Blotnatt bonfire and the slow, thunderous climax shared in a circle of sweat and song, she had vanished — not like a ghost, but like an ache.
Astrid missed her without saying it. Her body still bore Linna's thumbprint in the curve of her hip. Still dreamed of her laugh like a vine winding through her chest.
So when Linna returned — barefoot, wind-flushed, her cheek kissed raw by ocean spray — she didn't explain where she'd been.
She just stood on Astrid's porch, wet to the thighs, and said:
"Come here, I've missed how you lie."
They didn't go inside.
Linna pushed Astrid gently to the wooden porch planks, kissing her like she'd swallowed thunder on the walk from the fjord.
Her tongue was different now — slower, deeper, less hungry.
As if it carried stories back from salt-soaked cliffs.
"You taste like you've been kissed by someone else," Linna murmured between lips.
Astrid didn't flinch. "I was."
Linna pulled back — not in jealousy, but in curiosity. "Who?"
"Selma."
A pause. Then a small, reverent smile.
"The girl who watches."
Linna's fingers slid beneath Astrid's shirt like they'd been born there. She traced each rib, each soft flutter of breath.
"Did she touch you?"
"No," Astrid whispered. "But I think she listened to my orgasm the way some people listen to rain."
Linna moaned at that. A deep, low yes in her throat.
Then her hands found Astrid's waistband.
"Lie back. Let me read your body like she did. Only… with my mouth."
It was no longer a kiss.
It was a translation.
Linna's tongue moved over Astrid's belly like it was reading Braille, pulling meaning from every goosebump and shiver. She kissed behind her knees, under her arms, down the back of her calves.
"Everyone touches what's easy," Linna whispered."But pleasure hides. And I want all your secrets."
Astrid gasped when Linna's teeth found her hip bone, then licked it as if apologizing.
And when Linna finally kissed her between her legs, it wasn't a rush — it was an elegy.
Slow.
Mournful.
Honest.
Astrid came with her head tilted to the sky, her mouth open like it was catching stars.
After, they lay in a crooked sprawl, sweat drying in rivulets, limbs tangled like the stories they'd stopped telling.
Linna reached for Astrid's fingers.
"Did you miss me?" she asked.
Astrid nodded.
"But I didn't know how much until I remembered what your tongue sounds like."
Linna turned to her, eyes soft now.
"You want to know where I was?"
"No," Astrid whispered. "You brought the whole sky back with you. That's enough."
Far off, the Widow Åse was leading a small group of women through the cedar grove for a ritual no one under thirty was allowed to attend. Smoke curled from the trees. Someone sang.
But Astrid and Linna stayed on the porch.
Mouths still swollen.Hearts still loud.The taste of remembered lovers lingering between every exhale.
Because in Løvlund, nothing dies in silence.
It stays — in lips, in moans, in the tongue's sacred thread.