Fuckable Jonas' Last Kiss

Short Story on Dutch Students

Dear Republic,

Mette writes a short story for us about a Dutch student planning to travel to Ukraine, putting himself in harm’s way. This piece is a continuation of her previous short story, “Reasons to Suffer.”

- ROL

FUCKABLE JONAS’ LAST KISS

After class, I linger for a while in the hallway next to the classroom, which hangs like a balcony above the cafeteria. Other students walk past me. I look down at the dark brown, round tables where people are having lunch. Jonas is sitting at one of them. He keeps glancing at his phone, which he holds in the middle of the table. The cafeteria is dark on all sides: the floors are dark blue, there are black partitions between the different areas, and all the lights seem deliberately tucked away in niches in the ceiling, so their glow barely affects anything happening below.

When I get downstairs, I see Jonas walking out through the sliding doors. I decide to follow him so I can watch him from a distance. If he notices me, I’ll just talk to him for a moment or raise my hand in greeting. I watch as he meets his girlfriend. She stands waiting for him and smiles at him, showing her straight white teeth. She jumps up to kiss him. He bends forward passively to receive the kiss. She has long, thin arms clutching a stack of papers against her chest. The bottom of her light purple backpack is bulging with stuff. “How was class?” she asks in a bright, high voice. The tone drops at the end of the sentence, giving her question the undertone of a command.

They walk side by side through the busy alleys and cross the wide asphalt street that runs from Central Station through the middle of the city. They go into a café and choose a table by the window. He sits slightly slumped in the black wire chair, his knee moving restlessly, almost touching the glass. His girlfriend has straight hair that falls just below her shoulder blades, cut in tight layers. It moves very smoothly with her, in one single body. She’s dyed it brown with a red undertone. She’s wearing a long denim skirt and a short top that clings tightly to her slim upper body and small breasts. She orders a large glass of matcha and drinks it through a straw. Jonas drinks black coffee. His mouth twitches slightly when he takes a sip. She tilts her head a little and reads French short stories in a thin, dark blue book. The way her wrist bends as she turns the pages radiates authority, as if her movements obey a higher form of functionality.

She has self-assured, cool, even calculating eyes. Even when she isn’t looking at Jonas, you get the feeling she’s keeping an eye on him, that she’s granting him something, cherishing him in his peculiar, almost archaic appearance, steering him like a vehicle in her mind.

When he told her about his plan to go to Ukraine, she nodded very calmly. She absorbed the tension for him while he delivered the news with his head bowed, almost ashamed. She stood close to him, looked up, and then slid her arms under his armpits to grip his shoulder blades. She pressed her smooth head against his chest. “How brave,” she said, lowering her eyelids and carefully pulling her mouth into a straight line. “You have to be really careful,” she added, after a silence. She was so calm and sympathetic that it bewildered him. A vague grin appeared on his face.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were thinking about this?” she asked later that evening while they were eating. She poked at her gnocchi with a fork. “Not that you had to… it’s not a reproach… but I’m curious… how impulsive this plan is…” He looked up at her, his shoulders hunched over the table. “I didn’t want to jinx the idea,” he said softly, “but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I felt so useless studying, it seems to be going nowhere, like a dead end. The whole world, the faculty… when I saw this option, I felt relieved… like I’m finally going to live… I’d been searching for a while for volunteering options. Nothing appealed to me, but suddenly this website appeared… I hadn’t found it before. And the more I read, the more I realized I could just do it. I can actually go do it!"

And it also seems good that I’ll get to practice my Russian… and actually see… how something like this works…” She nodded. “Yes, of course,” she said, “it’s a really good idea.” And she looked at him with a smile, her eyes vacant. Those eyes widened like someone wanting to show approval and pride while simultaneously hiding something. It wasn’t so much worry that teased her, but resignation; a sudden, unfamiliar, compelling uncertainty about her own daily activities that resulted in a diffuse and unnamed feeling of jealousy.

Now he stares outside while she reads, his light blue eyes not fully open. He sees the gray city swollen with moisture in the earth, in the stones, the plants and trees: the moisture that hangs above the landscape in a heavy cloud cover, filling the canals and soaking into the bridges.

When his girlfriend finishes her matcha, they go together to the little room where she lives. It’s a few streets behind the wide main road, in a large house, an ’80s building wedged between seventeenth-century houses. Her room is hidden deep inside the building; you have to walk through several hallways to reach it. It’s a small student room with gray carpet and a slanted roof with one small rectangular window. It smells of clothes, extinguished candles, and dust. She keeps her room tidy, but there are things everywhere: LPs, books, postcards, and magazines. She’s stuck posters on the walls with Blu-tack. Her low double bed is made with clean white sheets of thin cotton.

She goes to the shared student kitchen to make Jonas a cheese sandwich, which he eats sitting on her low couch, made from cushions and a mattress, popping the pieces she cut for him into his mouth. “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow already,” he says. “Time went fast…” He sets the plate with crumbs on the floor. “Are you nervous?” she asks, sitting down next to him. A polite frown appears on her forehead, making it seem like she doesn’t know him well. He shakes his head, and suddenly his hands look sad lying there idle on his thighs—hard thighs with not an ounce of fat. “Not really…” he says. “I mainly want to get a good night’s sleep beforehand, before the drive.” They exchange a brief look. “I have to go soon,” he says. “I still have training.” She nods. “I know,” she says.

She crawls toward him and kisses him, tilting her oval head against his. She doesn’t have to make herself soft for him; the contrast between their bodies automatically makes him the man and her the woman, like a bulldozer lifting a slender fallen tree. He kisses her back without moving much else, only his lips.

She begins unbuttoning the small buttons of his light shirt, revealing his pale chest. “I still want to be with you before you leave,” she says in a half-pleading, half-apologetic tone. “We won’t see each other for so long…” He nods and slowly runs his hands over her back, mechanically but not stiffly, like an oiled machine, up and down. She pulls off her skirt and top while he stays seated on the couch, his body spread out and smooth, his hard cock dark pink between his spread legs. Outside the small rectangular window in the slanted roof, seagulls fly by, shooting like discs thrown in arcs through the air. He stays silent, lips pressed together, his face completely still, like a painting. When she’s wearing only her black wireless bra, she lowers herself onto him. She grabs the back of his neck, her pale narrow back arched over him. Her oval dark pink polished nails gleam as she touches his face. She rubs his body, touching him as if dusting him off, like a plaster statue that has just been cast. She pushes her lower jaw forward and turns her head sideways to show him that jaw. She moves her hips back and forth so her firm ass moves up and down; you can see the underside of his cock between her cheeks. She makes a slow wave motion with her spine and shoulders.

Her cool eyes melt as she rides him. They slowly fill with moisture, changing their surface; the light brown irises become more oval. He has his eyes closed and his head tilted back on the makeshift backrest of the couch. He holds her waist with his large hands. They fuck. He moves his hips. She sometimes grabs the back of his head, then his neck, then his shoulders. She opens her mouth so her teeth show, leans forward to breathe against his face.

He starts moving faster and faster, breathing heavily. It’s as if he’s waking up from a dormant state. She presses her belly against his, presses her body against him, clings to him. He pries at her, pushes her further away and moves her back and forth. She presses her hips more firmly against his, the hard tendons in her groin clamped against his thighs. He pries at her again and tries to push her off. She keeps her arms clamped around his shoulders. “I’m cumming…” he says with difficulty, his nostrils flaring. “I’m almost cumming…” he says again. She presses his shoulders even harder against him, then suddenly reaches her right arm backward, rises up, and gropes behind herself between his legs, pressing her long, outstretched fingers against his balls. “Careful…” he says with difficulty, throwing his head back; he quickly and clumsily grabs at her thighs. “Shh, shh,” she says, keeping her hand against his balls. His abdominal muscles contract as he comes, his face twisting into a grimace.

She strokes his hair in circles. “Do you think this was the last time?” she says, her voice a little thin and oddly cheerful. “Before you go?” He gently pushes her off and looks at her. “Was it… was it okay?” he asks. His shoulders slump forward. He arches his back to support himself on his knees. There’s a high blush on her cheeks. She’s still out of breath. Her eyeliner becomes visible as she lowers her eyes. “Uh… I… I don’t think so…?” she says. Her voice sounds hurried. As if she’s trying to suppress a high-pitched laugh. Then she really laughs, tinkling. “I haven’t kept track very well this month,” she says. His square jaw tightens a little. “Did it happen by accident then?” he asks. His face goes completely slack. She shakes her head very lightly as she gets up, turns smoothly, and sits on the couch. “By accident… I don’t know. It must have been some primal instinct of mine… Now that you’re leaving, I wanted to keep something of yours with me… or… maybe I just… didn’t want to think for a moment…” He starts to tremble, the light tremor that’s always there a bit, but now worse. “But,” he says, “then we don’t know…” He moves his head disoriented, looking a little dizzy, staring at his own legs. “I have to go,” he says, “I have to get to training.” He starts gathering his clothes, bending his long legs to grab his underwear, lifting his feet like a bear placed on a hot plate to dance. She pouts her lower lip a little. “Why do you even have to go to that training?” she says. “What does it matter, one more or one less before you leave? You’re going to miss a whole bunch anyway.” He freezes and lets his arms hang. She walks over to him and hugs him very lightly. “I got scared after all,” she says, “I got scared I’ll never see you again…” He stares over her head at the posters on her wall. “It’ll be fine,” he says. When he swallows, you see his Adam’s apple move up and down.