Erik turned off the motor, letting the boat glide silently towards the dock. As it neared, his little sister Jenny deftly grabbed the mooring ring and pulled the rope through. Securing it with practiced ease. They had arrived at one of the thousands of islands scattered across the Stockholm Archipelago.
"Here we are," Erik said, glancing at Maria, Niklas' new girlfriend and the only one among them who hadn't visited the cabin before. "I warned you it was pretty humble. I hope you aren't disappointed."
The smell was the familiar mix of the salt from the gentle waves of the sea lapping at the rocks beneath the cabin and the pine trees that covered the rest of the small island. It reminded Erik of the many past summers spent here.
"This place has been in our family for over a hundred years." Erik jumped from the boat onto the wharf and offered his hand to help Maria. She accepted and easily pulled the slim girl up.
"Does your family have anything like this in Portugal?"
"My family owns an old house out in the country where we go for holidays."
"Old house?" Niklas chimed in with a grin. "It's a thousand-year-old castle her family owns."
"It's a very small castle," Maria said with a laugh, "and not on the water in a lovely space like this."
Niklas had met Maria while studying at Oxford. It didn't surprise Erik that a wealthy aristocrat was exactly the type of person you would meet there. At his own school in California there were also plenty of rich kids, though few of them owned castles.
Erik looked at his family's cabin. Seeing it afresh through the eyes of the new arrival. It was a small plank building dwarfed by the large trees around it. The red paint was faded by the sun and the salt air.
It wasn't a castle, but it has a very special place in his heart after coming here every summer for each of his twenty-two years.
Distracted, he had forgotten to help the others out of the boat. Brigit was balanced on the side, and Erik swiveled over to offer her the same arm up as he had Maria. He helped her up. It was a bit more effort to lift up the much taller blonde. Erik then offered his arm to his sister, but Jenny ignored it and leapt out of the boat on her own. Her long legs gracefully getting her up onto the dock on her own.
Niklas and Kristian, still in the boat, started to pass up the supplies. All the food, water, and booze that was meant to last the six young people for a week on the island. Two couples. Niklas and Maria, Kristian and Brigit, and then Erik and his little sister Jenny.
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The rest of the afternoon was spent getting set up. The wooden floors of the house creaked as the six young people unpacked everything into its space. Erik showed everyone to their rooms up on the low-ceilinged second floor. There were three. The one in the middle had twin beds. Jenny and he would be there, with the two couples in the double-bedded rooms on either side.
The group ate a late dinner sitting on the dock. The July sun setting behind the cabin as they ate the simple dinner they had thrown together in the small kitchen.
Conversation flowed easily, mostly revolving around Maria, the newest addition to the group. She knew a few words of Swedish, but the group stuck to the English they all were fluent in.
"Have the rest of you all been to Erik and Jenny's cabin before?" Maria asked.
"Yep" Niklas said between big forkfuls of beef pasta. "Erik, Kistian and I have been friends since we were kids." Kristian explained. "We've been coming here forever--first with our parents, then just the guys."
"And Brigit and I have been best friends since kindergarten." Jenny added. "So she has also been coming here for years. This is the first time she and Kristian are here together as a couple."
"Oh, that's cute." Maria said, smiling. "How long have you been together?"
"Three months," Brigit replied, her eyes briefly meeting Kristian's. They were still in that early phase, always touching, always on the verge of drifting into their own world.
"So you and Jenny are the same age then?" Maria asked.
"Yup, Jen and I are still nineteen, " Brigit said. "while the guys are all twenty-two."
"Hey, I'm still twenty-one for a few more weeks. Niklas chimed in.
"And you and Kristian are still based here in Sweden?" Maria asked Brigit.
"Yep, Krister is at school, and I'm trying to make it as an actor."
"I'm sure you will succeed." Maria happily suggested. "You're so pretty."
"No shortage of tall blondes around here, unfortunately."
"You should move to Lisbon. You would stand out there."
"If I really want to make it as an actor, I need to move out to California with Erik."
"You are at school over there?"
"Yep Erik is studying computers at one of the fancy American schools. He is very smart and is going to be very rich someday." Niklas interjected.
"Oh which school?"
"Stanford."
"Wow, where all the future billionaires go?"
"I'm not interested in that. I just want to build cool things that make the world better."
"That's a very Swedish thing to say" Maria said with a chuckle. "Do you have a girl back in California?"
"He did," Niklas told her, "but she dumped him a month ago via WhatsApp."
Erik was annoyed and embarrassed by his friend revealing his secrets, but he smiled and tried not to show he was upset. Nik has always been too happy to gossip. The big man with the long blonde hair was never happier than when digging into someone's romantic secrets.
"What about you, Jenny? Are you studying?"
"In a month, I start university at Stockholm. I'm staying close to home for now."
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After dinner the group continued to chat and drink out on the dock as night fell. Alternating between gossip and trying to solve the world's problems in a single evening.
Erik felt the need to do some tidying and took the dinner dishes into the cabin to wash them. Brigit helped him, and the two of them were alone in the small and rustic kitchen.
Erik had known Brigit since she was a little girl. She had been his sister's inseparable friend for years. The two of them even looked alike. Both had the same build: tall, thin, with long blonde hair. There were differences of course. He couldn't help but notice that Brigit had grown a more impressive set of curves than his sister. Bridget also had a rather dull set of grey eyes, not the radiant blue eyes that both his sister and he had inherited.
