Page 8

I don't stop. I keep my fingers in her until she's twitching, and then I pull them out and put them in my mouth, and she watches me do it with her lips parted and her chest heaving.

"Now," she says. "Right now, please—"

I shove her jeans and underwear down to her boots and lift her. Both hands under her thighs, clean off the ground, her back against the rock. She wraps her legs around my hips and locks her ankles. I get my belt open one-handed and free my cock, and she reaches down between us and wraps her hand around me and makes a sound in her throat, a small shocked sound, and looks up at me.

I push in hard.

She takes all of it in one stroke with a cry that echoes off the rocks. She's tight and hot and so wet that I slide all the way home, and I hold there, buried in her, her back against the granite and her heels digging into me and her breath coming white and ragged against my face.

"Look at me," I say.

She looks.

"I've spent eight years telling women to run from men like you," she says. Her voice is shaking.

"Why didn't you?" I pull back and drive in, and she stops talking.

I fuck her against that rock hard and deep, with the cold air on my back and the whole valley spread out below us, and she meets every thrust. Her hands in my hair. Her mouth at my ear, telling me what she wants in a low, broken voice, harder, don't stop, there, and I give her every word of it. The granite scrapes her jacket. My hands grip her thighs hard enough to mark her. The red light on the recorder blinks beside us the whole time.

"Mine," I say into her neck. "You came up my road and you're mine."

"Yes."

"Going to come inside you."

"Yes—"

"Going to fill you up. Want you walking down this ridge feeling me in you. Want you on that tape."

She comes again on that, clenching so hard around my cock I see white, her cry going up into the pines, and I drive into her through it and follow, burying myself as deep as I can go and holding there while I empty into her, my face pressed into her hair.

Afterwards I stay inside her, holding her up against the rock with her forehead on my shoulder, both of us breathing hard.

"You never told me your name," she says into my jacket.

"Come home with me," I say. "I'll tell you there."

5

Nora

We're at his table with the stove roaring and a mug of coffee going cold between my hands.

He's been saying my name for a week. Nora, lock your door. Nora, eat something. Nora, sit. He says it like it's his to say. I've been calling him a dozen things in my head, and none of them out loud, because he's never handed me one.

He sets his mug down. Looks at me across the table, steady, the way he looked at me in the boulder field. In the light. Where I can see what I'm getting.

"Cole," he says. "My name's Cole."

No flourish. His hands are flat on the table, and he's holding very still.

I feel it land in my chest. A week of wanting a name, and he gives it to me like it costs him something. It does. I can see that.

"Cole," I say. I want to try it in my mouth. I want to know the weight of it.

Something moves in his face. Nobody's said it to him in a long time.

Then the floor drops out from under me.