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"Front Street. The room they've always used. The one they don't know we've been in, because Marsh is dead and Charlotte doesn't know we went down there." He's nodding slowly. "That's where I'd take them."

"Then let's go."

"Not like this." He puts his hands on my shoulders. "You're soaked to the waist and shaking so hard you can't hold a rifle. I've been welding for three hours. Front Street is two miles through water and another mile on foot, and whoever's down there has had an hour to settle in. If we go now, we go tired and cold and stupid, and we get those girls killed and ourselves along with them."

"They're scared, Silas."

"I know. So we go at three. Everybody guarding anything is half asleep at three in the morning. We rest two hours. We get warm. We go at three and come out with both of them." His hands tighten. "I swear it."

I want to fight him. I can feel it in my jaw, in my hands. But he's right, and I know he's right, the same way I was right yesterday, and it's worse, being on this side of it.

"Three," I agree.

"Three."

He gets the little propane heater going in the corner, and I strip off the wet jeans and the boots full of creek water and wrap myself in the wool blanket on the cot. He hangs my jeans over a cinder block to dry near the heater. He peels out of the scorched coveralls and sits on the floor in his undershirt, turning the pistol over in his hands, checking it, setting it down, picking it up again.

I watch him do it for a while. The lantern throws his shadow huge on the block wall behind him.

"Come here," I tell him.

He looks at me.

"We have two hours," I remind him. "Come here."

He comes. He sits on the edge of the cot, and I open the blanket and pull him in under it with me, all of him, and he's warm, so warm after the water, and I press my cold feet against his shins and he flinches and laughs, short and startled. I've never heard him laugh. It goes through me like heat off a stove.

I don't kiss him right away. I lie on my side facing him in the narrow space and look at him. At the stitches puckered in a long line down the inside of his forearm. At the scar through his eyebrow and the one down the side of his neck. At the dark eyes that looked at me over a dead man in a barn nine days ago and didn't look away.

Nine days. I've known him nine days.

"What?" he asks.

"Nothing." I touch his face. "Everything."

He kisses me then. Slowly. The way he did in the gauge house the first time, the way that scares me, and I let it scare me, and I kiss him back.

I get his undershirt off. He gets my sweater off, and the thermal under it, and when he pulls me against him skin to skin, my breasts flattening against his chest, the carved words pressing into me, I make a sound I can't take back. His hands go down my spine and spread across the small of my back and hold me there against him, and we just breathe for a moment, mouths almost touching.

He moves down my body the way he did before, but slower now, like he's trying to memorize it. His mouth on my collarbone. On the curve of my breast. He takes my nipple into his mouth and rolls it against his tongue until I'm arching into him, then moves to the other one and does the same, taking his time, his thumb stroking the first one wet and tight. I dig my fingers into his hair. He kisses his way down my stomach, and I feel his stubble scrape the inside of my hip, and then he's easing my thighs open with both hands and settling between them.

"Silas."

"Let me."

I let him. He licks me open slowly, his tongue flat and warm, dragging up the length of me and circling my clit, and my hips jerk off the cot and he pins them down with his forearm. He keeps it slow. Maddening. His tongue tracing circles, his lips closing on my clit and sucking gently, releasing, sucking again. He slides two fingers into me and crooks them, and presses, and I have to put my own fist against my mouth to stay quiet. I don't know who I think will hear. There's nobody for a mile. I bite my knuckles anyway.

He brings me up and up and doesn't let me fall, and when I finally do, it tears through me so hard I see white behind my eyes. My thighs clamp on his head and my whole body bows up off the cot and I sob his name into my fist.

He kisses the inside of my thigh while I shake. Then he comes up over me and braces his weight on his good arm and looks down at me, and he waits.

I reach down between us and take his cock in my hand. He's hard and heavy and so hot against my palm, and he shudders when I stroke him once, root to tip, and his eyes close. I guide him to me. I rub the head of him through how wet I am, slowly, watching his jaw tighten, watching him fight to stay still, and then I lift my hips and take him in.

He sinks into me inch by inch, and neither of us breathes until he's all the way inside.

We move slowly. There's no other way to move on that narrow cot, but it's more than that. Neither of us wants to rush it. He rocks into me in long, deep strokes, and I wrap my legs around the backs of his thighs and meet each one. The cot frame creaks under us in the same rhythm, and the propane heater ticks in the corner, and his breath is hot and ragged against my ear. I can feel every inch of him. I can feel him everywhere.

"Evie," he breathes against my neck. Just my name. Over and over, like it's the only word he has.