The smell was the thing I couldn't stop being aware of.
Even here in the bunk, four hours after the shower. Musky, heavy, coating the inside of my nose in a way that soap and hot water hadn't touched. I'd sat over the toilet for a long time and it hadn't mattered. My panties were still wet with it — I could feel the gusset sticky against me, the warmth of it seeping through, and beneath the cotton the deep ache that had been there since noon and hadn't gone anywhere.
He was still inside me. Not him — but what he'd left. The warmth of it at the deepest point of me, at the specific pressure I could still feel if I shifted my hips even slightly. I'd checked at midnight. Still there. I'd checked an hour ago. Still there.
Two weeks since my last period.
The math kept coming out the same. I'd never thought about that math before in my life — why would I have — and now I couldn't stop. What it would actually look like. Not abstract: a body doing what bodies do, starting to show, and everyone at the breakfast table trying to work out when. My brother home for the summer. Gone at the end of August. The math kept coming out the same and there was nothing I could do about yesterday.
Cole's alarm was set for six. I'd been awake since before midnight.
His hands. That was what kept arriving — not the rest of it, the hands first, always. The width of them across my hips, the specific weight, and I'd known those hands my entire life. Grown up around those hands. In the dark I hadn't let myself know whose hands they were, and I'd been trying to understand why all evening, watching him at the campfire with his hands around his coffee cup, ordinary and loose, while I held my s'more and didn't look at them directly.
What they felt like on my hips was the same as what they always felt like.
I'd known that in the fissure. I'd known it and I'd made a sound into the dirt and pressed back against them and the cave sent that sound back to me before I could do anything about it. I'd heard myself.
I'd been almost through when the orgasm hit. He'd found the angle — grinding at the deepest point of me — and I felt it coming and I let it. I came with him buried inside me. I was still shaking when my heel connected and I got free.
I came and then I kicked. In that order.
I'd been trying not to think about the order all evening. In the dark I let myself think about it.
Gonna get you pregnant. Plant a baby in you right here.
His voice stripped down by then, raw the way voices get when someone stops managing themselves. The words had been real and I'd felt him pulsing deep inside me while he said them — each pulse a specific heat spreading outward from the deepest point — and I'd already come and I was still shaking and my heel was the only thing that moved.
The warmth I was lying with now. The sticky weight of my panties. That was what two weeks meant. The math that kept coming out the same.
He'd made my s'more the way I'd always had it. Assembled and pressed and cut, passed to me before anyone else got theirs, without me asking. He'd always done it that way. Since I was six.
A stranger wouldn't know that.
I'd been sitting with this all evening — four feet from him at the campfire while he talked about the cave with his face that looked exactly like his face. Tight fit at the start. You open up to it. First time's always the hardest. I'd watched him talk and held my s'more and didn't eat it.
A stranger couldn't know. There was no way a stranger could know.
I'd held it together all day. Lunch, the afternoon, dinner — Cole right there the whole time with his taped nose and the bruise spreading under his eye, acting like himself, talking about things that had nothing to do with me, and I'd done it. Passed dishes. Answered questions. The campfire that evening was the hardest part.
So.
I thought about the drive up. Him in the front seat with his elbow out the window. The rearview mirror, and the grin when he caught me looking. The shape of his back at the awning bracket yesterday afternoon, which I'd made myself stop looking at, which I let myself look at now in the dark.
He'd talked about girls at the mall. Girls my age in shorts all summer, always looking — said it like it was just a fact about himself. I'd been at the mall in shorts all spring. I didn't want to think too long about what that meant.
He lost control in that cave. His voice going rough at the end, his hand flat on my lower back making sure I stayed. I didn't know if that was because of me or just because of what I was — fourteen, the first one, right there in the dark.
What I kept coming back to was my own orgasm. The breeding words and the pulsing and me already coming before my heel moved — I'd spent all evening working at this. Whether I'd come because I'd already known. Whether at some level in the dark I'd already recognized his hands and something in me had answered what it found. Or whether it was just what he'd done — the angle, the grinding, the specific weight of him at the deepest point — and it would have happened the same for anyone.
I couldn't tell the difference from lying here. That was what I couldn't get past. If it was him — Cole specifically — then I needed to understand what that meant about me. And if it would have been anyone, that said something else entirely. Neither answer was livable and I couldn't tell which one was true.
The only way to know was to go back. Knowing exactly who he was this time.
Two weeks. What he'd already left in me, still there at midnight, still there now. He'd already done it once — whatever was going to happen from yesterday was already the math. One more time didn't change what was already possible.
I was thinking about going back.
I stayed with that in the dark and stopped pretending I hadn't already decided.
I wasn't telling anyone. Not Mom, not Dad. It was Cole, and I'd cried the whole drive home when he left last August and hadn't told anyone that either. I wasn't going to start now.
The generator cycled. Dad exhaled.
At five forty-eight I put on my shoes. He'd already been awake.
He unzipped the tent from inside before I'd stood there long enough to decide anything. Half-dressed already, trail shoes on, flashlight in hand. He looked at me in the gray and said hey and I said hey and that was the whole of it.
His nose was taped. The bruise had spread overnight — deep purple at the bridge, moving toward his eye.
I'd done that. He didn't know I'd done that.
He said "Trail's this way" — we both already knew — and turned toward the tree line. I followed.
My shoes were wet before we reached the trail post. The dew still on the grass, the campground quiet behind us, a screen door somewhere starting the morning. The trail ahead was ours.
I kept five feet behind him and watched his hands.
They swung slightly as he walked, unhurried, the same way they'd always swung. I'd spent my whole life watching Cole. Even now, the taped nose and the bruise going dark at the corner of his eye, he moved like someone who'd slept fine.
He hadn't known, last night. While I'd been lying awake in the Winnebago with his smell on me and the math running on a loop, he'd been in his tent not knowing. The bruise on his face from a kick he didn't know was mine.
Boot-churned mud at the trail post. The laminated sign: CAVE TRAIL — moderate — 0.3mi to entrance. A man came the other direction — gray-stubbled, proper hiking boots — and lifted his chin as we passed. Two people on a trail at six in the morning. He didn't look at us twice.
The trees closed in on both sides. The cold smell of the firs, the damp of the trail underfoot, and underneath it the other smell that hadn't left me, that the shower hadn't touched. I breathed through my mouth.
The ferns came up, and the cave mouth through them. Wide slot in the hillside, boot-tracked mud at the entrance, a foil gum wrapper caught in the roots.
To the left of the cave mouth, a few feet up the hillside: the fissure. A hand's-width of dark in the rock, fern roots around the edges. From here it looked like nothing. A gap you'd walk past without thinking.
I knew exactly what it looked like from the inside.
"Ready?" Cole said.
I looked away from the fissure. "Yeah."
He clicked his flashlight on and went in first. The smell hit the same way it had yesterday. Cold stone, mineral and wet, nothing living in it. My footsteps too loud and then normal, the cave calibrating me to itself. The air didn't move.
Cole moved ahead of me with his flashlight sweeping the walls. He knew this cave now — one trip through had been enough. He moved with the ease of someone who had nothing to fear in this particular dark.
I kept my flashlight on the ground in front of my feet.
He showed me things as we went — a shelf of white mineral deposit where the stone had been leaching for decades, a seam where the wall had cracked along a fault and left an overhang you could fit your whole forearm into. Patient about it. The right amount of explanation, nothing extra. Just: look. He'd hold the light on it until I'd seen what he meant.
I thought: of course he is.
The corridor narrowed and he said ceiling drops here and we ducked through together, my shoulder grazing his, and I felt the specific warmth of him through his shirt. Just his shoulder. I kept moving.
Further along, the walls came in on both sides. He slowed. Put his flashlight beam on the left wall and stopped.
"Here," he said.
The fissure. Running floor to ceiling where the stone had split — wider than it looked from the outside. He moved the beam slowly up the length of it.
"Natural chimney. Goes through to the surface." He tilted the flashlight, trying to see up the crack. "You can feel the air change when you're close."
I could feel the air change. I'd had my hands through it. My face in the daylight with the rest of me in the dark.
"Cool," I said.
He kept his light on the fissure, moving the beam along the width of it at shoulder height. And then, angling the flashlight to see further up the crack, the beam swung and caught me wrong — from the side, at the strip of skin where my shirt had ridden up.
The marks on my hips. Both sides. Two pale gray scrapes at exactly the width the rock had held me.
He didn't say anything.
He kept his light there.
I watched his face in the peripheral glow. He wasn't startled — he was working something out. He'd had his hands on those hips through that crack. He knew the shape of the rock at that width. He knew what it would leave on a body wedged in it.
He looked at the marks and then he looked at my face. Something crossed his expression — not guilt exactly, but the knowledge of what he'd done arriving all at once. It was there a second. Then he looked at the fissure.
That was what I'd needed to see. When he looked at those marks his face did something it wouldn't do for a stranger. I'd been telling myself there was a difference — between the girl in that cave and the girls at the mall, between what he did in the dark and what this was now. Seeing his face just then was the closest thing I had to proof.
The corridor was quiet. Our breathing came back from the walls.
"Al," he said.
One word. Not a question.
"When you came back," I said. "The nose. Your clothes."
He was quiet.
"I wasn't going to say anything. To anyone. I just — I needed to know."
He looked at me. Neither of us moved.
"And you still came out here this morning," he said.
"I said I would."
"Knowing."
"Yeah."
I looked at his hand, still at his side. Not on me.
"I'm not upset," I said. I meant it. I couldn't have explained it to anyone and I didn't need to. I'd been awake since midnight and I'd had a long time to figure out what I was and wasn't. "I just needed to figure out what I was going to do."
He looked at me. "And?"
I looked at the fissure.
"And here I am," I said.
The silence held.
He lowered his flashlight — not off, just angled toward the floor between us. The corridor went dim. He didn't look away from my face.
He knew. And he knew that I knew. And I was still here.
Slowly, he reached out and put his palm flat against the mark on my right hip. Not gripping. Not moving. Just his hand there — the hand that had been on that exact spot through that exact crack — resting against the evidence of itself.
"We should head back," he said.
I didn't move.
His thumb pressed slightly. Feeling the edge of it.
Then he took his hand back and turned to the fissure. He stood in front of it and put both palms flat against the stone on either side of the crack and looked at the width of it — the specific width he knew from the inside.
I came to stand beside him.
We both looked at it. The crack that went through to the surface — from this side just a slot of dark in the stone, from the other side daylight and fern roots and a way out. I knew both sides of it. He only knew one.
Neither of us spoke. The cave held the quiet and sent it back. His hands still flat on the stone.
He said: "You don't have to."
"I know that," I said.
I turned toward the rock.
He turned off his flashlight. I understood what that meant. I turned off mine.
Arms first.
I knew the angle now — the shoulder rotation that cleared the widest point, the weight shift that let my hips through without the stone biting. I went through until I stopped: hips wedged in the crack, torso flat against the hillside above, arms stretched ahead of me into fern roots and cool dirt. The open air of morning on my face. Below me, my legs hanging free into the cave.
The dark of the cave against the backs of my bare legs.
Not stuck. I could drive my arms forward and be out on the hillside. My face was already there, in the light.
I stayed.
He didn't move either. Somewhere below me in the cave dark — the flashlights were off, the cave total, I couldn't see anything below my hips — I could only hear him breathing. The cave took that and sent it back from every wall, so his breath surrounded me from all directions at once.
His hands found my legs. Moving upward from my calves without hurrying, until his thumbs found my waistband. The button worked loose. My shorts came down over my hips, slow, and fell somewhere below me into the dark. Then his fingers at the hem of my panties — he stopped there, both thumbs on the small of my back — and then worked them down and let them fall.
I was bare from the hips down. Cool cave air against the inside of my thighs.
Then I felt him — not inside, not yet. The thick heat of his cock running slowly along the outside of me, front to back, parting me slightly without entering. I was already soaked. I'd known that before he touched me, the cave dark and the waiting and the heat of his hands moving up my legs — by the time he found me I was wet and he could feel that, and I could feel that he could feel it. He ran the head of him through the slick of me again, slow, back to front, and a sound came out of me that the cave returned before I'd finished making it.
He brought the head of him to the entrance and rested there.
Just that. The broad head of him pressed right there at the opening of me, warm and thick, not moving. In the dark without sight I had nothing to measure against — I felt the width of him where he rested against my entrance and I still wasn't ready for it. Wide. Heavy. The heat of him. The slick of me around it. My own pulse.
He held.
My arms were in the daylight. Two weeks from my last period. I'd been lying in that bunk since midnight running the math and I knew every implication of what I was deciding.
The heat of him at my entrance. The slick of my own wet. My own pulse. Him not moving. Just there.
"You know what you came back here for," he said. His cock not moving. "Tell me."
I kept my face in the fern roots.
He didn't move. Just held the pressure of him right there against my entrance — the heat of him, my own wet all around it, the specific weight of the head of his cock against me and not going anywhere.
"Last night," he said. "Lying in that bunk. What were you thinking about."
I was aware of how soaked I was. Of how much of it was already running down the inside of my thighs. Of how obvious it was, his cock right there against the evidence of it, waiting.
I pressed my face into the dirt.
"Al."
My hips wanted to shift back toward him. I held them still.
"Your hands," I said. Into the dirt. "I kept thinking about your hands."
He pressed very slightly — not entering, just adding to the pressure already there — and held.
"Whose hands."
My face in the fern roots. "Yours."
"Say it."
"Your hands on me." My eyes closed. "I kept thinking about your hands on me."
A beat. His cock right there, not giving me anything.
"And you still came back." Low. "For your brother to fill you."
His cock right there, not moving, and both things hanging between us — what I'd said and what he'd named for me. That I was soaked around his cockhead in the dark and still hadn't asked for anything.
I tried to hold it. Both hands gripping the fern roots. The morning air on my face and the cool cave air on my bare thighs and my own wet running and the thick heat of him right at my entrance and nothing happening and nothing happening.
"Please—" The word came out before I could stop it.
He didn't move.
My hips pushed toward him. Barely. Not enough.
"Cole—" The cave took it and returned it from every wall at once, my own name for him surrounding me. "Cole, please—"
I shifted my hips back.
He didn't move. That was the first thing — his hands closing on my hips, gripping, holding himself completely still. Making me do this myself.
I pushed back further. I felt my lips spreading apart around the head of him — the slow, specific prying open, the burning starting before he was even inside me, my body resisting even though I was soaked. I kept pushing. The burning spread. The pressure built at the widest point of the head where I couldn't yet accommodate him, and my arms shook on the roots, and I pushed harder anyway.
He didn't move. Just gripped my hips and held still.
The burning became sharp and I pushed through it and then — a give, a small give, that I felt through my whole lower body — the head of him cleared through my entrance. The ring of me closed tight around the shaft just behind it. Just the head of him inside me. I stopped there.
A sound came out of me — involuntary, the cave had it before I did.
He still hadn't moved.
I could feel the head of him just inside me. The ring of my entrance clenched tight around the shaft just behind the head. My body's weight on my hips in the fissure, the morning air on my face, and the head of my brother's cock just inside me in the dark.
Then he pressed forward.
Slow — his girth widening the stretch as he went deeper, the burning following him inward as he filled more than I'd prepared for. The walls of me opened around his girth as he pressed, the stretch moving deeper, until his hips met mine and he was all the way in. His balls rested warm and heavy against my lips. The blunt pressure of him at my cervix came sudden and specific — the ache shooting up through my stomach into my ribs, the kind of pressure that lives right next to pain — and my eyes blurred.
I couldn't make a sound for a moment. Then a low one came out, long, and the cave had it from every wall before it finished.
His cock. My brother's cock. Pressed to the deepest point of me — felt in every wall of me at once, his girth something I was aware of in all directions simultaneously, his balls warm against my lips and the ache still traveling upward through my body.
He held. The cave held our breathing and sent it back.
"All you," he said. Low. "Every bit of that."
I did every bit of it. My whole body clenching around him, the walls of me trying to adjust to his girth, the ache still sitting at my cervix and going nowhere.
He pulled back slowly.
The drag of it — the full drag of his girth pulling back through me, all of it — and the cave returned that sound instantly: the wet slick sounds of him moving in me bouncing from every wall at once before I could do anything about them. He drove forward and the cave returned that too. The sounds of his cock working in and out of me surrounded us from every direction, the cave making a witness of everything the way it always had.
He found his rhythm. Each stroke deliberate.
The stretch of him with every stroke — his girth dragging back through me, then filling me again, the walls of me spread wide around him, more than I'd known how to expect. My body hadn't adjusted. I felt stuffed full, stretched open, the burning from the entry still present every time he drove to depth. Each time he pulled back I felt the drag of his girth all the way through me, and each time he thrust I felt the bloat of him filling me again, and neither of those sensations was something I had a frame for.
I kept my face in the dirt, my hands on the roots, tried to stay in my body — and then I was at the breakfast table. His hand reaching past mine for the butter. Scrambled eggs. I'd asked if anyone wanted more coffee; I could hear my own voice doing that. Him right across. What he'd left in me the morning before still in me, and the eggs, and him passing me the butter like any morning at all.
He drove forward and held and the thought broke apart.
With each stroke I was getting wetter — I could feel it, the slick of me building around his cock with every withdrawal and thrust, the cave returning the sounds of it from every wall. My hips had started pushing back to meet each stroke without me telling them to.
"Girls your age." His hips steadying to a rhythm. "On the street. At the store." A stroke, the cave returning it. "Their little skirts. Tight leggings." His thumb into my hip. "Braces still on."
My hands tightened on the roots.
"Just out there." Moving. "Not thinking—" A harder stroke, his cock driving to depth. He stopped there. "—about what they do to anyone."
A sound came out of me into the dirt. My hips pushed back against him, my body clenching around him at depth without my deciding.
"I look at them." Finding a harder rhythm. "All I can think about is getting one alone." Deeper. "Somewhere no one is." The cave returning every wet stroke from every wall. "Getting inside her. Whether she can even take me."
My arms were shaking on the roots. My hips pushed back to meet each thrust. I was so wet now that the sounds the cave returned were unmistakable — the slick rhythmic sounds of his cock moving in and out of me, surrounding us from everywhere, inescapable.
"She can." He pressed to the end of me and held. "Takes a minute. But she can." His thumb digging into my hip. "Fill her up. Send her back." Moving again, harder. "Couple months later she's starting to show. Friends are asking her." Driving to depth with each stroke. "She doesn't know what to tell them."
I pressed my face into the dirt and my hips pushed back against him and the sounds the cave returned from every wall at once were past the point of my doing anything about them.
"Fourteen years old." Almost to himself. "My own little sister." His hips going still, his cock at the very end of me. "Every time I came home. I watched you." His thumb hard into my hip. "Filling out. Right in front of me every break." Moving again, slow, the pressure at my cervix shifting. "Tighter than any of them. Any girl I ever thought about." Pressing harder. "And you came back. Pushed yourself onto me." The full weight of him against my cervix. "Here we are."
"Al." His hips slowing. "Who's inside you."
I kept my face in the dirt.
He pulled back to the edge and barely moved. The absence of him at depth. Making something wait.
"Who's inside you."
A whimper came out of me before I'd found it and the cave sent it back from every wall.
"You are." Into the roots.
"Who am I."
The word stopped in my mouth. My hips pushed back toward him.
"Al."
"My brother." Barely said.
He drove to the very end of me — hips hard against mine, the blunt weight of him pressing to my cervix — and held. "Your big brother." Low. "Say it back."
"My big brother." The cave had it before I did. Returned it from everywhere at once.
His hips began to circle — slow, grinding, his cock held at that depth and working the angle — the pressure of him directly at my cervix, pulling fractionally away and returning. My whole body clenching around his girth with each rotation, involuntary, gripping.
And then quieter, not quite to me:
"Gonna breed you." Low. Still grinding. "Get my little sister pregnant right here."
I'd heard it once before. This same fissure, the first time, his voice stripped raw in the cave dark, while he was already pulsing inside me. He hadn't known who I was. Now he did. Now he knew exactly whose body was under him and he said it anyway.
"Two weeks." His grinding going slower, deeper. His thumb hard into my hip. "Ripe. And here you are."
Mom's face. Dad's face. My belly starting to show by October, freshman year, Cole already gone at the end of August and none of it stoppable. His cock at the deepest point of me while he said it like he'd read every calculation I'd run since midnight.
"Going to fill you up." His hips shifting, the grinding giving way to longer strokes, his cock driving hard to depth. "Put a baby in my little sister and send her back to that breakfast table."
The orgasm was already building where his cock drove against my cervix, spreading outward through my whole lower body in slow waves. I pressed my face into the dirt and stopped fighting any of it. My sounds went to the cave and the cave sent them back from every wall at once, my own voice surrounding me from every direction.
"Al." His voice stripped rough. His palm coming flat on my lower back, holding me at the angle, his cock driving harder. "Don't move."
He drove forward one last time — harder, that fraction deeper — and a sharp stab of pain went through me at my cervix, pain and pressure both at once, and my back arched against it without deciding to. His hands left my hips. Both palms spread flat against my lower belly, pressing in — right against my womb, where he was going to put it.
"Feel every drop." Strained. "Don't move."
My hands gripped the roots. He was going to come inside me — I could feel his cock thickening, the pulse of it already building — going to fill me up right where I was ripe for it.
Not at fourteen. Not his. Not by him. I couldn't — I clenched against it, trying to close, trying to shut whatever gate I thought I still had — and Cole groaned, the cave sending it back from every wall at once, his cock surging in the grip of me around him. The clenching that was supposed to close me down just gripped him harder. Milked him.
The first pulse hit at the same moment I broke open — hot, a flooding heat outward from the deepest point while my whole body clenched around him. The second pulse harder and I felt it flood through me while I was still shaking. The third. His cock throbbing at my cervix while his palms held my belly and my body gripped each pulse — not choosing to, not managing any of it. The seal of him tight inside me, everything going nowhere, his pulses and my clenching layered together while the cave surrounded us with both.
More than I expected. Hotter than I expected. The warmth building with each pulse until he finally went still.
His cock still fully inside me. His palm flat on my spine. The cave quiet.
My arms were still trembling on the roots. Slow aftershocks still moving through my lower body — clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, my own body still coming down from it while his stayed pressed to the deepest point of me.
My face in the morning. My arms in the fern roots in the open air. Everything else in the dark with him. I could feel the heat of what he'd left in me against my cervix where he was still pressed. Where he was keeping it.
I hadn't stopped him.
He stayed inside me after. Still and warm — his cock going soft in increments, each increment a small twitch that belched another pulse of his seed into me, warm and specific against my cervix. My walls clenched around each one without my deciding to. His palm flat on my back through all of it, holding me at the angle, keeping everything right where he'd put it.
"Good girl." Quiet. The cave barely took it.
"Mine," he said. Almost to himself.
Then: "Not a word. To Mom and Dad." His hand pressed slightly. "Not to anyone."
I kept my face in the dirt.
"Al."
"I know," I said.
Two loads in two days. Two weeks out. The heat of his load at the deepest point of me, sitting there while his cock finished softening inside me. I held the roots.
A long time passed. Long enough that the morning air on my face shifted warmer. My arms ached and I shifted my grip and held anyway. When he finally pulled back I felt every inch of it — the drag of his cock moving through me, slick, the seal breaking. And then the moment he cleared: everything he'd left in me ran. Not slow — a rush of warmth that poured down the inside of my thighs and dripped into the dark below me. The cave sent that sound back from every wall.
I stayed in the fissure and let it run.
The soreness was different from yesterday. The ache in the walls of me — the stretch of his girth, of being held open that wide at that depth for that long, of everything he'd pulsed into me still warm inside my body. My body had made room for him. It remembered now.
"Cole."
"Yeah." Somewhere below me in the dark.
"I'm going to need my panties."
A pause.
"I know," he said.
I came through the fissure into the morning — arms first, then shoulders, dragging my bare hips through the last of the rock — and made it a few feet before my arms gave out on the slope. I got myself propped against the hillside, chest heaving, legs splayed out in front of me. The ache of having been held open that wide, that long, was still in the walls of me.
I looked down.
Between my legs: the lips of me still spread, still gaping open — his girth had been inside me long enough that I hadn't closed back, the labia pushed apart and staying there. A creamy white froth at the edges where his cock had churned through me, the slow thick ooze of his load working out now, running through the open folds of me and down the inside of my thigh into the dirt.
Cole came around from the cave mouth before I'd gotten my breath. Naked from the waist down, boots still on, my shorts and panties in one hand and his own pants in the other. Still half-hard, his cock glistening with what we'd made of each other, and where the shaft met the base a thick pale ring of what he'd churned out of me with every stroke.
He stopped two feet away.
He took in all of it — bare thighs, the wet still running freely down them, the wet spreading into the dirt beneath me. The morning light was full and bright. Nothing hidden.
"God," he said. Low. More to himself than to me.
He crouched in front of me. Put his fingers to the inside of my thigh just above where the worst of it was running, and drew them slowly upward all the way through the wet. He looked at his hand. Then at me.
I looked back at him.
Then voices on the trail below — two of them, close, boot steps already on the switchback under the tree line.
He stood and shoved my clothes into my chest.
"Go."
I went for the panties first. They caught on my wet thighs and wouldn't come up — I had to work them inch by inch over the slick skin, the fabric soaked through before they were even seated, heavy and dripping, clinging to everything. Cole was turned away from me, fighting himself back into his pants, his hands not cooperating with his fly. I got my shorts up, found the button, lost it, found it again. The voices louder now — right below the last stand of firs, maybe fifteen feet, the trekking poles clicking against the rocks.
He got his fly up. Looked at me.
I nodded.
The boot steps crested the ridge and there they were — older couple, matching rain jackets, the woman already lifting her hand in a wave before they'd fully registered us. Cole said "morning" the same way he'd say it across a breakfast table, easy, like he'd been standing up here getting some air. I smiled back. Don't know if it looked like a smile.
They went up. We went down. That was that.
He reached back at the first switchback and his hand found mine without looking. Those hands — the same hands that had been flat on my spine twenty minutes ago, that I'd been lying awake thinking about since midnight — now just taking mine as he led me down through the firs toward the campground.
Every step I could feel it. His load still working out of me with each footfall, heavy in the soaked fabric, spreading with each stride down into the seam of my shorts. By the bottom of the trail the denim was wet through.
I let him guide me back to camp.