One

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.

Two

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.