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“Duty comes first.” He picks up a piece of kindling from a pile on the hearth and strips the bark, throwing curls of wood into the fire.

The soup bubbles, and he ladles some into a bowl and passes it to me. Again, none for himself.

“Sounds lonely.”

“It is what it is. No point in wanting things I can’t have.”

His pale gray eyes find mine and don’t look away. It ignites a fever across my skin that dies just as quickly when his attention returns to the fire.

“Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Let me in then shut me out.” I’m tired of the way we keep circling each other. “Talk to me, Nick.”

“Because…” He stops stripping the bark. “Because sometimes I forget.”

“Forget what?”

The kindling snaps between his fingers.

The firelight moves across his angular face and finds a warmth in his skin I hadn’t noticed.

He opens his mouth to say something.

Then he presses his lips together, and it’s gone.

I reach over to lay a hand on his knee, and he looks at me like he’s been waiting for it since September.

Rising to my knees, I let the blanket fall and crawl across the floor until there’s nowhere else for him to look. I lean in until the tip of my nose brushes the side of his and stop.

“I’m going to kiss you. If that’s not what you want, you have to say so.”

I’ve never done this before. Never straight up told a guy what I wanted, how I imagine those beautiful, confident women do. I’ve never been brave in that way. The seconds pass like hours as I wait for him to object, tell me to sit back down, but he doesn’t. I count to three deliberately in my head, long enough to change his mind. My breath fans across his cheek, but I don’t feel his. He’s holding it.

I press my lips to the corner of his. Careful, chaste, experimental. His are smooth river stone, and he lets me kiss him without moving at all. I’m about to give up, already composing my apology, when his palms come up around my face and he’s kissing me back.

His mouth against mine is cautious, handling me like he’s afraid I’ll break, and one thumb moves painstakingly along my cheekbone. Tasting, testing, scorching right through me. He takes his time, lingering in places, moving on to others.

I’ve kissed people before. None of it was this. None of it made me want to stay exactly here, in this exact minute, with my knees aching on a wooden floor in a cabin at the end of the world.

An inch opens up between us. His eyes half-closed.

“Ellery.” He says it like it hurts.

“Don’t stop.”

It’s the permission he needed. He nips at my bottom lip, and when I open for him, the kiss goes deeper, his tongue cool against my mouth. Momentum pulls me forward, and my palms land on his chest to steady myself. They slide up over hard planes until they’re in his hair.

He groans and drags me into his lap. I match him like we’ve wasted too many weeks without our mouths on each other. I’m free-falling from the airplane and I don’t care if I hit the ground.

His hands ring my waist, so tight I think they’ll leave a bruise, anchoring me to him in case I drift away. Some distant part of me suggests I might be rushing this a tad, and then his mouth roves across my jaw, stubble scratching my skin in the best way, and travels down the length of my neck. I can’t hold in the moan when his teeth scrape my throat.

He stops moving, his lips below my ear. The rest of him goes somewhere else.

“Nick?” I’m flushed and raw, but he doesn’t move. I have zero desire to hit pause, so I try to bring his mouth to mine again. Around my ribcage, his fingers flex tighter, and he pulls back. His irises have blown wide, pitch-black edge to edge.

“This is a mistake,” he says quietly, like it isn’t for me.