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“Marlowe.”

He looked unsurprised, like he already knew.

I sat down on a stone across from him, wrapped in my blanket. “You’re expected to stay awake all night?”

“No, I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “You’re not tired?”

“I was out cold. Then I woke up thirsty,” I said, realizing too late how loaded the word sounded. “Whatever was in that cacao—” I stopped, because the hum under my skin chose that moment to point out the line of his forearm where his sleeve was pushed back, and I had to wait for it to finish. “What was in that cacao?”

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, in a flat, careful voice I’d come to know very well: “I don’t know the exact recipe—”

“But what’s it doing to me?” I said. I hadn’t meant to cut him off.

He turned the stick in the coals.

“It opens people. That’s the polite word for it. Everything you want gets louder, and everything you’d normally put between yourself and what you want gets…quieter.” He glanced up at me, and the way he looked at me felt like a warning.

“You need to drink a lot of water tomorrow,” he said. “It’s an aphrodisiac. A real one. It’s been used for, I don’t know, six hundred years for exactly that. It takes a while for it to wear off. That’s what Aurora really means when she talks about raising your vibration. So whatever you feel tonight—about anything, about anyone—just remember that.” He glanced at me again, and very unhelpfully, I noticed he had very nice eyes, and I thought about what those eyes would be like staring down at me in bed.

“That includes anything you feel around me,” he said, right on cue.

“That’s—” I recalibrated, thankful that the dark was hiding how I’d blushed the color of a plum. “That’s a strange thing to tell me.”

“It’s the strange thing I’d want told to me.”

And here’s something more I want on the record. I heard him. I was sober enough to hear him, sober enough to check myself. I looked at this man across a dying fire and asked myself, Is this the cacao? And the honest answer was this: the cacao was interested in how his shirt clung at the shoulders. The cacao liked how the fire lit his cheekbones. But when he said, “It’s the strange thing I’d want told to me,” the warmth that spread under my skin wasn’t the stupid cacao. That was me, meeting the first person in years who’d handed me information I could use against his own interest, at two in the morning, expecting nothing.

Woo chocolate doesn’t do that. Nothing in a cup makes a man tell you what’s in the cup.

“So everyone up there,” I said, waving at the tents, “is marinating in medieval love drugs and dreaming about their soulmate?”

“More or less.”

“That seems ethically busy.”

He laughed, quietly. “You have no idea,” he said.

“And you work here.”

“Now and then.” He fed the stick to the coals. “I’m a carpenter. But sometimes I do this for Aurora.”

“Does it pay well?”

“No,” he said, flatly.

I glanced at his very nice hands. No ring. Before I’d thought better of it, and because the hum had returned and now felt like a warm current spreading from my core, I said:

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

I regretted it immediately. In no reality was that a natural follow-up to does it pay well.

“Ask me tomorrow if you really want to know. Ask me when you’ve had some coffee. I’ll be around.” He looked at me, and his hands twitched once in his lap, like he’d argued with them about something they’d wanted to do.

“I’m mostly sober now,” I said, asking myself where the hell I’d found the audacity to be as forward as a man in a dive bar.

“Really? Because I’m guessing you’re wondering how you just asked me that,” he said.

My cheeks burned hotter than the fire.