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"I was asking sideways," she says.

I put my mouth at the hinge of her jaw and work down. She is all bone and cord after fourteen days, the long line of her throat, the shelf of her collarbone, and she goes up on her toes and stays there, and her hands strain against mine over her head and I do not let them go.

"Talk," she says.

So I talk.

I tell her what I am doing while I do it. I tell her, with my mouth at the hollow under her collarbone, that I intend to have her make that sound again, and then I make her make it again. I tell her, with one hand spread wide across the small of her back and the other going down the front of her, exactly how far my hand covers her, which is nearly all of it, and I tell her what that has been doing to my sleep since the fifth night. I tell her when I get the last of her clothing off her and off my forearm and out of the way that her skin has gone to gooseflesh everywhere and that I am going to be responsible for a different reason for that within about a minute.

Her hips go forward off the rock.

I get two fingers into her and she says my name in a register I have never had out of her, high and stripped, nothing left of the wry thing she does with every other sentence. She is soaked. She is soaked and shaking and swearing at me in a steady quiet stream that has no content in it at all, and I keep my other hand at the back of her neck to hold her head off the stone, because the stone is stone.

"Ghorlan. Ghorlan, don't stop, don't you dare do a load assessment right now..."

"The load is fine."

She laughs and the laugh turns over halfway into something else and breaks, and she comes apart around my hand with her heels off the ground and her mouth open against my shoulder to keep it quiet, and there is nobody within eighty feet and no lens with a path to us and she does it quietly anyway, out of two weeks of habit, and that fact goes into me somewhere and stays.

I hold her up until her legs work again.

"Down," she says, when they do. "Down, sit, I want you sitting."

I sit on the doubled bags with my back to the fold, and she comes over me astride, and she takes hold of me with both hands, and she has to use both hands, and she says something extremely unkind about the anatomy of orcs in general and mine in particular that will be on me for a year.

Then she puts me where she wants me and lowers, and stops, and breathes.

"Slow," I say.

"I've got it."

"Junie."

"I have got it."

She takes about ninety seconds and she takes all of me, and by the end of it she has both arms locked around the back of my neck and her forehead against my temple and she is making a small sound on every exhale, and the fire is going down the wall in orange, and I put my hands under her and lift, and set her down again, and she swears at me on the way down.

After that it is not slow.

We go at each other with two weeks of cold and hunger and cameras and prompt cards behind it, and the sand under the duff shifts and the bags go crooked and neither of us attends to it. She gets a hand in my hair and pulls hard enough to hurt, which she has correctly worked out is welcome. I hold her hips and take over the rhythm entirely and she lets me, which from Junie Halloran is a sentence with a lot in it. Her breath goes ragged in my ear and then stops going anywhere at all, and I put my mouth over hers so the mountain gets nothing, and she comes with everything in her locked rigid and then all at once loose, and I follow her about four strokes later with her name in my mouth and the rock at my back.

After, we lie in the fold under both bags with her along my side and the fire down to coals eight feet away.

Her hand is doing something absent on the ridge of muscle above my hip.

"So that was a choice," she says.

"Yes."

"No lightning. No hold. Nobody pulled the crew off the ridge." Her thumb keeps moving. "The ninth was weather. That was weather and adrenaline and two people who might've been dead by morning. This was Tuesday."

"It is the fourteenth."

"It was metaphorically Tuesday, you enormous pedant."

"Yes." I put my hand on the back of her head. "It was a choice."

The coals settle. Out past the mouth of the overhang the sky has gone hard and black and absolutely clear, which is what cold does here, and there are more stars than a person raised anywhere useful has any business being shown.