Breath escaped him like a laugh. “Almost.”

“I remember falling asleep in your bed when you weren’t here.”

He pulled back slightly, searched her face. “That didn’t happen.”

“Yes it did.”

His mouth parted, but he didn’t speak. The blacks of his eyes were bright. She wondered what it would be like to give her body what it wanted. It knew something she didn’t. Her heart sped, her blood was lush in her veins.

“The first day,” she said. “Last summer. Your hair was a mess. I wanted to sweep it back and make you meet my eyes. I wanted to see you.”

His chest rose and fell beneath her hand. “I don’t know. I can’t—I don’t know what you wanted.”

“I never said?”

“No.”

She lowered her mouth to his. She tasted him: the raw burn of liquor on his tongue. She felt him swallow, heard the low, dry sound of it.

He pulled her down to him, tangled his hands in her hair, sucked the breath from her lips. She became uncertain whose breath was whose. He kissed her back, fingertips fanning across her face, then gone, nowhere. Then: a light touch along the curve of her hip, just barely. A stone skipping the surface of the water. “Strange,” he murmured into her mouth.

She wasn’t listening. She was rippling, the sensation spreading wide. Stone on water, dimpled pockets of pressure. The wait for the stone to finally drop down.

Suddenly she knew—or thought she knew—what he found strange as he traced where a dagger should have been. To see a part of her missing. She felt her missing pieces, the stark gaps. She was arrested by the thought (it pierced her, sharp and surreal) that she had become transparent, that if he touched her again his hand would go right through her, into air, into the empty spaces of who she was now.

She didn’t want to be empty, didn’t want to vanish. She wanted to be whole.

She said, “I want to remember you.”

An emotion flared in his face. He braced her hips, tugged her closer. His lids were heavy, eyes dark. His mouth was a wet gleam. She didn’t recognize his expression. It was new. She leaned in and drank the newness of him.

Their kiss turned savage. She made it so. She felt his teeth, reveled in the sure knowledge that it had never been like this between them. Yet at the same time, she felt each kiss they’d shared before, felt them live inside this one. His mouth left hers, rasping down her neck. He buried his face in her skin.

She sought his mouth and found that he tasted different now. She was tasting the taste of her skin on his mouth. Coppery. She dipped her tongue into it again.

“Kestrel.”

She didn’t answer him.

“This is a bad idea.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

He pulled away, closed his eyes, and dropped his head to press his brow against her belly. She felt rich with the words he muttered against her nightdress. His mouth burned through the cloth.

His chair scraped back. He no longer touched her. “Not like this.”

“Yes. Exactly like this.” She tried to find the words to express how this helped, how he somehow mapped the country of herself, showed the ridges, the rise and valley of her very being.

“Kestrel, I think that you’re . . . using me a little.”

She stopped, unpleasantly startled. It occurred to her that what he’d said was another version of what she’d been struggling to say.

“It’s not, ah, a hardship.” He gave a rueful smile. “It’s not that I don’t want—” She’d never heard him stammer. Even with her untrustworthy memory, she knew this. You’re easy to know, she wanted to say. Memories of him came quickly. It didn’t hurt, not as much as she’d feared before, on the tundra, or in his empty bed. At least, it didn’t hurt anymore. It was better. Better than . . . other things.

A faceless horror. A monster. Inside her. It thickened, grew into a featureless, blunt shape. She wouldn’t touch it. She’d go nowhere near it.

Arin had been right, that day when he’d suggested that there was something too horrible for her to remember.

“It’s not enough,” he said. It took her a moment to realize he was continuing his refusal and not responding to her thoughts, which were so loud in her head that she felt as if she’d shouted them.

She said, “What would be enough?”

Color mounted in his face.

“You can tell me,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “Well. Me.”

“I don’t understand.”