Carúpano, Elisabeth had said as she got in the car, and the man had nodded, so presumably he’d understood. It isn’t far, less than thirty minutes, but the bus you’d planned on taking never came. While you waited, you drank tequila from a roadside shack and danced in the violet twilight with your best friends, well aware of the stares from the men populating the plastic chairs to the side of the makeshift bar. You smoked cigarette after cigarette, stubbing them out with the heel of your flip-flop. After a long while, feeling warm and woozy, you started walking, leaving the few lights dotting the steep hillsides of the little crossroads town behind. Then it got dark. Elisabeth and Trine had stuck their thumbs out every time a pair of headlights appeared in the distance, but not a single car had even slowed down, before this one.

The car stops. The jungle has grown denser and stands like mountainsides on either side of the road. A long sliver of moonlight spills down the empty road, making it appear liquid, like a river snaking through the forest. You glance down at your hands, held gingerly in your lap. A childhood memory flashes through your brain, random but clear; those same hands gripping the handlebars of your first bicycle, purple and white streamers flying behind you as you tore down the streets. You look at Trine and Elisabeth, but they are both quiet and serious, now, like you. Your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and you can make out a narrow dirt track disappearing into the forest from the patchily asphalted main road.

The man turns around and only now do you finally see his face. It is a beautiful face, with soulful black eyes set beneath thick brows, and full lips spreading out in a slow smile at the sight of you. His cheeks are sweetly dimpled, and a long scar runs from the outer corner of his eye all the way down to his stubbled jaw, as though a tiger had clawed him. A small snake is tattooed on his throat, its red serpent tongue flicking upwards to the man’s chin. You can’t help but take a stunned, sharp breath of air. He’ll come back, this man, in your dreams and in your waking moments, and maybe you know already now that you’ll never be free of him. You’ll write about him in your diary in twenty years’ time, when you’ll be a respectable, married woman with a beautiful home and a rewarding career. You’ll write about that first moment. About desire coursing through you like a white heat. You won’t feel desire like it again, not ever, not with anybody. Is it even real, such a sudden and uncontrollable explosion in the synapses, at the mere sight of a stranger? In your own words – an instant surrender of everything I knew, everything I thought I was?