He couldn’t see her face, but he knew she was giving him her signature look.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Ah.”

Some details didn’t need to be shared in a relationship. But now that he thought about it, he needed to take care of that detail, too. He let her have a head start, then climbed out into the night. Emma had wandered off to the left, toward the woods, so Adam wandered right, toward the rock ledge.

The air was chillier than he had thought, but it felt good against his overheated flesh. When he was finished, he turned back toward the tent and was startled to see Emma standing there, watching him. Bathed in the blue light of the full moon, she looked unearthly, like something from a movie.

They’d met a month ago at a mixer held by Joan of Arc Academy, the sister school for the Clinton M. Hedrick Military Academy. Both schools considered themselves to be virgin vaults, but the respective headmasters understood that boys and girls needed to be boys and girls, and they arranged a heavily chaperoned dance every month.

Adam fell in lust with Emma the first time he saw her, but he had always considered her to be the unattainable prize. She was that gorgeous, from the perfect body to the flaming-red hair. And the blinding smile. It took him three mixers to spin up the courage to ask her to dance. He nearly fell over when she said yes. She’d even chastised him for not having asked earlier.

God only knew how many demerits he’d have to walk off for skipping out for this birthday bacchanal, but it wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t exactly his first time, but it was his first with someone for whom it was not.

“Were you watching me pee?”

“I wanted to see how many times you shook it. My brother tells me that if you shake it more than twice, you’re playing with it.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “It’s a little creepy to be talking about your brother’s dick.”

Emma wandered up and hugged him. “You’re a very special guy, Adam Emerson. A beautiful night, in a beautiful spot. You were here for school before? Is that what you said?”

“Mountain survival training,” Adam explained. “Kind of bullshit exercise, but kind of fun, too. Four times a year, instructors blindfold us, put us in the back of a van and then drop us off at different spots so we can fend for ourselves for a few days. It starts in ninth grade, but those kids are dropped off in groups of four and they have radios.”

“Do they have to hunt to eat?”