Claire tried to think of something normal to say. She couldn’t casually mention that she’d been there before. She couldn’t even say that she’d ever been to a picnic that she didn’t cater. But Claire not knowing what she was doing could come as no surprise to him, of all the people in the truck. She’d been nothing but a contradiction since she met him—go away, come closer; I know enough, I know so little; I can handle anything, look how easily I break. “I’ve never been there,” she finally admitted. “Ask Sydney, our social director.”

Sydney turned in her seat. “It’s a popular swimming hole. Lots of teenagers and families with young kids go there in the summer. And at night it’s something of a lovers’ lane.”

“And how do you know that?” Tyler asked.

Sydney grinned and wagged her eyebrows.

“You went out there at night?” Claire asked. “Did Grandma know what you were doing?”

“Are you kidding? She said she used to go out there at night all the time when she was a teenager.”

“She never told me that.”

“She probably worried about all the flies zooming into your wide-open mouth.”

Claire snapped her mouth shut. “I didn’t think she did things like that.”

“Everyone does something like that at least once in their lives.” Sydney shrugged. “She was young once.”

Claire snuck a look at Tyler. He was smiling. He’d been young once too.

Claire had always wondered what that felt like.

Lunsford’s Reservoir was located in the ninety acres of thick woods passed down through a long line of lazy Lunsfords. It was too much trouble to try to keep people away from the reservoir, and the maintenance would be too much hassle if they turned it into a park. And this was the rural South, so they’d be damned if they sold their family land or, worse, gave it to the government. So they posted NO TRESPASSING signs everyone ignored, and left it at that.

There was a trail about a half mile long from the gravel parking lot to the reservoir. Tyler walked behind Claire all the way there, and she felt very conscious of her body, of what he knew of it, things about her no one else knew. She thought she could feel his eyes on her, but when she looked over her shoulder, his eyes were always elsewhere. Maybe she felt them there because she wanted them there. Maybe this was how people coped after intimacy. When you tell a secret to someone, embarrassing or not, it forms a connection. That person means something to you simply by virtue of what he knows.