We walked back along the road, our shorts heavy with water and sticking to our legs like wet plaster, the cars going past us so fast I could feel the hard smack of pushed air against our bodies. Three, four inches to the right and we’d have felt the full impact of metal and engine and glass. So close, that devastation. And then the soft, quiet spaces between them, no engine, no throttle, just the air in the long grass and our feet on the tarmac, and him whistling.

We walked for days. Up on the cliffs, the narrow crumbling edges. Another fault line, another border—the land sliced and dropping straight into sea. Novo was comfortable there, at the margins of things, at the place where things change. We climbed until my lungs and my legs burned, but he wouldn’t let me stop when I wanted to, would never let me stop because he could always see another place ahead, something different. Farther. Better. More.

We walked at night too, diffuse with the low, secondhand light of the moon, and we lay on our backs in the silvered grass to map stars. Novo gave me a meteor shower, because I’d never seen one. “Every time someone says they see a shooting star,” I told him, “I’m blinking, or looking down, for that split second. It’s not even funny.” And before I’d even finished talking, the night was filled with dropping lights, and it stunned me into silence, the total quiet of all that movement, the utter vastness of the sky. I slept, and in the very early morning, wild ponies cut fast across the moor to meet us, to meet him, and we gave them grass and the cores of our apples, and Novo pressed his forehead against theirs and spoke words and they shivered with pleasure and their heads swung up when he let them go.

I remember how many stars there were out on the moor, how the wild ponies edged closer to us in the dark until we could hear their breathing and the rip of the grass they pulled out of the ground with their piano-key teeth and soft mouths. I remember how cold it got while I was sleeping, how wet everything was in the morning, like the sky had turned to liquid overnight, our quilt and blankets, my clothes soaked through and sticking to my skin.

When I said, “Thank you,” he said, “For what?” like it was all nothing, all this magic, and I guess that’s how we did it, how we acknowledged and overlooked at the same time how special this was, how unexpected and temporary, the solid and the unthinkable, the ordinary and the impossible-to-know. I don’t think either of us knew then how long it would last. I accepted and denied his otherness, our otherness. The way you do when you’re falling in love against all logic, wildly fascinating and hopelessly unrealistic, and you say, This is not happening, no way, no thanks, not to me.