From the bench to her blankets on the floorboards of the little stockade was not a long way to go but they took a long time moving there, seeming to travel down inch by inch in a locked body motion that neither led nor followed but went with them trembling. Once down, they wrestled with limbs made slow and heavy, his fingers thick with the buttons of her dress and her breasts out then, nipples like summer blackcaps against thick honey, and she shuddered under his tongue. She astride him and with one hand he swept the dress up over her hips and opened his flies with the other, but she arched away from him even as he strained toward her, his thumb once traveling down the length of her as she opened under, the wet there breathtaking. Still she held off from him, their mouths smothering each other, tongues each hot and sharp to the other, almost struggling until she broke away, rolling over to lie beside him, her legs still spread and her dress open to the waist, and she said, “If you’d got it in I would’ve let you.” He rolled over on top of her and as he entered she said, her voice now a wet thing in his ear, “I could just melt all over you,” and with that he was done, thrusting from the small of his back and her soft cries falling into his ears like thin slices of bird-flight entering his brain. She reached down and held him to her after he was finished and told him, “Don’t leave, don’t go.” So he stayed until he slipped from her and still he lay there, the wet between them sealing one to the other. Neither one now wanting or able to leave.