“Why, sir,” I say coyly, paddling slowly away from him with broad strokes. “You have a very wicked glint in your eye.”

“Do I? Maybe that’s because I’m thinking some very wicked thoughts. Now get back here.”

“Catch me if you can,” I call, laughing and swimming away from him, toward the waterfall. But he is taller, of course, with much longer arms and legs, and he soon catches me, one of his arms snaking around my waist to pull me back against him.

“I win,” he says triumphantly.

“And now.” I wrap my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist, shifting until he is inside of me and we are joined again, marveling at the intense waves of pleasure that sweep through my entire body. “You can claim your prize.”

Afterward, when we are exhausted from our lovemaking but reluctant to let the moment end, we drift on our backs, the spray from the waterfall dancing around us like whimsical wraiths. I try to relax and just enjoy it, but my thoughts turn to death, as they always do now. How close I came to dying without seeing this place, or making love with James. I would have died without knowing that I’d missed out, of course. But now that it has happened, and even though I wouldn’t change what we have done for anything in the world, I know what I will miss out on. A lifetime of these moments with him. Waking up next to him every morning, going to sleep in his arms every night. Making love for a million days in a million ways and places, never tiring of him, always craving him. I have seen a glimpse of the future, but it won’t be mine. James and I, we have been as close as is physically possible, but it is not enough. I want more. I want to join with him so tightly that I become a part of him, anchored to him and this earth. Allowed to stay, because in order for them to take me they would have to take him also, and it is not his time, nor his story.

Life is pain. It is also joy, but with the good must also come the bad. I don’t pretend to know why. I can’t even say I understand it. If there is a God—and if there is then he’s doing a fairly lousy job as far as I’m concerned—then there must also be an opposite. A yin to his yang. A black to his white. And maybe that guy, he’s the one who points his sharp finger at the board game and says, “That girl, she’s too happy. Can’t have that—quick, throw a disease her way.” Then he clicks his fingers and toddles off to eat souls for lunch.

I am somebody’s pawn in the game of life. Disposable.

But here, now, in James’s arms and in his eyes, I have become someone’s whole world. And I have to figure out a way to let that be enough.