When they finished, the sun had already peaked. The cameras drifted off for their afternoon break. Mara had always assumed the break was for lunch, and spared for the crew a jealous thought, or at least wondered what they ate, imagined the taste of it and the feeling going down. But now she didn’t care. She didn’t care at all. Soon they would have their own food. The food would come.

They sat by the lake, just the two of them.

The water was settling from the disturbance. The top inches were clear, though muck swirled farther down. A few white lilies gasped at the surface.

“You did it,” said Ashley. “I can’t believe you pulled it off.”

“We did. I would never have made it alone.”

“We did,” said Ashley.

Mara lay back, because she was dizzy, because the sun was warm and soon she would eat. Because she was with Ashley, and content. She thought Ashley might lie beside her, that they could watch the clouds. High and white, drifting fast across the sky.

Instead Ashley turned and lay back in Mara’s lap.

Mara’s skin went electric, her heart and her lungs. Like the first time she had met Ashley—that sudden shock. She tried to steel herself, to play the feeling off. Trying to act like she hadn’t noticed. Like it was nothing, touching skin. She didn’t know why she was like this. Why she always had to hide what she wanted, what she felt.

But then Ashley looked up at her, through her lashes, and Mara knew that it wasn’t an accident at all.

It was that look. It changed her.

Mara dipped her face to Ashley’s neck. She wanted to tell Ashley that she smelled good, but didn’t want to make her self-conscious. They had not showered in almost three weeks, and though Ashley still swam sometimes, she rarely ventured far from shore. That smell, though—her skin. Mara’s mouth watered. Her mouth often watered now, at the strangest times.

Mara didn’t plan what came next. She didn’t know what she was doing until she did it.

It was like sinking into a dream, the smell of her. Mara’s hand on Ashley’s cheek, her collarbone, swirling on her skin. Mara had never felt skin like that. Never felt anything so soft in her life.

Ashley sighed, a breath that filled and emptied her whole chest. Rising and falling. When she exhaled, she melted somehow more deeply into Mara, as close as they could be.

Mara watched her hands move as if they were not her own. Her fingers tracing circles on Ashley’s stomach, rising to the cotton of her bra. Sliding beneath it. The way they breathed together, the way they gasped together, the way Ashley melted closer when they finally fell still. And still Mara had not kissed her, or tasted any part of her; and she lowered her lips to Ashley’s hair, and kissed her there, gently, and that kiss felt like the most dangerous thing she had done yet.