“I love you so much,” he says as we start fucking, which I roll my eyes at behind his back. He gets off on the fact that I’m into this shit. That I’ll have sex whenever, wherever, and we both come every time. But I get turned on not by him but by the show. The idea that someone could be watching us. His brother, his father. My first time—and our first time—was in public, and I never quite got over that rush of getting away with something you shouldn’t. I thrived on it. I came on it.

I also liked the way the tree felt against my back as we moved up and down against it. The way the bark embedded into my skin, scratching my shoulder blades and my back, painful and delicious. Something my makeup team will have to cover up in the morning, but that’s a thought for another day.

We walk back to the house silently but enveloped in each other. His jacket is draped on my shoulders, his arms around me, my head resting on him, our sides and hips pressed together so close I could smell the salty sweat of our sex.

“Can we take the shortcut?” I ask. “I’m freezing.”

He rubs his hands up and down my arms. Sex was a momentary release from the cold, but afterward it was worse; not even my coat could protect me from the cold air clinging to my sweat, sending chills up my spine and my back.

The shortcut was walking along the road instead of through the trees. It was a more direct path that was already cleared and would lead us to the front door in ten minutes instead of thirty.

When we reach the edge of the woods, Graham stops and lets me jump onto his back. I couldn’t walk the gravel in heels, and I couldn’t walk it barefoot. So, a piggyback ride up a steep mountain it is.

“You weigh less than a feather,” Graham says after a few minutes. “If you weren’t breathing on my neck, I wouldn’t even know you were there.”

I let out a long warm puff directly into his ear and then kiss him just below it. I could feel him shivering.

“We’ve got a hot shower in our future,” he says, pretending to be less breathless than he is.

I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes. If I let myself think about this place too long, I can feel the panic start to grow, from the hole in which it usually resides in my chest to my neck and stomach and my face and my knees. But sometimes if I close my eyes, I can forget, for just a moment. Forget about everything.

“What the fuck—”