We switched places, nearly slipped, and used each other’s flesh to right ourselves again. Ben was as voracious as I was, and we laughed when we met with teeth instead of tongues, bit instead of kissed, and when we bruised instead of brushed the flesh we’d waited a decade to touch again.

He shifted, leaning back beneath the spray, and pulled me along with him. Water pounded our skin, filled our ears and our open mouths, creating trails for us to track, liquid maps laid out over our bodies. Ben followed one over my neck and down to the slope of my breast, where it paused, cresting at my nipple. There, his tongue turned lazy, lingering and teasing until I dipped my head back, moaning, and arched into his mouth and arms.

The water snapped off suddenly, Ben muttered some dark demand against my skin, and I lifted my head in time to see him blindly pushing open the shower curtain before I was lifted from the tub, wrapped in a towel, and dried in short order. He never stopped kissing me. I never stopped kissing back.

“Now you,” I finally said, pulling back to offer him the towel.

His eyes lit on my face, as dark as a banked coal. “I’m not cold.”

I dropped my gaze, inspecting his body. No, he wasn’t.

He picked up a bottle and moved toward me. I let the towel drop.

He started from the top, kissing every place he touched both before and after slicking it with lotion. He grew distracted again when he reached my breasts and, I confess, so did I. His palms were wide and warm over the sensitive skin, his thumbs and tongue earnest in their circuitous exploration. I reached for him, but he moved away, poured more lotion, then lifted one of my legs as he leaned against the counter.

“How you doing over there, Jo-Jo?” he asked as his fingers worked my instep. I dropped back against the opposite wall of the tiny bathroom and stretched my leg toward him in reply. He chuckled, his hands moving higher.

“You going to slick my whole body?” I asked as he massaged my calf in broad strokes.

“That’s the plan.” His fingers slid past my knee. Our eyes locked, and I ran my instep along his hip, then his inner thigh, opening wider to him. He inhaled sharply, his eyes flicking down my body, narrowing when they returned to my face. Then my leg was thrown over his shoulder so fast I was gasping before his knees hit the ground. His hands moved over the inside of my thighs, flared over my stomach, and dropped to cup me from behind. I strained toward him, and he moaned, the echo sliding through my body, humming in my thighs. I bowed back, reaching for new sensations, and this time earned twin moans from us both. The silence in the room was punctuated only by our breaths, catching and quickening, the breathy music of lovers improvising a duet.

He was feasting. More, he was watching me as he did it, eyes so dark and filled with such desperation, it was almost fierce. He licked slowly, savoring, and touched me deeper with his tongue. I moved my body into his, offering myself to him, and came a moment later with a cry that sounded distant, like it was coming from someone else entirely.

Ben dropped his head to my belly, weight pinning me while his heart thudded between my thighs. “I didn’t expect it,” he finally said, the words whispering against my stomach.

“Expect what?”

He lifted his gaze up to mine. “The sight of you. In my arms again.” He looked confused for a moment. “It’s devastating.”

I could only swallow hard at that. That, and watch him rise, our stare never breaking as he picked me up and carried me to his bed.

“I knew it,” Ben said, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. “I knew you’d come to me.”

He was propped up on one elbow beside me, his other hand exploring, taking his time. I nestled my head deeper into his pillow. “How? I didn’t even know.”

“I know things about you, Jo-Jo.” He smiled, and touched a finger to his breastbone. “In here. Probably things you don’t even know about yourself.”

I could have laughed at that. I could have said, “You have no clue who I really am,” and told him stories of first signs and conduits, and magic that allowed a person to walk the earth like a ghost. But I didn’t. He was too sincere, and so sure of his quiet belief in me—and in us—that I couldn’t shatter it. I wanted to believe it too.

“Like what?” I said instead. “Tell me something you know about me.”

“I’ll do better. I’ll show you.”

He leaned over, tenting his body above mine, and the hand that had been propping him up climbed into my hair. He pushed my thighs open with one of his, taking up residence in my most personal space…exactly, I thought, where he belonged. The sheets rustled around us, conforming to the new shape of our two bodies forming one, and I shut my eyes and inhaled deeply.

Ben’s scent was everywhere; on the pillowcases, in the air, clean and warm and dizzying as he bent over me. I lifted my head, pressing my lips to his, trying to coax some of that scent into myself. He kissed me back freely, unable to know what I was really seeking, but responding to the way I dug my fingers into his back, letting me set the pace. I sighed into his mouth, lifting one leg up his hip as my palms flattened and pressed over his back, and his skin was so hot it felt like I was raking burned silk.

I squeezed his bare hip with my right hand, then ran my nails along his outer thigh, my knuckles along the inner. As hard as he was, he stiffened further, and ground himself against me with a moan, trapping that hand. He moved his own fingers along my left side, half spanning my rib cage with his palm, dropping farther to my hip before settling beneath me, lifting me to him as he pressed from above.

He closed his eyes and whispered, “I want to go back a decade. I want to go back, and never let you go.”

I stilled, wondering how he could so clearly read the thoughts of my heart.

Go back. God, that sounded good. Back to being that girl who feared nothing, who was on the cusp of becoming the woman she was born to be, before God or fate or whatever personal dogma you hung your hat on intervened. I would do it too, in a nanosecond. I would go all the way back, and this time I’d protect her better. I’d never cross that midnight desert.

And that, I realized, was what I was really searching for night after night, as I snapped photos of the disenfranchised on the litter-strewn concrete streets and urinestained walls. Ben thought I was looking for the monster who’d taken a bite out of my young life. But I was really looking for her. For me.

“Okay,” I finally said, lifting my head, and freeing my hand to caress his flushed cheek as his eyes clouded. “Let’s go back now.”

“Yes,” he agreed, and began to lead me, slowly, kissing me lightly as his chest brushed my nipples, then harder as he opened me with one gliding caress, still cupping me from below. “Yes.”

He entered me smoothly, a key settling in its lock, a corner piece clicking home in a puzzle to make sense out of things not previously understood. I cried out with the rightness of it, and he dropped his forehead against mine, gasped into my mouth. And rocked.

I clasped my thighs around his waist and squeezed, then kissed him hard, and the shock I’d been in for the past few hours snapped so instantaneously that my life came flooding back to me—my life as it was meant to be, before I’d been touched by violence, or fate, or anyone and anything who wasn’t Ben Traina. That was when I knew I could face the dawn. With this to come back to, I thought, I could face anything at all.

Buried in me, Ben murmured against my cheek, infusing me with his scent and life and love…and his hope. Starved, I shifted, rolled and straddled him in one swift motion, lifting our hands so we were linked both above and below. He gazed up at me silently, his eyes twin brands regarding me brightly in the dark. The glow of the streetlight outside sent silver light skittering into the room, and our bodies were bathed with it as we set to a gliding rhythm. I could hear him, whispering to me in the silvery light, telling me things he’d bottled up for years, and in doing so, causing those years to melt into nothingness behind us.