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“Patrick,” she whimpered, again and again, eyelids fluttering. It was his favorite picture of her, he’d decided. Lips wet and glistening, throat exposed with her head back, cheeks pinkened. Those fall-colored eyes becoming uncontrolled.

He brought her to the very cusp, where it seemed the fall into blissful oblivion were inevitable, then watched her lunge for him, pushing him upright. She wrapped her legs around his waist and lowered herself onto the hard length of him, immediately picking up a rhythm that had already become intuitive to them both. He relished the way her body slid up and down his, how her stuttered whimpers collected in his mouth. He braced his arm around the small of her back and angled up into her, pulling her down as tightly as he could, as close as he could, and watched her rapture cascade.

He followed soon after, groaning her name into the hollow of her throat, tangling his fist into her hair. If there were pleasures greater than this, he’d never heard them told. He descended back into himself with languid reluctance and found her still here, wrapped around him.

They fell in a tangle onto their sides.

It was peaceful enough here that he thought he might be able to sleep. He closed his eyes. “Tell me a story,” he whispered into her ear.

She stirred lazily, half-dazed. “What kind of story?”

“A story about you. Before we met. In Scurry.”

Her eyes opened, a line appearing between her brows. “Wouldn’t you prefer a happier story?”

He shook his head slowly, dropped a soft kiss to her throat. “I want a real one.”

“If you insist on touching me like that, I shouldn’t be expected to speak.”

He noted her hesitancy and was unsurprised. In the brink, childhood was a balled-up wad of troublesome things. Watery dinners and long wintersand red-raw palms. Policemen with swinging batons. Mothers who cried. Fathers who shouted and split their knuckles against the wall. From the little Patrick had gathered, Nina’s upbringing had been no different.

She stalled at first, and Patrick wondered if he’d accidentally broken the spell they’d cast. But she didn’t withdraw, didn’t turn her face. She closed her eyes, and through their touching flesh, he felt her heart race.

“There was a river behind our house,” she said. “My mother used to take me swimming in it. Taught me to pick the mint leaves along its edge and make tea with them. We watched the narrow boats and she tried to teach me to sketch or paint them. She told me the boats were headed for Belavere City. She promised we’d go there together one day.”

Patrick stayed very quiet. He sensed pain laced into the words. A pain that wrenched at her even now.

“One day, I woke up at dawn and she wasn’t in her bed. She wasn’t in the kitchen, either. And somehow, I knew. I knew she was on one of those boats headed for the city. I ran to the river just as she was passing. I chased it for a mile at least, screaming for her, all the other passengers staring at me. All except for her. She didn’t even have the courage to look at me one last time. She hid her face beneath her hat and turned her head away.”

Patrick’s fingers had become clamps. He swallowed the knot caught in his throat.

“I still wonder sometimes how she could do that. How could someone leave their child without a word? Without a single glance? I know now that she wanted to give me a chance. Another kind of life. But she didn’t look back.

“I stood on that bank until sunset. Then I went back out the next morning, and the next. For the longest time, I was sure she would come back. That’s the cruelest part of childhood, I think. You don’t know how to stop hoping.”

There was no tension in Nina’s body as she spoke, no severity in her tone. Only acceptance. She spoke as though the story belonged to someone else.

Patrick thought of that small girl on the Scurry riverbank, waiting for her mother to return, and was incensed. The troubles he’d traversed as a child paled compared to this.

Patrick looked at Nina, at her blond curls and rose-stained lips, and imagined her as a girl, the breaking of her heart a gradual progression. He wondered whether, if it were possible to go back in time and hold her hand, it would have made any difference.

Patrick drew Nina closer until she was curved perfectly around him. He kissed her shoulder, her jaw, the space between her eyes. He muttered, “She was a fool,” and, “I’m sorry,” and, “Thank you.”

“For what?” she asked, her lips a hairsbreadth from his.

“For giving me that piece of yourself,” he said. “I swear to you, I’ll look after it.”

And then he kissed her endlessly. Until it seemed she’d forgotten the river and its bank. Until she’d forgotten anything but this small world. Patrick Colson and Nina Harrow, succumbing to that which had simmered and seethed between them like a growing tidal wave.

CHAPTER 50NINA

At dusk, Donny came again to pound on the door. He threatened to break it in and drag Patrick out.

“In case you forgot, Pat, an entire fuckin’ pit caved in day afore. The whole town’s waiting downstairs for you!”

The bath Patrick and I shared had become tepid, yet neither of us made any move to rise.

“I’ll be down in a moment,” Patrick called, sighing with tremendous reluctance. “Hold ’em off for a bit, will you?”