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Noemi slept, although she didn’t expect to.

She came down for breakfast not knowing where to look.

Pascal apparently felt the same. They ate quickly.

Neither of them mentioned the full moon or the veranda.

They set off discussing the intricacies of the climb and nothing else.

The potential for low cloud and sudden fog which could be a hazard in the area.

How to spot and test for the snow bridges which looked solid but could crumble to air beneath them with one misplaced step.

How best to traverse rock faces on limestone mountains like the Karwendel, where seemingly secure handholds could dissolve into gravel at a touch.

They didn’t look at each other; they kept an arm’s length apart.

Noemi had never felt so separate from him – or so uncomfortably close.

Until the climb across the peak began, and they were PascalandNoemi again.

They’d been climbing together for so long, they worked as one body.

Pascal took the lead, scraping away the ice from the rock, fitting the pitons into place for the rope which would be their lifeline.

Noemi ran that round her shoulders and under her arms, watching where his hands and feet found the crevasses as he began the ascent, calculating how much further than him she would need to stretch.

Trusting him to keep them both safe. Once he was clear and she’d hoisted their packs up, it was her turn to set out.

She pressed her body close to the stone, feeling its solidity and its strength, letting that certainty soak through her.

She slowed her breathing against the inevitable adrenaline rush; checked her ice axe was securely fixed in her belt.

Banished I can’t reach it from her head and began.

Her muscles began to burn within minutes; her lungs started shivering as the oxygen levels dropped.

None of that was unexpected; none of that frightened her.

Move your left foot up. Extend your right arm.

There’s the hold, well done. The running commentary in her head was deliberate, designed to squash any lurking self-doubt.

Because that was the real danger, not the narrow ledges or the almost invisible handholds.

If self-doubt crept in, she might stop trusting her instincts, and no climber could afford to do that.

Hauke had drilled that message into her – and Pascal – from the moment they’d first pointed at a mountain and said, ‘We want to go up to the top.’

‘If it feels wrong, stop. It doesn’t matter what the reason is – a change in the weather, an unsteady rock face, a partner who’s lost their nerve. Trust your instincts and stop. A mountain’s no place for heroics.’

They’d both followed that advice rigidly and learned their craft carefully because the prize for doing it properly was…

Breathtaking. As Noemi pulled herself over the ridge, the view exploded around her.

The sky was a cloudless cornflower blue, so vivid and close she could have wrapped herself up in it.

The snow stretched out untouched as far as she could see, rising and falling in sharp silver crests.

This wasn’t simply beautiful either. This was…

A magic I want to be part of.

She couldn’t take her eyes from Pascal’s; she didn’t try.

They watched each other as she unknotted the silk rope and released herself from him.

As she peeled off her wet gloves and he gathered her white fingers inside his before she could cover them again.

When he reached for her cheek this time, she didn’t back away.

She stopped worrying about consequences that had no place in the pure wonder of a mountaintop.

They moved into each other’s arms as if they’d known the way there for years.

His body was so familiar to her and yet suddenly so new.

There was a second when their eyes met, when they caught their breath and the world shrank to the two of them.

And then their lips met too, and the world slipped away.

His mouth was sweet; his kiss was as perfect and pure as the snow and the sky.

If the light hadn’t dipped and opened her eyelids, she would have stayed buried in its warmth forever.

‘There’s fog coming – I can feel it.’

He said that like a caress, although they both knew the clouds were a warning.

They broke away from each other more slowly than was sensible, as if they’d forgotten how to be separate.

They gathered their packs; stuffed fingers that wanted to stay in contact with bare skin back into their gloves.

There was no tension between them this time, no awkwardness.

This wasn’t the veranda’s misstep. They turned back into the careful climbers the mountain’s changing moods demanded, but they didn’t turn away from each other.

They made their way off the ridge and towards their next stopping point as if they were still locked inside the kiss.

Whatever’s coming next, I won’t stop it.

Noemi caught Pascal’s eye and smiled at him, her heart swelling as he smiled back.

I love him, and he loves me. What else matters?

She didn’t care what the rest of the world would have to say about them being too young – or too wrong. The rest of the world with its laws and its judgements and its hatreds wasn’t watching. So she smiled at him again and let her heart bloom. And she stopped worrying about avalanches.

‘You said it was a climbing hut. It’s gigantic.’

When Pascal had told her they would be able to stay overnight in the Karwendelhaus climbers’ lodge before they continued to Innsbruck, she’d been expecting the kind of small wooden structure which was a feature of Bavarian and Austrian mountain trails.

Instead, the building in front of them was three stories high and appeared to have grown out of the rock face.

It was also – if the shuttered windows were anything to go by – completely deserted.

‘Don’t worry about that. The door’s never locked, and there’s always a store of food and bedding. Or so my youth leader promised.’

Pascal sounded confident, but Noemi breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened on the first push, and the lodge proved to be as well stocked as he’d hoped.

A check of the kitchen revealed stacks of tinned and bottled food; there was also wood for the fire and coal for the stove.

They dumped their packs and began making the space their own, both falling without thinking into the patterns their parents had set.

Pascal began laying a fire; Noemi worked her way round the stove, opening cans of stewed chicken and waxy potatoes.

They were hungry and cold, so they dealt with those needs first. But the kiss was there in every movement and sideways glance, waiting while they warmed themselves up and ate their simple supper.

Rippling out, spreading into, What comes next?

Noemi kept telling herself she didn’t know the answer to that.

It wasn’t true; she wasn’t a child. They were alone, there were countless bedrooms above them; she was with the person she trusted more than anyone in the world.

She knew what was possible, although she’d made no decisions.

Her mother had only discussed the subject with her in the broadest terms, and the movie cameras always cut away once the hero had kissed the heroine, but Noemi knew what happened between men and women.

The girls who ignored her at school, and didn’t care if she overheard their gossip, were obsessed with boyfriends and husbands and babies – it was all their heads were filled with.

The ones who’d been kissed, who’d done more, were objects of endless fascination – to their faces anyway.

Noemi had listened to the talk, and to the judgements that came hand in hand with an upbringing overseen by a priest. She was also aware how many of her classmates had giggling crushes on Pascal. As for her?

I’ve thought about it. About him.

Noemi glanced over at Pascal, who was staring into the fire.

She’d never admitted that to anyone; she’d barely admitted it to herself.

At first, the idea that there might be more to their friendship had been little more than an echo of the town’s assumption they would marry one day.

An assumption that had fallen away with the introduction of the blood and citizenship laws, and his move into his beloved Hitler Youth uniform and away from her.

Or it should have done. Until they’d slipped back into their old ways with Carina’s blessing, and Noemi had realised that fifteen was very different to twelve, and sixteen had brought a whole new wave of emotions.

Which don’t matter.

She shook herself. The fire was playing the same tricks on her that the moon and the snow had tried.

The laws are the laws – the world won’t allow this. He shouldn’t have kissed me; I shouldn’t have kissed him. It wasn’t magic; it was madness.

She scrambled to her feet, excuses springing to her lips. But he was there, beside her, before she could find the words.

‘Don’t run away from this. Don’t pretend it means nothing.’

His arms found her in the same moment hers reached for him.

Their mouths merged. Her body took over.

Her fingers found his face, found his hair.

When he tipped her head back and kissed the base of her throat, he wiped the world and its nonsense away.

Noemi stopped thinking; she let herself melt.

If the fire hadn’t suddenly burst into a last loud crackle, she wouldn’t have surfaced at all.

The pop opened her eyes. The flames had burned down to embers, and the temperature outside their arms was mountaintop cold.

‘Give me a moment to relight it – it’s my turn.’ She slipped out of his embrace and smiled at him. ‘There’s no hurry. There’s no sense in us freezing to death.’