It was all going to be okay. We just had to make it through the night, through one more night out here, and then we’d get back to Woodman’s Cottage and both of us could carry on with our lives where we left off. It was going to be okay.

Sure, Hugo might have been on my mind for days now, but he didn’t have to know that. In fact, I would rather die than let him get an inkling that I had missed him. That kiss? Just a mistake. Just nothing. There was no way I was going to let him do what he did and then just waltz back into my life like it never happened. I’m sure he had loads of slutty girls waiting for him anyway, right? Hugo had been a dog, and you don’t reward a dog’s bad behavior by giving it precisely what it wants when it next comes running…

“So, you’re saying it just stared at you?”

For the first time that morning, we were able to walk side by side through the brush. I had completely ignored what happened yesterday and I didn’t even want to acknowledge that we had slept beside each other last night, tucked in a mini-tent he’d brought. In the glistening morning sun, it was almost easy to forget that we’d curled up close to each other and then fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. Everything would be fine just so long as we kept making for the cabin.

“Yup, it just looked at me. Right into my eyes,” I said, recounting the story for the third time this morning. He stopped to catch his breath and look at me.

“It’s just that… are you sure? Wolf attacks are really rare. In fact, the real problem in this area is bears, not wolves.”

“Well, I’m not an idiot, I know what a wolf is and this was a whole pack of them,” I said, the memory feeling more and more like a dream the more unconvinced he seemed.

“The only thing I can think of is that food is scarce and they were sizing you up for a meal. Or that they’ve migrated from some other place for some reason. Lucky for you they weren’t too desperate.”

“What if they came back?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t know. Fighting wolves is not exactly something I learned in my training. But they’re obviously reluctant. Don’t worry about it.”

“But I am worried though.”

“You? Well you were intimidating enough to chase them off the first time round,” he laughed.

“Intimidating? Stark naked? I don’t think so.”

“What? Naked…?”

Shit. I picked up my pace and tried to walk ahead of him, but he trotted up beside me with a massive grin on his face.

“Wait wait wait, you were naked? You never said anything about naked…”

“Okay, let’s just drop it,” I said curtly. But that naughty look he had on his face was always so damn contagious. The more I tried to keep a serious expression the more I couldn’t help but smile.

“Tell me, come on, you know you want to,” he said with a teasing wink.

“Will you just shut up?” I said and swatted him. He always loved embarrassing me like this.

“No way, I can’t believe you were out here in the forest running around in the buff. Color me impressed.”

“It wasn’t a big deal.”

“So, let me get this straight… you had a standoff with a pack of wild wolves in the forest, completely naked… but it wasn’t a big deal? Oh my god, I’ve figured it out. You’re one of those furries aren’t you? Go on, you can admit it to me Becky, you have a thing for wolves, don’t you?”

“Shut up,” I said again. I forced myself not to laugh out loud at the ridiculous way he arched one eyebrow high up at me. “Stop being such a clown. I was… bathing. I got into a little stream.”

“Go on…” he said in a mock sexy voice, his chin in his hands. I gave him another playful swat for good measure.

“I was in a little pool of water freshening up. Maybe they were afraid of the water.”

“Oh no, I think it’s obvious what happened. They took one look at your naked ass and it froze them in their tracks.”

I couldn’t help but laugh with him. Despite my best intentions to make sure he knew exactly how mad I was at him, something in me just wanted it to be like old times, where we’d both make each other laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe.

“Well, maybe, but my fat butt? Probably not.”

“Oh no, I can see it now. Are you sure they weren’t like those wolves in the cartoons, whose tongues roll out to the ground?” he said, and proceeded to demonstrate. He was hilarious. Hugo might have been an unapologetic flirt and a playboy, but when he got to making faces and goofing around, he was more or less a four-year-old with a new whoopee cushion.

“By the way, your butt is perfect,” he said, and a slightly more serious look came over his face.

“Oh, now you’ve really gone too far,” I said and laughed. But he caught my eye and held it. I gulped it.

“You’re really mad at me, huh?” he said quietly. It was uncanny, just how quiet it could get out here in the trees. I sighed.

“Well, what do you want? You were my first love and you up and left me, sorry if me being sad is a bummer for you…”

“Come on, Becky, I didn’t exactly just up and leave you. Separating was something we both decided on.”

I snorted.

“That’s not how I remember it.”

“No? We wanted different things. You wanted to get married. I was so young, Becky. I wanted to—”

“You wanted to fuck around with everything on two legs. No, I understood perfectly. So you left me, just like I said.”

He sighed. But unlike in the past, he didn’t blow up and get mad, then storm off. He didn’t jump into fighting back at me. It was weird arguing with him now that he was five years older and, surprisingly, five years more mature.

“Becky…”

“The sad thing is it doesn’t even seem like the whole SEAL thing worked out for you, huh?”

His mouth twisted. I got the strong sense I’d said something I shouldn’t have.

“Well, you’re not wrong. Max and I did good work out there Becky. I know you don’t care about any of that …but I don’t regret it,” he said quietly. “Any of it.”

The thought that he didn’t regret leaving me was enough to make my face prickle in anger.

“Okay, cool. So what are we talking about?”

He gave me a weak smile.

“Your perfect butt?” he said sheepishly.

Classic Hugo. You could never have a serious conversation with him for more than two seconds. I was about to quip something back at him when he took a step toward me and folded his lips into mine again, just as tenderly as he had before. I didn’t kiss back. But I didn’t exactly pull away either.

“Hugo, I told you we can’t do this…”

“Just kiss me,” he moaned.

I was exhausted from walking. I was weak and tired and confused. So as he kissed me, everything in me melted – my resolve, my years-long resentment for the man who’d broken my heart. How could I kiss back, and open myself to be hurt by him again? What was left to hurt, after I gave Hugo all my hopes and he broke them? But how could I resist those smooth, perfect lips against mine, when it was all I really wanted, all I had been daydreaming about ever since we set off walking this morning?

When his hands went to cup my breasts, I didn’t have to breathe a word: he already knew exactly how I liked it, exactly how to touch me so I’d be jelly in his arms. When he tilted my neck and kissed hungry trails down onto my shoulder blades he did it with all the skill and precision of someone who’d already done it hundreds of times before.

“Take this off…” he groaned to my chest, like he was relishing just being buried in my cleavage, half kissing, half nibbling. He was slowly pulling the buttons apart and kissing lower and lower down.

“What about Kirsten?” I breathed. He didn’t stop for a second.

“Kirsten? I’d give a lifetime with Kirsten for one day with you,” he said. Hugo never said stuff like that.

“Then what about all the other girls?” I said, finding it difficult to slow my breathing as the warmth of his lips explored me, one opened button at a time.

“A distraction. A consolation for knowing I fucked up the only good thing that ever happened to me.”

All at once his gaze was in mine again, but this time, it wasn’t just Hugo anymore. Not the Hugo I knew. He was the same boyish prankster he always was, but there was something else I saw in his eyes. Layers of something that hadn’t been there before. Hugo, my old Hugo, the one guy in the world I thought had the subtlety and refinement of a school boy… here he was, with something very different in his eyes….

“You know just what to say don’t you?” I said and couldn’t resist lifting him up to taste another kiss.

“Just say so and I won’t utter another word. Better yet, let me show you what I mean.”

That warm, croaky timber of his turned-on voice was enough to make my knees weak. It was like a spell. I let my head loll back as he fell to his knees and began to kiss and paw at my stomach, and I let the magic of it wash over me. This was not how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to be showing him what he missed, making him regret hurting me. Instead I had my fingers buried in his hair as he rapidly tore at my trouser buttons and yanked them to the ground.

“Hugo…”

“Did you think of me? Tell me you did. Tell me you missed my cock,” he growled as he rolled my pants to the ground, grabbed my ass in both hands and pulled me close to him.

There was no way he couldn’t tell how wet I was. There was no way he didn’t know how badly this was turning me on. He loved watching me squirm. Loved watching how hopeless it was to resist what he was doing with his hands right now…

“Hugo, please…”

“Say it. Say you missed me. I know how much you like this,” he said, and in that instant he forced my legs apart and leaned into me, pressing a hot tongue to that aching slit between my legs. A moan involuntarily escaped my lips and I grasped his shoulders to steady myself. Here? Now? But…

“Hugo, we can’t…” I moaned.

“But we will. Tell me you want to. Just please fucking say it for me Becky, say you missed this…” he breathed, and his tongue slipped effortlessly into those sleek folds. It was like a jolt of electricity ripped through me at the raw touch of his tongue on my clit, out here with nothing but the sighing trees to witness us and his firm, urgent hands pulling me closer to him, and closer…

“Tell me what you want,” he growled, with a flick of his tongue that made me see nothing but a sheet of white behind my closed eyes.

“Hugo…” I whimpered, struggling to stand.

“Say it.”

“I fucking want it!” I blurted, unable to control myself anymore. “I’ve missed you so much, Hugo. Every fucking day you were away. Please just…”

“Say it.”

“Please…”

“I need to hear you say it,” he cried.

“Fuck me, Hugo. I’ve missed your cock,” I said and the words were a delicious admission, a heavy secret I threw off, not caring if he how saw how hungry I was anymore. I had scarcely uttered the words when he grabbed me in his arms, hands slipping behind my knees, and brought my body and his tumbling down to the ground. It was a strong, effortless movement, and instantly his strong form was on mine, and the whole world around me dissolved into desperate fumbling.

He tore down his zip and pressed a hot, toned stomach against me. His cock was just what I remembered: a thick, heavy beast of a thing, rock hard and firm against my belly, just the weight of it enough to send a kick of wanting all through my body. I wanted him so bad it hurt.

Again his lips were on my neck, my tits, and he tore and kissed, tore and kissed, till my clothing was in worse shape than when he had found me in a day ago. I writhed against him, lifting up to his hard body, my hips begging.

“Do it then,” I said, biting his lower lip, “fuck me before I change my mind.” Now it was my turn to grab his ass. The fat knot of his cock pressed me wide open and before I could cry out he had stuffed the full length of it all the way inside me. So many days we had passed like this, before the break up… so many times he had fucked me, over and over again. How well I knew that deep, tight feeling of him inside me, how I recognized the scent of his flushed, warm skin, as familiar to me as my own.

With strong hands around each of my wrists, he pinned me roughly to the floor, so my half-undressed chest was defenseless against his hungry gaze. Our bodies fit snugly together like they were a single thing that had broken long ago. Every nerve in my body zapped and whined to be with him again, the sensation a million times more delicious than even my most favorite memories. Despite him pinning me hard to the ground, I couldn’t help but writhe up to him with each deep, hard thrust. Our eyes were tangled in a soft gaze, but further down our bodies locked in a more brutal way, clashing angrily against one another, like we could make up for five years of missed fucking all at once, each thrust tumbling hard on the tail of the one before it.

I couldn’t help but yelp with each merciless curl of his hips, the cries catching in my throat. He knew me inside out. He knew precisely what my body craved. His body had broken mine in a long time ago and remembered it still, remembered it right down to the deepest, most quivering wet part inside me. Time slowed and I could see as though in a dream his wet lower lip, parted, his intense gaze nailing me down just as surely as his hands were, the swell of muscle under skin as he tensed and pounded into me… He didn’t stop. I wrapped my legs round him to brace myself. He didn’t relent no matter how animalistic the sounds coming from my lips were. He didn’t even pause after my body shook and quake and I began to come.

“Fuck. Yes. That’s right, come. Oh fuck,” he hissed, the tendons on his neck straining. God, Hugo was a beautiful man. He was like a machine, but velvety. His cock was ruthless; he turned my whole shuddering body into an orgasm engine, so that after one had split through me, he only pummelled deeper in and fucked till I had another, and another…

I don’t know where the strength came from, but my body bucked and convulsed under him and I shoved two hands into his shoulders, pushing him away and releasing his grip on my wrists. He was now on the bottom, pressed into the wild earth with the grass and stones and mud, and it was my turn to devour him. I had scarcely recovered from a hard, juicy orgasm when the sight of him laying there beneath me had me riled up all over again.

“Come inside me,” I begged. I felt dizzy. Hands propped on his chest, I sunk again onto his cock, taking it all in, grinding my hips into his to take every thick inch of him. Cold mud squelched against my knees. The trees whispered. There was nothing now but hot, hungry flesh, and our breath, both laced with moans and whimpers. When he clutched at my waist and cried out, he spread muddy handprints all over my bare skin. I smiled and clenched down on him, every part of my body eager to swallow those warm wet spurts he sent deep inside.

“Becky… oh fuck,” he cried and I felt him jerk beneath me.

I imagined years of cum shooting me through me. Everything he had denied me for years he’d now given, emptied out, and fucked me till I was completely exhausted.

I collapsed onto him, breath ragged. It was strange how a body could be both familiar and strange at the same time, how being close to him like this now felt like he had never been further from me. I had tried so hard to scrub this man from my life. I had tried to forget his smile, his touch. And now I was laying shattered in his arms, right back at square one somehow. I sighed and breathed in his smile. I could think about all of that later, once I stopped shaking.

I don’t know how, but time kept tumbling along and we went with it, Hugo and I, finding an old, easy tempo with one another again. We did our best to clean the mud and dust off our bodies, located our clothes and laughed at each other and the situation, cheeks flushed. Night was beginning to fall again and there was no sign of the cabin. But I said nothing. Maybe part of me didn’t want to break the spell of being out here with him like this. Two nights before I had been terrified that I wouldn’t even make it out alive. But tonight I had perfect faith in Hugo. He’d keep us both safe and we’d get to where we were going, one way or other. So why not relax? Why not just watch the way the sky was turning pink between the lowest tree branches and let it all be?

Though it was only the second time we were setting up our miniature camp with Hugo’s emergency tent, it already felt like a routine. Hugo had always been a bit… immature. But the way his rough hands moved easily over everything, the way he cut some kindling and seemed to magic a fire out of nowhere, it all struck me as deeply impressive. As physically mature somehow. Material things just obeyed him. He had the kind of grace with tarps and fire and rocks that a virtuoso has with an instrument. I helped him in silence and soon we were tucked inside the makeshift tent, the cold out there and the warm in here.

“That was nice,” he said after the longest time. We were both on our backs, staring up at nothing, but our hands were loosely linked between us. I had touched him by accident but left my hand there, and now it felt like that slight contact was almost as lovely as the… deeper contact we’d just had.

“Yeah. It was.” On the edge of my thoughts I felt a tidal wave of doubt and anxiety threatening to burst through. What did this all mean? Was he even going to stay? What the hell were we doing? Were we together again? Did I even want that? But somehow those thoughts just didn’t seem as interesting just then as relishing the gentle weight of his hand against mine.

“Hey, do you want to be my forest wife?” he said.

I yanked my hand away.

“I mean, it’s just, you remember don’t you? Our beach wedding? That day at the—”

“Of course I remember.”

His hand stretched out to touch mine again.

“I remember it like it was yesterday. We had those little crabs as our kids. It was hilarious. Carl and Crustaceous.”

“What?”

“Those were their names, remember?” he laughed, “Crustaceous was the first born, the overachiever, and Carl was like, the underdog.”

“Oh. I don’t honestly don’t remember that,” I said.

“No? Man that was the best part. You beach divorced me at the end though.”

“What? That’s not how I remember it.”

“Oh yeah, you were cold about it, it tore me up for days.”

“Huh.”

“Well, we can have a second chance out here, can’t we? We can be forest husband and wife. I’ll fend off the big bad wolves and you can keep our tent pretty.”

I leaned into him, mostly because it was warm, and only partly because I think it’s where I wanted to be.

“Yeah? We’ll live out here and just be wild people?”

“Exactly. It’s kind of hot, actually. Living off the land. Nothing but each other…”

“God, I’d get so skinny.”

“And I’d be like Tarzan.”

“What would we do all day?” I said.

He turned to look at me. It would have been nice to think that I had some control over that maddening ache that was right back at my clit again. It would be nice to say that I was thinking clearly and rationally just then. But the truth was Hugo had a hold on me that resisted all sane thought. Wanting him was more like hunger or thirst, more like a reflex, than something that had words or reason to it. And the other truth was that I didn’t even want to resist him, not really, not out here when every other thing seemed to be crumbling around us, and happily so.

When he slipped a hand between my legs I silently opened them for him. When he stroked a careful finger at the slit between my thighs, I lifted my hips. Material things just obeyed him. My body was the same, and there was nothing to do but submit to his sure, skillful hands.

He grasped the top of one thigh and opened me wide, then without any further ceremony crammed the bulk of his gorgeous cock into me, his hard chest pressed close all along my spine. His one hand at my clit and the other slightly lifting my leg, he fucked me with a tender insistence. On our sides, him spooning me close behind in a warm hug, I shut my eyes and let myself go. In the quiet evening air, the crinkle of the plastic beneath us was the only sound. That and the quiver of my breath with each slow, tight thrust.