I close my eyes. I’m not thinking. But I am feeling.

His hand twitches under mine, like he is trying to grip the ground tighter. I know he’s turned to stare at me, but I am watching my hand with a sort of detached fascination as it closes over his. The warmth of his skin under my still-cool hand seems to melt into me, and I swear I can feel his pulse jumping nervously. Or maybe it’s mine.

He makes a small sound, like an inrush of breath, and then slowly turns his hand over. For a second, we stay that way, motionless, palm to palm, and then slowly, like he’s afraid of startling me, he starts to enclose my hand in his.

“Reg—” I don’t think he means to say my name, and that’s what makes it so much better.

“Adam,” I swallow, and saying his name feels different somehow, like I’m breaking some kind of inner taboo. That same sliding looseness that I felt on the boulder the night of the reunion, only magnified tenfold. I inhale sharply and my chest expands, and suddenly it’s like I’m able to breathe too deeply. I gulp in a great lungful of air, high off the sudden rush of oxygen that makes everything brighter and more real.

“You—” he starts to say, and then something flickers across his face. He looks down at our entwined hands again, and then suddenly he pulls me to him.

I slam into his side and blink up at the warm brown of his eyes, so comforting and familiar, but the expression on his face is one I’ve never seen before. Or if I have, I haven’t let myself think about what it means.

“Adam, we should…” I don’t know what I’m about to say, but it doesn’t matter, because whatever it was is swallowed up in a gasp when his mouth claims mine.

The gasp turns into a moan as I part my lips eagerly, because kissing Adam is something I’ve been fighting against for sixteen years. Letting myself melt into him feels like the kind of surrender I should be fighting against, but it’s so much easier to press my body to his and let his hand wander up and sink into my hair. It’s so much easier to let him move my head, tilting to deepen the kiss, his tongue melding and dancing with mine. In the back of my mind, I feel weak for giving in, but that weakness makes me giddy. That devilish thrill of indulging after abstaining so long.

Kissing him wrecks everything I’ve worked so hard for, but nothing feels better than smashing all that progress to smithereens.

I squeeze my eyes shut. The sound of the rushing water fills my head but the rest of my senses belong to him. The feel of his sun-warmed skin under my fingers, the taste of his lips. When I breathe, my lungs are filled with the scents of pine and chlorophyll, but over everything is the clean scent of Adam, so familiar and so missed. If I open my eyes right now, they’d be wet with tears, so I keep them closed and keep kissing him, almost afraid to stop.

“Regina…” I feel, rather than hear, my name on his lips as he pulls back, moving over me so that I bend back on my elbows. The sun makes his blond hair a gilded halo, backlighting him so I cannot fully see his face, but then I blink and a tear falls, and I can see him clearly now. Another flicker of something passes across his eyes. I think he might say something when he reaches up to touch his finger to the wet trail down my cheek. I brace myself for him to remind me of what I said the afternoon we first met, when he carefully bandaged my knee, showing more attention and worry for me than my own family ever had. I’d lifted my chin at him and told him that I never cried.

I don’t cry.

I have no idea what’s happening to me right now.

His finger on my cheek is so tender that another tear falls. Emotion I’ve been running from, literally running, mile after mile, is catching up to me all at once. “I never stopped thinking about you,” Adam says, so softly I can barely hear him over the falls.

“You shouldn’t have left me,” I tell him.

He nods, casting his eyes down for a second because he knows I am not whining. I am not trying to make him feel guilty because the years I spent hating him made me strong enough to be with him now. “I shouldn’t have,” he agrees, just as quiet and matter-of-fact as me. He does not try to defend himself. “But I am here now…”

I lick my lips and a smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. “You are…”

“No more wasted time, Reggie.” He bends and brushes his lips to kiss my wet cheek. I close my eyes again as his lips trace the trail up, kissing my eye, then across the bridge of my nose to the birthmark under my right eye. “Nothing after you ever felt…” he inhales a little, a slight hitching in his chest, and I gasp as his lips move to my neck. My pulse thuds in my ears as he kisses and then sucks, gently at first, but when I tilt my head, I feel a vibration as a low growl rumbles up from his throat and suddenly I am flat on my back, his weight crushing me into the rock, and Adam is kissing me so hard that it takes my breath away.