“The deep fall is my favorite time of the year. The bitterness and fatality of winter has yet to set in, and for a few weeks, the sun and the wind are both high and strong at the same time. The leaves give up their colors like fireworks as I head to my weekly concierge appointment.”

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The ascent of Crossroads was mystifying to Eve, who had never invested much thought into marketing her blog. She just loved to write, and she was unemployed. She set up her blog as an attempt to generate some ad revenue, but knew that it was a long shot. In an attempt to be practical she had also filled out job applications for the corner grocery and her favorite shoe store, which were both looking for seasonal help.

Tonight, she was out with Cliff, telling herself to forget money issues and just have fun. He slid his hands over her body and his fingers tickled at her belly button. “Do you feel that energy flow?” he asked her, scooping her arms up over her head and into a perfect tree pose. With her arms stretched and cupped together, it left her supple breasts unguarded for play, and it became a game for him to massage her nipples and nibble at her ears while she struggled to maintain her balance and find nirvana.

Eve always lost—but won—when the game dissolved into deep kisses and spread thighs, hands sliding over clothes, tripping on open buttons and peeling zippers. They made love with urgency every time, both of them servicing the other selflessly, until they were hot, sticky and exhausted. They made love until they were dizzy and pungent with sweat, and until the sun was coming up or going down. It was the honeymoon period, and it was making Eve want to marry his ass.

She kept going to the gym every few days. The tension, both of resentment and attraction, never got better with Milo. After the first few weeks with Cliff, she learned that he and Milo did see each other on a regular enough basis to qualify them as good friends. In fact, they almost seemed to be best friends and she tried not to be jealous. She never saw them doing anything which seemed anything other than friendly—besides, she and Cliff had never formalized the nature of their relationship. They were just fucking as far as she knew.

Seeing Milo all the time was surprisingly uncomfortable. He was always wearing pants that were snug around the trunks of his thighs and loose on his hips, shirts that didn’t hide his muscular physique. Eve caught herself lusting after him, certain that he only saw her as his friend’s obnoxious girlfriend—well, his friend’s obnoxious fuck buddy, anyway.

In a tiny part of Eve’s heart, she wanted to quit the gym, but her body improved by leaps and bounds under Milo’s capable stewardship. She had felt the effects immediately, on her posture, her stamina, her grace, and her confidence, but now she was beginning to notice the difference in her appearance, too.

“You know,” Cliff suggested, “you could make your blog about your life changes, weight loss, writing, and diet, if you wanted. I could help you.”

Eve had followed his advice and filled her diet with more unprocessed foods and was reaping the benefits. Her eyes were alert and radiant with extra energy. Her complexion was brighter and she felt more robust and spiritual, calm and strong, confident and clear-minded. She also felt sexy as all hell.

One night, after a steady hour of meditation, she climbed into bed with Cliff without even thinking about going back to her own place for the night. She didn’t even have any clothes here, other than the rumpled ones on the floor. She slunk into the bed, winding around him naked and began to drop off to sleep.

And that’s when she should have known that she was in trouble.

Her hand traveled lovingly, tenderly along Cliff’s side, then down his back. Cliff laid with his back to her, so she lingered within an inch of his skin and traced her fingernails over the crack of his perfect ass, feeling drunk, even though she hadn’t touched alcohol in weeks.

“Hey Cliff,” she called up to him in a drowsy, lazy voice.

“Yeah?” Cliff replied sleepily.

“What are we doing?” she asked him. Her voice sounded again like her old self, meek and just a little afraid.

“I don’t know.” He twisted over onto his back and slung one arm up around the pillow under his head. He didn’t look directly at Eve. “After everything that happened with Allison,” he murmured, then shook his head. “I am worried about letting you down, to be honest.”

“You wouldn’t let me down,” Eve said gently. Her hand planted over his chest and she calmed at the beat of his heart beneath her palm. “I’m not Allison.”

“My marriage taught me that even the most sacred commitments can be totally ruined. I’m still not even sure whose fault it was. Should she have been warmer to me? Should I have never changed? Did we just move too fast from the very beginning, and our relationship was just some shared hallucination that was never real?” Cliff laughed awkwardly. “Remember when we talked about my changes? Allison calls it my ‘quarter-life crisis.’”

“I remember,” Eve answered, feeling trepidation. Maybe she shouldn’t have just crawled into his bed. Maybe that wasn’t what this was, after all. “What about it?”

“It’s made me wary of dating. I guess, for me, dating is like marriage. I don’t want to lose my way in another relationship.”

“Oh, yeah,” Eve said, feeling dismayed. “Me too, actually. The whole ‘crossroads’ thing for me, too. I don’t know why I even asked.” Was her face beet red? She could hear the blood pounding in her ears. “Getting back into a serious relationship just feels tough, too demanding.”

“Being my girlfriend is not demanding,” Cliff informed her gently.

“Hey, do you want to go costume-shopping with me?” Eve had decided that a quick change of subject was required. “All the good stuff is going to be gone next week, and there’s going to be a huge haunted house party off Baker. I’m going to be a zombie bride. I know it’s cliché, but I just don’t care.”

She gazed up at Cliff, expecting him to jump with her onto this new topic, hoping that they could leave behind the awkwardness of the relationship definition stuff behind. Unfortunately, he was still looking at her with somber eyes. She stilled when she felt his hand wrap around her arm. He squeezed.

“I know one thing, and that is that I do love you, Eve,” he said, soft, and certain.

Halloween evaporated from Eve’s thoughts, and her heart gave a twinge. They’d known each other for almost six weeks now, and been sleeping together for less than three, so this declaration was unexpectedly early. She pursed her lips to keep them from trembling, and her eyes almost clouded up. She blinked rapidly to clear the fog away and took a deep, silent breath. She adored Cliff Bauer, and if he was in love with her? That was enough.

Eve lifted one small hand to kiss against Cliff’s cheek, stroking down along his powerful chin.

“I love you, too,” she whispered, feeling the tightness in her throat.

Cliff pulled her close with one arm, sliding his other hand up to her breast and cupping it gently. He pulled her beneath his body and kissed her deeply, until they were both gasping for breath. He entered her with deep, perfect strokes, as only a yoga god could. They climaxed together quickly, faces tingling, exerted and grateful, and then they curled together in the afterglow and fell asleep.

* * *

White, blood-splattered corset, dirty crinoline skirt, and tattered bridal veil in hand, Evelyn Mooney stood at the back of the line in Boo’s Halloween Depot. The line’s progress was sluggish, to say the least. Next to her, Skye Lamar was clutching earth-tone patchwork pants, ragged brown faux-leather boots, a kit of face makeup, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. “I don’t know where we’re going to find hay in New York City,” she said as they took another step toward the cashier.

“There’s still time to be Sexy Grim Reaper,” Eve teased.

“I’ll pass,” Skye replied. She was heartily opposed to the overt sexuality of every female costume in Boo’s. Her scarecrow was pointedly unisex. “What’s your not-my-boyfriend-but-kind-of-my-boyfriend Cliff going to be?”

“Absent, probably,” Eve replied. Halloween was such a bright and noisy holiday and Cliff wouldn’t enjoy the over-stimulation. He said he was going to attend the haunted house party on Baker with Eve and Skye, but she had her doubts. Even if he did go, he probably wouldn’t last past ten o’ clock. He just wasn’t the type and she couldn’t help but love him for that. He really was a big old golden retriever. All he seemed to want out of his life was to spend his nights in a quiet, candlelit living room, getting his kind-of-but-not-really-girlfriend’s cuddles under a warm blanket.

Eve was trying to let go of the boyfriend/girlfriend construct that she had accepted as conventional reality since middle school. She really was. Even though they were both buying groceries for each other, sleeping in each other’s beds every night, and only had protected sex about half the time, they still weren’t technically boyfriend and girlfriend. But she got it. They weren’t in high school anymore. Maybe he was right; maybe the labels were all pretty meaningless.

“If my kind-of-but-not-really-boyfriend Cliff is going to come with us,” Eve said, interrupting her own thoughts, “then I think he’s probably going to be something simple, like a vampire or a mummy.

Skye smiled knowingly and nodded as they milled forward another few feet. “And what is his kind-of-but-not-really-boyfriend Milo going to be?” she asked.

Eve glowered. Milo McNamara was spending a lot of time with Cliff lately, and was even infringing on the time she normally spent alone with him. She was trying not to let it get to her. She often found herself on the couch squeezed between the two men on movie night and she wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that. She wasn’t exactly jealous but she was certainly confused and even a little torn.

On these nights that she spent wedged between Cliff and Milo, her pussy was definitely sending her requests, calling out to Milo and Cliff both. Sometimes, Milo would lean past her to grab a handful of Cliff’s homemade “zesty” kale chips, and she’d get a whiff of him—an aroma of leather and asphalt and oddly sweet sweat—and she’d get so wet that she would spend the rest of the night shifting around, trying to find a position that might discreetly massage her clit.

Whenever Milo would be on top of her, helping her deepen her thigh and hamstring stretches, she would catch Cliff looking and he’d just wave and smile. How was he so trusting? Or did he not care? Did he think that she was still sleeping with other men in her limited free time, and if Milo was one of those men, would he even mind? Just how open was this relationship thing?

There were times that she saw Milo and Cliff together that gave her pause as well. It was hard to describe what made the moments suspicious. They seemed to light up in each other’s presence. She could catch a glimpse of them laughing, not even touching, and feel as if she’d caught them in a moment of intimacy.

Eve was on a new path, and it would only hinder her progress toward self-love if she stopped to fume every time her kind-of-but-not-really-boyfriend showed favor to someone else. Hell, he was a yoga instructor. He spent most of his day pressing his hands into the bodies of strangers, smoothly coaxing them to release their tensions. If he wanted to fuck someone else he’d have plenty of opportunity.

“Milo isn’t really the type to go out in public, socialize, and have a good time,” Eve answered Skye’s question with more certainty than she felt. She couldn’t imagine someone as stoic as Milo jumping up and down on a ghoul-infested dance floor. “He’s more likely to call the cops with a noise complaint.” They stepped forward another few feet and were finally next in line to be served.

Skye grinned. “What a sexy brute, huh?” She nudged Eve’s shoulder. Skye was well aware of how attractive both men were, and was constantly making comments to Eve—and to Cliff, and to Milo for that matter—on the subject. Maybe Skye and Milo would hook up, they were both free agents after all. Then Eve could possibly stop fighting with herself about whether or not it was wrong to masturbate with both of the men taking on starring roles.

“Next please!” the cashier yelled.

* * *

“Cliff, where are those really slutty boots of mine?” Eve hollered from his bathroom. She’d just finished applying her contacts. No cat glasses for this bash.

“I don’t really think those are appropriate tonight,” Milo muttered, ducking into the bathroom to share the mirror. He was dressed in a full Wolverine costume, from the spiked bouffant to the metal blades protruding from his hands. He wore distressed jeans, boots, a white undershirt and an open red flannel. He only needed to apply two fake mutton chops to his cheeks.

Eve was wearing her blood-stained white corset and dirty crinoline skirt with white tights. She was finishing the final touches on a face of porcelain foundation with dramatically askew eye makeup and smeared crimson lipstick. It was impossible to tell if the smear came from kissing or feeding. Either way, she looked like a hot mess and she liked it. She couldn’t believe her makeup looked so good, especially as she was already a little tipsy.

“Cliff, have you seen my boots?”

“Which ones?”

“The slutty ones!”

“Which slutty ones?”

Milo snickered as he pasted the left mutton chop to his face.

“Anyone seen the face paint?” Cliff was going to be Frankenstein.

“I’ve got the face paint,” Skye’s voice announced from the living room.

“Oh. Thank you.”

Milo pasted the second mutton chop into place.

* * *

Eve couldn’t make heads or tails out of this crowd anymore. They really should have thought more carefully about the boozy pre-party makeup session. Skye was the scarecrow on the dance floor, but the strobed lighting shifted from cool blue to a deep, dark red, and somewhere near the life-size casket, a fog machine switched on and filled the floor with smoke. Skye seemed to disappear, to bleed away into the shadows. One second, Eve’s eyes were fastened to her, fixated, and in the next, she was casting around in a panic, not sure where she was going.

There was a gory maze in the Baker house basement where Cliff had vanished, and Milo didn’t make it out of the hall of mirrors. Now Eve was alone, and tipsy, in a giant public house party.

Eve groped for an unoccupied chair and tried to stand on it, shrieking when a pair of fake, rubbery arms pretended to grab her. Standing on the chair more steadily after the initial scare, she searched for Skye. How could she just be gone? Eve climbed back down and fumbled through the throngs of other blood-spattered patrons, people in wolf masks and giant skeleton suits.

This house was too big and there were to many people. Every room was a strange new world: A realistic murder scene, An empty neon-lit room with the words ‘Get Out’ scrawled on the wall, a small room filled with rubber bats and many others. Eve discovered that it was impossible to even walk down the stairs without unseen hands grabbing and pinching any exposed flesh. She crashed down the last few steps and banged her head on the cap after being grabbed by one of the hands.

“Argh,” Eve moaned into the carpet. She figured she’d just stay here. She was so tired of looking for her friends. There were hundreds of people here. She might as well just let someone rob her corpse and get it over with.

“I am so sorry,” said an unfamiliar male voice. Eve shifted her head from between her arms so she could look at him, but of course, he was wearing a gorilla suit. “They’re paying me like ten bucks an hour to trip people up. Man, I hate this gig.”

Eve groaned as clumsy hands fumbled over her and pulled her upright. “I’m just trying to find my friends,” she explained dully. Her head still stung from the blow against that cap.

“What’s your name?” the muffled voice behind the mask asked.

Eve held back, just wanting to find Skye, Cliff, or Milo, not to be sucked into this random person’s drama for the evening. “Um, nothing,” she answered, twisting her eyebrows into an expression of sympathy even though she didn’t feel particularly bad for this guy. She swayed on her feet. “Nobody.”

“Your name is nobody?” The gorilla tugged at her, leading her toward the next room, which was clogged with smoke again.

“Um yeah.” Eve resisted his pull, but he was much bigger than she was, and she didn’t feel too good, either. “I just want to find my friends.”

The nameless gorilla planted one hand firmly onto Eve’s ass. That hand was not part of any costume. Those were real, flesh-and-blood fingers on her body.

“Hey!” Eve screeched. She pulled away, and this time, the gorilla released his hold so suddenly that Eve staggered back a few feet. When she turned and straightened, expecting to fend off his nonsensical advances again, her eyes widened. He had released her because Wolverine was shoving at his chest, sending him stumbling backward with each fresh assault.

Reactions bloomed and died in Eve with amazing speed. She was relieved and even elated to see Milo, then she was alarmed that they might fight over her. Then, as Wolverine flicked off his knives and pummeled into the gorilla with bare knuckles twice, sending him sprawling and unconscious onto a vacant sofa, she was both impressed and concerned. She closed the gap between them without even thinking about it, somehow seeing through the fog of pain in her head.

“Are you okay?” Eve called up to Milo, touching his arm and chest without even thinking about it. Right now, she just wanted the comfort and stability of his arms around her.

“I’m fine,” Milo answered coolly, sounding exactly like his old self. He didn’t, however, look like his old self. His eyes were intense and almost glowing as they lit across her face and body. “Was he touching you? What happened?”

“Just my ass,” Eve answered, and as Milo moved to storm past her and return to the gorilla sprawled on the couch, Eve jolted into his path and snatched at his arm, alarmed again. “It was no big deal! He’s just some drunk in a monkey suit!”

“Your ass is a huge deal,” Milo assured her, as seriously as he’d ever said anything before. Then his head cocked to the side and he added, in an almost curious tone, “You’re bleeding.”

“What?”

“Come with me,” Milo answered, taking her hand in his. His hand felt dry and warm, especially compared to her own icy, sweaty palms. She relished the fact that Milo wasn’t even slightly inebriated, or unprepared in the least. If terrorists attacked this house right now, Milo would no doubt save the day.

He pulled her to the corner of the dark bathroom. He flicked on a switch and a harsh fluorescent bulb stuttered and came alive over a broken mirror. Eve was still blinking uncertainly up at it as Milo reached behind her and swept the bathroom door shut, twisting the lock into place.

Eve could see herself in the mirror now. She could see the little red rivulet originating just above her ear. She gasped and leaned closer to her reflection. So much for the party.

“This party never made sense anyway,” Eve slurred up to him. Despite the razor-sharp pain on the left side of her head right now, she was delighted to be sequestered in this bathroom with Milo. She could hear the party burbling on through the door, but here, on the other side of this locked panel, with Milo, she was safe. They were safe. “I mean, what even was the theme?” she wondered drunkenly, leaning against the sink for support. “There were ballrooms and mirror halls and operating tables and shark fins and upside-down crosses. And lots and lots and lots of other really weird shit.”

“Shh,” Milo murmured, tenderly bracing her chin with two fingers and tilting her head to the side with a delicacy that surprised her. He inspected the cut above her ear. “We might not have to go home,” he said. “I can fix you.”

Eve gazed up at him adoringly. In this moment—with him lightly touching her face, the light bulb on the fritz, and herself a little drunk, a little dizzy, and a little sore—she did adore him. He’d saved her. He acted like he hated her, but here she was, in his arms.