When evening fell, Hildy came to Paige's roundhouse, where I'd been left alone while Paige took care of some things – to lead me away and told me that before the feast, I would be bathed, and that I could take my bath with Paige, if I liked. Since it was bitterly cold and, as far as I knew, the Vikings didn't have access to electricity or hot water tanks, I assumed she meant some kind of hellish dip in a half-frozen stream.

"No," I told her, standing outside and refusing to move as the wind whipped my hair against my face. "It's fine, I don't need a bath."

I moved to go back in, desperate to feel the fire-warmth again, and found myself blocked. Hildy had her arm outstretched in front of me. I looked at her, at first assuming she'd made some kind of mistake – but she didn't drop her arm. Nor did she speak.

"What is it?" I asked, confused. What did this woman want?

"I'll send for you soon," she replied firmly. "So you can be bathed before –"

"No," I said, slowing my speech because I believed maybe Hildy was having trouble understanding me. "I don't need to be bathed. Thank you for offering but –"

Hildy laughed heartily, cutting me off. "Oh I'm not offering, girl," she said, drawing herself up and eyeballing me. "You'll be seated at the high table, with my Jarl. As such, you will be bathed beforehand."

"No," I said, for the third time, and in a much less friendly tone. "I don't know what part of 'I don't want a bath' you don't understand, but I – Hildy, I don't want a bath. Now if you'll please –" I tried to shove her out of the way, because the tip of my nose was getting numb in the cold.

Hildy held herself in place. She was quite a bit shorter than me, and quite a bit stronger than I'd imagined. I shoved her again, harder, and she slide to the side.

"Paige won't allow it either!" She yelled, when I finally managed to get past her. "I'll send her to fetch you, then! I'll send your friend to fetch you for your bath!"

"Do what you want, you crazy old bat," I muttered, before making my way to the westerly roundhouse following the path Paige had told me led right up to it. I walked inside and found Jarl Ragnar seated in front of a fire, shirtless from the waist up and effortlessly magnificent.

"What is it?" He asked, seeing that I was annoyed. "Don't give these people trouble, Emma. We're their guests, Jarl Eirik feasts us tonight."

"I –" I started, before stopping to gather my thoughts because, as I said – Ragnar was shirtless. He was sprawled across a kind of wide wooden bench, bigger than a single bed and piled high with soft furs – and I was pretty sure I'd never seen a sexier sight in my life. "I – uh, Ragnar, um, I – sorry, what am I talking about? Oh, yeah. I don't want a bath. I was just telling Eirik's assistant that I – "

"Eirik's what?" Ragnar responded, irritated but smiling, because he'd definitely noticed my reaction to his state of half-undress. "And it's Jarl Eirik to you, Emma. Don't make me regret bringing you here. If the woman wants you bathed, you'll be bathed."

I almost snapped at him at that point but luckily the humor got me before the anger could. "What am I?" I asked, laughing. "A baby? I need to be 'bathed?' Does the Great Jarl Eirik find his powers weakening if an unclean woman is seated too close to him during a feast?"

Ragnar got to his feet so quickly I thought he might be about to strike me and crouched low, to defend myself. It was his turn to laugh.

"What are you going to do?" He chuckled, pulling me in against his warm, strong chest. "Are you going to fight me, girl? You're stronger than most of the women, it's true, but I don't think you'd have much luck in combat with a Jarl. As for being bathed – will the fire-hearted one allow her Jarl to advise her?"

The fire-hearted one. I liked that. I liked it so much I decided to keep how much I liked it from Jarl Ragnar – although something told me he might have guessed it anyway. I also liked the way he referred to himself not as a Jarl, but as her Jarl. My Jarl. And I definitely wasn't admitting that – even, at the time, to myself.

"You can advise me if you want," I told him, turning my head up so I could rest my chin on his chest and look into his glacial blue eyes as the firelight danced within them. "But only on matters of combat and – I don't know – sailing and conquering and things like that. You wouldn't take my advice on how to take an estate, would you? Or how to swordfight? So why should I take yours on women's cleanliness?"

Ragnar looked back down at me, half smiling, half stern. "You're a troublesome girl, aren't you?" He asked, bending his head to kiss my mouth slowly and only pausing to speak again when I was breathless with the sudden need he conjured to life deep in my belly. "A very troublesome girl. Keep it up and I might see fit to punish you. As it is, I am not advising you on women's things, gods no. I advise you only on Viking ways. It is our way that a woman bathes before being seated with a Jarl, at his feasting table. Also before taking to his bed, although I admit I have not been as fastidious on these matters as I could have been."

I hovered there, in the liminal state between wanting to keep talking to Ragnar and wanting the talking to stop immediately. It made the blood rush hot and fast in my veins to be so close to him. He was so big, so masculine, as solid and unbending as a hundred year old oak tree. It made me feel drunk, it made my limbs slow and my mouth hungry for his kisses to be held so tightly against him as I was.

I laughed – not a loud, mocking laugh but a softer, gentler one. Still, a laugh. "You're right," I told him. "You were not fastidious on that point. So why must we be fastidious now?"

He opened his mouth to respond, and just before he did I slipped one of my hands under his leathers and found him, thick and hard against his thigh. "Emma," he started, but his words turned to a heavy sigh and his eyes closed and I felt something soften inside me.

I was raised in the modern world, by educated, cosmopolitan parents. I knew where babies came from, and didn't find any part of it funny or embarrassing, by the time I was 8 years old. My mother took me to the doctor to get a prescription for birth control pills when I was 16, after I told her my first serious boyfriend and I were going to have sex. What I'm saying is that up until I met Jarl Ragnar, I considered myself a fully, confidently sexual human being.

So why did it feel like such a shock to experience the reactions in my own body when he touched me? Even he noticed it. When I shivered as he loosened the ties of my tunic before pulling it off over my head, and then bent down to take one of my nipples into his mouth, he saw the look of surprise on my face.

"What is it, girl?" He asked, kissing his way to the other nipple and applying the same exquisite technique of soft suction and a firm tongue to it. "Why do you look as if I had just transformed into a wolf in front of your eyes?"

A wolf. It was a fitting animal to choose. I felt like prey in front of Jarl Ragnar, as vulnerable and sensitized as a doe in a forest clearing. I didn't recall ever having felt that way with ex-boyfriends. Sex with them was light, fun, as casual an amusement as an afternoon nature walk – it never made me feel the way Ragnar was making me feel, with the lust seeming to emanate from his pores, entrancing me, making me his.

"I –" I said, trying to think of something to say. But there was nothing – or there were no words for it, anyway. All I was doing that at that moment was feeling, and there was no room for anything else within me.

"You have a virgin's look in your eye, Emma," he whispered, pushing his tongue into my mouth and kissing my deeply, until my thighs ached for the feeling of him between them. "Have you never been with a man who knew what it was to take a woman before?"

To 'take' a woman. I might have objected to that term, had I been anything other than literally weak-kneed and slick-thighed with desire. Men didn't take women, that's not what sex was. Sex was a mutually pleasurable activity between two adults. That's what I'd been told, even if part of me had always wondered if maybe, maybe, there wasn't more to it than that.

And standing there in Jarl Ragnar's roundhouse, with his hand slipping up, up my inner thigh, and then pressing, holding itself against me in a gesture that could not have been any more obviously about ownership, I suddenly knew with absolute certainty that everything I'd been told was wrong. Or, not in any way close to the whole story. I didn't balk to see the aggression in his gaze when I turned my face up to him and he took it in his hands and plunged his tongue into my mouth again, hard.

"Voss," he swore – I knew it was a swear because of how – and when – he said it. I cried out when he pushed one finger into me, and then a second, and then took them back out to hold up in the light.

"You're as wet as a doe's flanks after the rain," he told me, his voice thick and deep, before pulling me down onto the bed of linens and furs that had been laid out for us.

I straddled him as we undressed each other, peeling off layers of wool, leather, fur, pushing them aside in our frenzy to feel each other's bare skin. And then I was naked on top of him and he was looking up at me, consuming me with his eyes as his hands grasped greedily at my flesh. He wasn't inside me, not yet. His cock was between my legs, but it wasn't inside. I pushed my hips forward, sliding my wetness up the length of him, and he dug his fingers into my hip so hard it hurt. I kept going, too, and my mouth fell open as what little control I still had seeped away.

It quickly became too much. Ragnar lifted me up, just far enough to wrap his hand around himself and push the head between my lips, groaning loudly as he did so.

"Emma," he said, settling himself against me. "Emma, Emma..."

I slid down on him, then – all the way, gasping and throwing my head back and clenching my hands into fists. It stung a little, at the moment when I was most full, but the sting was sweet. He was sweet. I only forced my eyes open so I could see him, so I could watch the expressions on his face as I worked myself up and down, as we worked each other up into a desperate frenzy of need.

"You're beautiful," he told me, thrusting his hips up harder, quicker. "You're going to finish me, girl. Voss, ohhh..."

I didn't have to guess what 'finish' meant, either. It didn't take the work with Ragnar that I was used to it taking. I didn't need to slip a surreptitious hand down between my own legs to make sure I didn't get left behind. Seeing him get closer – feeling him get closer – it was like being carried along on tide, pushed nearer and nearer to the beach where you know the wave will crash over your head and send you tumbling.

"Oh, God," I panted, as I moved against him quicker and harder. "Oh my God. Oh!"

"Yes," he moaned, pushing his upper body up off the furs when he saw how close I was and pulling my mouth down to his again. "Yes, Emma. I'm going to give you – Emma, I'm –" he broke off when he felt the first trembling contractions of my orgasm around him.

I met his eyes one last time, taking the urging in them and falling easily, simply over the edge. There was never a moment of worry or hesitation. Ragnar led me to that searing, oceanic bliss and then he held me as I dove in. I think I actually screamed at the peak of it, perfectly full of him.

"Emma," he growled, before I was even finished, and I knew what it meant. He pulled me down against him and buried his face in my neck, baring his teeth against my skin. "Emma," he moaned again, his voice catching in his throat as he held me down and didn't let me back up, filling me, giving me what he needed to give me.

I let him hold me so tight I couldn't breathe when he came – and I would have let him do a lot more than that. I think I might have let him do anything. I'd never experienced such power – such unadulterated maleness – as Ragnar before. When the tension left our bodies and he pulled me down beside him on the furs, curling himself around me, I felt almost stupefied by what had just happened.

"Is that what it takes to quiet you?" He asked a couple of minutes later, rolling over on his back and completely relaxed. "You just need a man to finish you, is that it?"

I wanted to banter. I wanted to giggle and join in. But my brain – my soul – still felt all scrambled up. I knew I wouldn't have been able to string a sentence together if I tried. So I didn't try and Ragnar studied me with his eyes, a look I almost wanted to turn away from, worried that I might become instantly addicted.

"I'll have you again before the feast if you keep staring at me that way," he whispered, "as winsome as a spring lamb, even as my essence fills your belly."

We were allowed to lie there, in the little cocoon of warmth and our own spent bodies that we had created, only for another minute or two. Even before a woman's voice came from outside, demanding that I attend my 'bath' the reality that, out there, people were searching for me, worrying about me, imagining I was hurt or worse, had begun to reassert itself. Ragnar himself noticed, pulling back at one point to look at me with great interest.

"You worry again," he said, tucking a piece of hair behind one of my ears. "I see its return in your eyes, Emma."

Before I even had a chance to dodge the subject, Hildy returned.

"Why do you fight it?" Ragnar asked. "A hot bath? If I had a hot bath on offer, girl, I would not be fighting it. You seem a small child, fighting against eating its supper. You know the little one is hungry, but something in the infant mind once it begins to walk cannot abide anything it interprets as an order. Even if the order is to do something pleasurable! If someone ordered me to eat berries and spring cream, or to lie back in a hot bath in the middle of a freezing winter and relax as others attended to me, I would not fight them. But it is as it is, I suppose. You are a woman, and women are like small children in so many –"

Jarl Ragnar stopped talking and burst out laughing then, because he'd seen the look on my face, seen that his teasing had riled me. I reached out and slapped his shoulder and he ducked out of reach. "I meant it, woman! All except the last part – it's not women who need to wear the blame for your stubbornness. It's just you."

"Is she ready?!" Hildy's voice came from outside, and even as she was speaking to a visiting Jarl her tone was definitely not as respectful as it could have been. Ragnar heard it, too, and raised his eyebrows in surprise at me, grinning.

"Well you'd best hurry," he whispered. "She sounds even scarier than Inga!"

In the end, I followed Hildy – who even managed to walk as if she were in a state of permanent annoyance – along a frozen path to another roundhouse. Inside, fires burned in two pits and the interior was more brightly lit than usual, the walls and surfaces almost covered with the tallow candles the Vikings used everywhere. Three wooden tubs, deeper and shorter than regular bathtubs, sat in a row. Paige was asleep in one of those tubs, and in the one next to her was a slightly older woman with thin hair and, I saw when she smiled at me, a few missing teeth.

Attending to them were two other women, Vikings in dress and look. When Hildy shoved me through the leather doorway and slapped it shut behind me with an audible sigh of irritation it was one of these two that looked up and smiled.

"You're Paige's friend," she said, gesturing to the third tub. "Hildy told us to expect you. Take off your dressings and we'll prepare the water."

At that point, Paige woke up and, when she saw me, smiled widely. "Oh good, you're here. Hildy said you were giving her trouble, but Hildy thinks everything on earth was created for the sole purpose of giving her trouble. Get undressed and hop in – it's wonderful."

As I stood, not getting undressed, the two attendants moved heated rocks from the middle of one of the fires and plunged them into the third tub, where they hissed and sizzled and made the water around them boil furiously.

"Is that – uh, is that safe?" I asked. "Won't those rocks burn me?"

"Oh you just don't touch them at first," Paige replied airily. "Anja will push them to the bottom end, just give it a few minutes for them to cool and then you can use them to warm your feet on."

For a brief moment, I wondered if Paige was playing some kind of prank on me. "What?" I asked. "Are you serious? How don't those rocks burn their way through the wood, anyway?"

"They're placed on other, smaller rocks to prevent it," one of the attendants answered, gesturing to the tub I was to bathe in. I peered in and saw the smaller, flatter rocks arranged at one end. OK. That was taken care of. I just had to manage not putting my bare feet on one of the rocks which had, moments ago, been sat in the middle of a raging fire.

"So – I just get naked right here?" I asked, looking to Paige. My fingers and face were cold from the brief walk between the westerly roundhouse and the bathing roundhouse. I wanted a hot bath more than I wanted food at that point. But I didn't fancy getting completely naked in front of my best friend and three total strangers. "I mean, in front of everyone?"

Paige smiled serenely. Paige smiled serenely a lot in this place – more than she ever did back in our time. She lifted one arm out of the water and waved it lazily in the air. "No one cares about that here," she said. "Seriously, Emma, it's just not something to be embarrassed about. Anja and Gudry can help if your leather laces are tied too tightly, or if they're frozen."

Nothing Paige said actually stopped me from being embarrassed, but it didn't look like I had a choice. One of the attendants, the one with the friendlier demeanor, approached me and began to work on the ties of the long fur cape.

"I'm Anja," she said. "Don't worry, we'll have you warmed up and clean soon!"

I burned with self-consciousness as I was undressed, and then even more acutely when I was naked, standing in front of everyone. To be fair, no one seemed particularly interested. Not until Anja slid a couple of her fingers over one of my thighs – where the evidence of Ragnar's lust had not been wiped entirely away yet – and giggled before announcing to the room that I must have just come from 'pleasing the visiting Jarl.'

I remember feeling my eyes widening as I turned sharply to Paige with a 'did that just happen?!' look on my face. She just smiled up at me from the tub.

"Paige!" I screeched, my cheeks tingling as I looked from Anja – who didn't seem to think she had said anything wrong – to my friend. "What the fu –"

"It's not a thing," Paige said, chuckling. "I mean, they don't think about sex the way you do. It's not this big 'thing' here, you know? It's like eating or sleeping – don't be embarrassed."

"Uh," I said, because Paige appeared to be serious. It was apparently perfectly fine, in that place, for strangers to wipe cum off other people's thighs while making gossipy comments about their sex life to a roomful of people. "Um. OK."

I think Paige might have noticed that I was actually quite bothered by what had just happened because she pulled herself up to a sitting position in her tub and reached for my hand. "Hey," she said. "Hey, Em."

"What?" I snapped, annoyed that she seemed to be expecting me to somehow immediately adapt myself into this community of perverted Vikings.

"I'm sorry," she said, squeezing my hand. "I – in some ways it doesn't feel like I've been here very long, but having you here has kind of made me realize just how long it's been. Anja didn't mean anything – it really is just how it is here. No one gets uptight about bodies, or sex, or any of –"

"Well that's nice for them!" I cut her off, irritated because now I saw that it was me who was coming off as strange and foreign, not Anja and her lack of boundaries. And as soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them, regretted making a big deal out of it.

"I'm sorry," Anja said, looking like she might be about to cry. "I didn't mean to offend anyone – especially a friend of Paige! I won't – I won't do it again, I –"

"It's OK," I said, rubbing my forehead. It's – uh, yeah. I mean, it's really odd to me but it's OK. I'm not angry."

After everyone's feelings had been smoothed over sufficiently – including my own – I let Anja and Gudry take my hands and help me into the tub. And Paige was correct – it was wonderful. As I submerged my body under the steaming hot water, it was the first time I'd felt truly, completely warm since arriving in the past. The aches of the cold and the lack of mattresses and the simple stress of my situation seemed to leak away into the water.

"See?" My smiling friend asked, turning to me as we both lay with our heads resting on the edges of our tubs. "Isn't it great?"

And I couldn't even pretend to disagree. "I think I want to stay here for a whole day," I told her, my voice slowed now to match the easy pace of everything else in the bathing roundhouse. "Do you think they could bring us supper in here?"

We couldn't really talk about anything to do with my getting back to the present time with Anja, Gudry and Willa – who was introduced to me as Paige's childhood friend and the wife of the man I'd met on my first, brief visit to the past – all within earshot. So instead we just talked of – well, I guess you could say we talked about men. And specifically about which ones were hot, and which ones were not. There was much interest in the new Jarl in their midst – Ragnar.

"Will you marry him?" Willa asked, after she had woken up from her hot-bath-induced sleep and joined the conversation.

"Oh!" I said, laughing. "Oh, um. No! No, of course not."

Three pairs of eyes – all except Paige's – fixed themselves on me, clearly wondering if I was insane.

"Why?" Willa asked plainly a few seconds later.

"Uh," I said. "Uh, I –"

"My friend doesn't yet know who she will marry," Paige jumped in. "Stop pestering her, she's had a long trip from the south."

But Willa, already showing herself as headstrong – to put it mildly – wasn't satisfied. "Long journey?" She asked. "I heard it hardly a day by sea! Tell us, Emma, are you holding out for the King himself? Or do you already have another man's child in that flat belly of yours?"

"No!" I protested, once again offended by the bluntness of the 9th century people. "No I'm not – I'm not pregnant. And I'm not holding out for the King. If you must know, I'm trying to get –"

"You'd best be careful, then" Willa spoke before I'd finished. "Because if there's no baby in there now, there soon will be."

I opened my mouth to respond, but found there was no real response to Willa's comment, because she was right. I turned to Paige, hoping maybe she would be able to put a muzzle on her too-forward friend, but all she did was shrug.

"She's right, Em. I mean, there are other ways to have fun without risking a baby, right?"

At that moment, before I had time to stammer out a sheepish response, Hildy's voice boomed through the wooden walls of the roundhouse.

"Stop your gossiping and get dressed, ladies – the feast begins shortly!"

Gudry and Anja both made faces in the direction of Hildy's voice – faces I suspect they would not have made had she been able to see them, and began to help Paige from her bath.

"Why do you let her speak to you that way?" Gudry asked my friend as Anja wrapped a long length of soft linen around her wet, naked body. "You're the Jarl's wife, lady. You could have her whipped for –"

"You're right," Paige replied cheerily. "I could. But without Hildy bossing everyone around I'm not sure this place would run half as smoothly as it does."

Willa left the roundhouse after drying off and dressing herself – I noted that Anja and Gudry seemed explicitly interested in helping Paige, not Willa. Paige kissed her cheek before she left and then turned to me.

"You'll eat at the Jarl's table tonight. That means you have to behave."

I laughed as Anja ran a comb through my hair, assuming Paige was kidding.

"I mean it," she followed up a moment later. "It's not a joke, Em. I can see already that a part of you finds all of this – the Viking ways – silly. I don't blame you, I was even worse when I first came here, half-convinced it was all a show they were putting on just for me. But it's not a show. And Eirik has invited you to sit at our table – if you act badly, it reflects on him. It makes him look bad in front of –"

"Oh my God, Paige!" I burst out, unable to hold my tongue. "Don't talk to me like I'm a damned idiot, OK? What do you think I'm going do, rip all my clothes off and show all the Vikings my tits?"

"No," she replied, her voice a little tight. "No, that isn't what I meant. I just meant –"

"Like I said, Paige – I'm not stupid. You're not stupid, either. Remember when you and I had classes together and one of us almost always got the best mark on our papers? Remember that? So yeah, neither of us are dumb and we both know it." Paige moved as if to speak but I kept going. "But I see how you're treated here. And if you think it's too alien to understand, it's not. You know I'm English, you know I understand class and hierarchy and all of that tedious bullshit. All I'm saying is, I'm not going to embarrass you, alright? Not knowingly, anyway. I can't say there aren't any Viking eating customs I'm unfamiliar with. But don't expect me to treat you like royalty. You're not. You're just the same as –"

Anja suddenly dropped the hank of my hair which she was busily detangling, and I saw that she wore an expression much like I imagined mine must have been when she drew attention to the fact that there was semen on my leg. "Don't speak to the Jarl's wife like that," she said quietly. "Paige – she should not speak to you in such a –"

"Anja!" Paige suddenly exclaimed, clapping her hands. "Gudry! Leave us. I'll have one of the thralls bring you some meat from the feast later, OK? I need to speak to my friend alone right now."

Without another word, both attendants took their woolen tunics off the hooks near the door, shimmied into them, and left. And as soon as they were gone, Paige and I stood looking at each other, each of us wondering if we still knew the person in front of us.

"You look annoyed," I said. "But I meant what I said – we're the same Paige. We're equals. I know you know it. No one else here knows it, apparently – but we –"

"Of course I know it, Em! Jesus! What do you think? That I want you to kiss my ass or something? I don't. But this is real, do you understand? This is real. This is my real life. These are my people now. And I've learned to just go along with certain things, even if they seem silly or nonsensical to me. So no, this isn't about me thinking I'm better than you or any horseshit like that. It's just about not making waves, OK? You want to get home, don't you?"

I pulled one of the soft linen under-gowns, one of which had been laid out for me, over my head. And as I smoothed the fabric down over my body I found that I felt ashamed of how I'd acted.

"You're right," I said, blinking back a quick tear. "I'm just so stressed out. It's not your fault – it's not anyone's fault, I know it. I don't know why I'm acting so –"

Paige pulled me into her arms and shushed me. "Shh, Em. Shhh. I know. You know I know, don't you? Out of everyone on this planet, in this time or any other time, I truly do know. Come to the feast. Sit with Eirik and Ragnar and myself. Eat your fill. You won't wake up in America in 2017 tomorrow morning, but it will help. I promise."

Why had I ever resented my friend? I shut my eyes as I buried my face in her shoulder, heavy with guilt. It wasn't her fault I was here. What had happened to me back in the present wasn't her fault either. We were both buffeted by high winds, by outside forces. It was folly to try to ascribe responsibility for any of it. At that moment, all I felt was an all-encompassing sense of warmth and gratefulness for her friendship, and her support in helping me get back home.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled. "I know it's not your fault, Paige. Or my fault. All of this happened to you just as much as it happened to me, didn't it?"

Paige nodded. "It did. But right now, Em, we need to get dressed and get to the feasting hall before Hildy comes back and drags us both there by our ears."

We got dressed. My clothes were much finer than those I'd worn before – softer, woven with more skilled hands and decorated with beads and small colored stones. Even the wool tunic that went over the linen layers had scalloped leather sewn around the cuffs, hem and neckline.

"Ragnar's going to die when he sees me in this," I giggled, looking down and running my fingers over the necklace of black beads Paige was fastening behind my neck.

"You should be careful with that," she commented, patting my shoulder.

"Oh don't worry, I'm not here to steal your baubles! Well, unless –"

"I don't mean the necklace," she said, her voice gently serious, and I realized what she was talking about – my relationship, whatever it was, with Ragnar.

"Oh," I replied. "Oh. Yeah. Paige, if you think I'm going to stay here, or that I'd leave my family to –"

"That isn't what I think, Em. In fact it's the opposite of what I think. I know you're going home – I know it because I remember feeling it myself. But I see the look in your eyes when you talk about him. Don't make it more difficult for yourself than it has to be."

I laughed, but it didn't sound very convincing – even to me. "It's only been a few days, Paige. It's – I mean, it's just fun, isn't it? You saw him, right? He's so hot! What was I supposed to say? No?"

She offered me a small, almost sad smile. "I know, Em. I know. Just be honest with yourself, OK? I'm only saying this because I care about you."

"I know."

We hugged again, holding each other tightly, and then Paige linked her arm with mine and we ducked under the leather flap, gasping at the sudden blast of icy winter air as it filled our lungs.