We fall through the cottage door, hands everywhere.

Eli’s already peeling off my bathing suit straps and my palms are coasting over his skin as I reach up to catch his mouth. It’s so familiar that time slides away and suddenly I’m in my apartment bedroom at twenty-one, being stripped down by him for the first time, inhaling the birthday candle smoke fresh on his skin. I’m thinking, this is Eli, I have him. Look at the way he needs me; look how it matches mine. What a revelation it is.

And then I’m back here, it’s now, and he’s pressing a murmured, laughing apology to my chin as I trip over his discarded sneakers. It’s now and it’s tongue and teeth and Eli’s deep groans, it’s my breasts against his chest when he gets my bathing suit down to my waist.

We’re kissing and it’s now, but the feel of our bare skin sliding together for the first time in five years holds the echo of the first time ever. It’s in the way Eli exhales “oh” in surprise and relief. In memory.

How strange it is to have a first for the second time. How lucky and messy and perfect. It makes my eyes sting, even though all of this is temporary.

We make it to the bedroom, kissing the entire way. His hands traverse my body as we stop at the foot of the bed, a slow slide upward until he’s cupping my face. It’s like he’s revisiting every piece of me that belonged to him before.

“Hi.” The word rides out on a sigh as he presses a kiss to my forehead. My laugh is quiet so it doesn’t break the moment apart. “Hi.”

“What’re we doing tonight?”

“Everything,” I whisper. “If that’s what you want.” There’s a beat of silence, then his hoarse, “It is.”

The room is dark, but the moon slices in through the window and so I see his expression like there’s a spotlight shining on it. The raw need there, an old affection, the shadowed thing I can’t quite make out. His eyes move

over my face, thumbs brushing along the high planes of my cheeks before moving down to trace the seam of my lips. When I part them against his skin, he lets out a soft, pained exhale.

The frantic pace from a moment ago softens. He leans in to kiss me, no tongue, just his lips against mine. His palms are so careful on my jaw, like he doesn’t want to break the moment apart either. I can feel how overwhelmed he is. How easy it would be for second thoughts to sneak in to turn us back.

But I want him, everything, right now, so I cup his neck to bring him to me. I part my lips against his, make a needy sound I know will undo him, and it does. He groans, sliding his tongue against mine, sealing my body to his with a firm hand to my lower back.

“Fuck, you feel so good,” he breathes. “Thank god I jerked off earlier.” His admission pierces my sex fog, then intensifies it. “What?”

He sucks a path down my neck. “Before we went swimming.”

I pull back. “It took me, like, five minutes to get changed, and you were already in the pool when I got out there.”

He raises his head, his lust-drunk expression turning sheepish. “Yeah, well, it took me like five seconds.”

I let out a cackle that pulls his swollen mouth into a wide grin, and he bends, dissolving into soft laughter as he scrapes his teeth against my collarbone.

“What were you thinking about?”

“You.” He presses the word into my skin; it goes straight to my veins. “This. The way you taste and your sounds and your laugh. How well you fill my hands. What it would feel like to have you again.” A pause as his fingers flex into my back. He inhales, and then stops. “Several other things I’ll keep in the vault.”

“That depraved?”

He hums, a private sound. “Something like that.”

Pushing his hips into mine, he tips me back onto the bed, then follows me down. The looming spread of his shoulders blot everything else out. Nothing can touch us.

“Are we stupid for doing this?” he asks, voice low.

I swallow, wondering what answer will allow for this to continue.

Probably not what I actually say, which is, “A little bit.”

There’s a flash of relief in his eyes, a release of the tension line between his eyebrows. It’s not an answer that’ll fit into a neat box, but god knows it’s real, and he looks at me as if he likes that.

I do, too. We won’t hurt each other when we’ve said out loud what this

is.

And maybe it’s not stupid, I think as he presses me into the mattress in a

way that feels vital, like I’m being consumed by him. Maybe it’s just like going back to visit a home that isn’t yours anymore. Maybe you don’t have the key, but someone lets you in anyway, and you stay awhile, and it feels so good just to be somewhere you once belonged.

Eli’s mouth fits over mine, bringing the feeling full circle. I get lost in the beautiful, familiar cadence of his tongue winding with mine, of the way his palm drifts down my body. He loves to take his time with me, and I sink into every second that’s mine.

Eventually he moves lower, pressing open-mouthed kisses down my neck, his teeth grazing skin until he reaches my nipple. His breath is warm just before his tongue is wet and swirling, centering the need that’s been suffusing my entire body into that one point he’s licking, sucking at, drawing into his mouth.

“Do you remember when we got together…” He shifts over to my other breast, murmuring, “And I told you about the things I wanted to do our last summer here?”

Hazily, I recall Eli handing me confessions:

I wanted to get my hands all over you in the pool so you’d feel me when you went to bed, he whispered at the corner store one night.

Wanted to put you on your knees in your cottage living room, he murmured against my ear at a party, his body curling over me from behind.

Wanted to kiss you in the middle of a vineyard block. Tell you I love you at breakfast, while we were working, in the middle of the night—

Just because I could.

The last thing winds itself around me. It pulls fear and exhilaration into my veins, even though I know he’s talking about what we’re doing now— finally getting to act out the way we wanted each other then.

“I remember,” I sigh.

“I’ve still got my list,” he says, his hand curving over my thigh. “I know how you love those.”

“Mmm,” I murmur as he drags his quietly grinning mouth down my ribs.

I need them and the thought that we’re building a new one makes me feel simultaneously bound and free. I can let it be exactly what it is within the boundaries of the week and the items we check off together. Our old list is largely dead, but this—this will keep me safe.

“Let’s get through as much of it as we can,” Eli says, rising to his knees and curling his fingers into the bathing suit bunched at my waist. He asks “okay?” to stripping me down and having me this week and I breathe out a desperate “yes” to both things.

I watch, rapt, as he peels my suit down my legs, tossing it over his shoulder. For a second, he looks flattened.

His eyes move up to mine, his throat working before he speaks. “Goddamn. My memory never does you justice.”

“Get up here.”

He does, carefully levering his body over mine. “Very glad I jerked off earlier,” he groans as I get my hands between us to unlace the front of his swim trunks.

“Why, so it doesn’t take five seconds?”

He laughs, even as he squeezes my thigh in warning. “I’ll last as long as it takes for you to beg me to make you come.”

I groan. Eli is the living embodiment of it’s always the quiet ones.

His mouth drifts to my ear. “I love it when you beg, Georgia. You never ask for anything.”

His voice is dark and low, but there’s a pleading note there, too, and it breaks me apart, especially when he kicks his trunks off and presses against

me fully naked. He’s so stiff between my legs, so exactly what I need. Our mingled gasps rise up toward the ceiling like steam.

“Please get inside me,” I whisper. “Not yet,” he whispers back.

I grip his hair, bring him back for a kiss that’s hard and messy, but too soon he’s leaving me, making his way down my body, his chain a tickling drag along my skin. He pushes my thighs apart with his shoulders, then places a wet kiss on each one, licking me there instead of where I need him. “I forgot what a tease you are,” I complain, lifting my hips. “You’re in

the wrong spot.”

He grins, sucking a mark right near the crease of my thigh. “Show me where you want me. It’s been a while, not sure I remember how it goes.”

I tsk. “Losing your touch?”

“Maybe yours will inspire me,” he says silkily, then repeats a rumbling, “Show me.”

With a sigh that’s half exasperation and half desperation, I slip my hand a bare inch from his mouth, spreading the wetness he’s created. I make it easy for him to taste me when he gets tired of this game. And he will, soon.

“Fuck.” His voice is strangled. “That’s—that’s very inspiring.”

I run a wet finger along the seam of his lips, gasping when he catches it with his teeth and sucks at my skin. His groan vibrates through every part of me, setting me on a delicious edge I need him to push me over.

“Mm.” He shackles a hand around my wrist, licking my fingers before he looks at me with a sweet smile. “Peach. It really is my favorite flavor.”

I pull myself from his grip, heart flying as I trace exactly where I want him. “Is my showing portion of this over?”

He noses my hand out of the way, places a soft, almost chaste kiss on me, then licks his lips.

“I remember now,” he says, gripping my thigh, pushing it further open. “I never forgot. I just wanted to see you.”

When he puts his mouth on me, the sound he makes is utterly wrecked, his fingers digging hard into my thigh. He doesn’t have to say the words for me to know it’s good, but he does anyway because he knows the praise will

make me mindless. He whispers, “You taste incredible, you’re so fucking good, Georgia, look at what you do to me,” as he wraps a hand around himself, stroking slowly while he licks me so well.

It’s like a spark catches fire minutes later when my orgasm hits—it’s heat and licking flames, Eli’s wild groans and the way he pins my twitching hips down to keep me on his mouth. I’m done, but he’s not, not until I’m begging, pulling at his hair.

He rises to his knees, his eyes glittering in the darkness, still stroking himself. “Jesus.”

“Are you joking?” I nearly slur. “How did you get better at that?” “Not with practice,” he assures me. “It’s just you.”

“We’re not done, right?”

“No,” he says. “We’re not.”

He crawls to the bedside table, letting out a relieved breath when he finds condoms there. It’s Aunt Julia’s touch—as a former high school counselor, she has a deeply pragmatic view of sex, so condoms are littered everywhere like prophylactic Pokémon. When I was a teenager, opening the drawer made me blush. Now I want to collect them all.

Eli rolls the condom on, situating himself against the headboard. It’s my favorite position and it occurs to me that he remembers that. That he remembers a lot of things.

It should scare me, how seen that makes me feel. I remind myself that some bits of the past will bleed in, but it’s okay. It’s now.

“C’mere.” His features are carved out with a severe need, but there’s something infinitely soft there, too, as I crawl onto his lap. His hand wraps around my hip, holding me above him, while his other cups my face. He pulls me in for a quick, quiet kiss. “You good?”

“I will be when you let me get on you.”

He groans, then laughs softly. “I’m just trying to prepare myself for it.” “Me, too. But I want you right now.”

It feels like a mutual admission and he looks at me like it is one. We haven’t done this in years, and it does mean something to be back like this.

He positions himself for me and I finally sink down, watching his expression melt from anticipation to shock to a pleasure that looks like pain. Soft, helpless sounds fall out of his mouth as his head falls against the headboard. I lean in to run my tongue over the salt of his skin, working him all the way into my body until my ass rests on his thighs.

It’s so intensely deep. I feel like I’m full of him to my throat, like he’s consuming me.

“Fuck.” Eli lets loose a short, disbelieving laugh, gripping my hips. “Georgia, please don’t move yet.”

“I have to.”

He wraps one arm around my waist, takes a handful of my ass, then burrows his face into the curve where my neck meets my shoulder. I feel the shake of his thighs underneath me, in his hands holding me tight to him, in his back beneath my palms. “God, you feel so good. I missed you so much.”

His voice breaks in the middle of the confession, cracking a tiny fissure into my heart. Soothing a missingness I’ve carried with me since I left New York.

Careful, I whisper to myself.

He whispers something, too, but the words are pushed against my neck, lost to me. Whatever it is heats my blood, some alchemic reaction to the needy arch of his voice.

I start to move in earnest and he accepts it with a pleading groan, his fingers digging into every part of me he can access. It’s so good, so scary, so much and he’s showing me that he wants it—

“Exactly like that,” he pants against my cheek. “I’ll take it all.”

I groan, sliding my mouth over his as he curls his arm around my waist. And then he tips us sideways, rolling me onto my back without sliding out, his thighs pushing mine apart, hips holding me down. I love his weight on me, the way he anchors my body with his own. I’ve felt so adrift, before and now—sometimes I think I’ve been adrift always—but he’s keeping me right here.

His name rides out on a plea and I don’t even know what I’m begging for—his body or his heart, to be held on to again and forever this time, even though I know we can’t. But I say it again anyway, and he hisses out a “yes” that spirals through me.

“It’s so good,” he pants, his eyes moving over my body, from my breasts bouncing with his thrusts down to where we’re connected. He’s wet with me, and it’s an easy, deep glide now. I swear he dissolves right in front of me, his eyes falling shut, cheeks flagged red, the delicate chain of his necklace swaying between us as his pace increases. “Oh fuck, you have no idea how much I…”

He dips down with a low groan, slides his tongue into my mouth, his body into mine again and again.

“Please,” I breathe out after minutes of riding the edge with him. I can feel how close he is, and how much he doesn’t want it to end.

His hips slow, his strokes getting longer but not as hard. “You want to come or you want me to make you come?”

“I want you—” I hiccup around a moan as pleasure twists down my spine. I’m so close, blissed-out and frustrated in equal, unbearable measure. A tear snakes from the corner of my eye. “I want it to be you.”

He wipes his thumb through the moisture at my temple. “I can feel it, you’re right there,” he praises, voice tight, then whispers, “Let me help you.”

Propping himself on an elbow, he slides his hand between us, pets his thumb over me right there—right there. I say it out loud, and he nods, leaning down to kiss me slow and deep, thrusting into me hard. It’s all of it

—the hard and fast and the deep and slow that winds me so tight it hurts and then drops me into wild relief.

Eli’s ragged moan catches in his throat as he curls an arm underneath my shoulder, his hand cupping my neck. It’s chaotic, me losing myself underneath him, Eli losing himself into me. He goes completely silent for a beat as he goes nearly too deep, then comes with a low, fractured noise.

He says my name, tunnels his fingers into my hair while his hips rock slowly, not ready to end it.

“Fuck me,” he finally sighs, kissing up my throat, along my jaw.

“I think I did,” I say, dazed, smiling up at the ceiling when he laughs.

It takes a solid sixty seconds for the bliss to wear off and reality to slide back in—I just had sex with Eli.

I did my best to cling to now, but those little flashes of further and future and forever snuck in, revealing what my deepest, messiest self wants: Eli, in every era.

You can’t have it, I remind myself.

Time will run out once everyone descends on Friday and we get swept up in the real reason we’re here. Selfishly, I want to grip it tight, not let it go.

It’s why I let Eli lift himself off me with just the briefest lingering touch, so I can start exposing myself to what I’ll have to do soon enough. It’s why, when he returns to bed after we both take our turns in the bathroom, I let my eyes drift over his naked body, so I can remember what it looks like when I no longer have access to it.

He climbs over me, his eyes warmly assessing. I still feel his hands everywhere, the tender spots where his fingers dug in. The ache between my legs is a lovely bloom.

When he reaches my face, his eyebrows drop. “Are you freaking out?” “No.” It’s almost the truth.

He dips his chin, pinning me with a look.

“Okay, yes, but just a little.” I pause, running my thumb along his collarbone. “We had sex.”

His voice lowers. “We did.”

“And it was—” My brain trips over a word big enough for it, but there isn’t one. “Really good.”

At this, he grins. “It was.” “Are you freaking out?”

“Yes.” He pauses. Something intense shines in his eyes—a photo flash, there and gone—before his expression turns teasing. “But just a little.”

“We are kind of stupid,” I say.

“But we’re doing it together. Teamwork, right?”

“The teamwork was related to saving Adam’s wedding, not me begging for your dick, but I mean…”

Eli barks out a laugh that triggers mine. “I like it.” “Clearly I do, too.”

I get what I want—a smirk, his eyes wandering over every piece of me he’s wrecked. But that look turns thoughtful quickly.

I pat his pillow, affecting a lightness I don’t feel. “Lie down with me.”

After a brief hesitation, he does. In the dark, we stare at each other for a stretch of seconds, and I beg him wordlessly not to let the future or the past burst through the door.

His eyes drop to my mouth, trace over my cheeks, my nose, memorizing me or this moment or both.

“Do we need Nick Miller tonight?” he whispers finally.

I let out a relieved breath. “No pillow person necessary. He was a terrible chaperone.”

Eli grins, one that leaves as tenderly as it came. “Then come here.”

He opens his arms and I don’t hesitate; right now I don’t have to. I scoot over, sighing when he pulls me close, humming against his throat when he kisses my temple, his mouth lingering there in a firm press.

And exactly like that, I fall asleep.