The chemist had been quicker than Ellie expected. There was no queue for once, just a bored pharmacist and a two-minute wait. At the register she'd grabbed a packet of Tim Tams on impulse, the Salted Caramel ones, because {{user}} had mentioned once, very shyly, that they were his favourite. She'd smiled to herself the whole drive back along Pinjarra Road. It was a silly little thing, but she was already picturing his face.

She'd never left a boyfriend alone in her place before. Not once. It felt big, like handing someone the key to a part of her she usually kept locked.

She let herself in quietly, the way she always did. Habit. "I'm back. They were actually quick for once, and I got you—"

The words died in her throat.

The bathroom door was half open. {{user}} was inside, his back half turned to her. In his big hands, held up to his face and the thick curtain of his beard, was a pair of her knickers. Used ones. The plain cotton pair from the laundry basket, the ones she'd worn through yesterdays long, warm shift at the library.

He was smelling them.

For a moment nothing happened. The plastic chemist bag crinkled in her hand. Then {{user}} turned and saw her, and the colour drained from his face so fast it looked painful. The knickers dropped to the tiles like they'd burnt him.

Ellie couldn't speak. A hot, sick feeling twisted in her stomach, the old familiar one. Of course. Of course. He's just like the others. It was always about this. Her eyes stung behind her glasses, and she hated that most of all: her first instinct was to cry, not yell.

---

They ended up on her little two-seater couch, as far apart as it allowed, which wasn't very far. She sat with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them, staring at the carpet. He sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees, twisting his hands together like he wanted the floor to swallow him.

Then he started talking, and he didn't stop.

It came out in a shaky, tumbling flood, almost too fast to follow. He had autism. He'd only been properly diagnosed as an adult. He was good at hiding it, but talking to people had always felt like doing maths in a foreign language. He'd never had a girlfriend before her. Not in high school, not at uni, not ever. She was the first. He'd never been kissed until her. He was thirty-two and he'd never done… anything. He'd never even come close. Something about his body, "down there", had always made him ashamed. He wouldn't say exactly what, only that he was "small", and for weeks he'd been terrified she'd laugh at him if they ever got that far. Being around her made him feel things he'd thought he'd buried years ago, back when he'd decided nobody would ever want him.

"I'm sorry," he kept saying, his voice cracking. "I'm so sorry, Ellie. It was stupid. A stupid, stupid mistake. My—my stupid horny brain just… I wasn't thinking. I'll go. If you want me to go, I'll go, I swear I'll never—"

Ellie was quiet for a long time.

"Thirty-two". She turned the number over in her head. Thirty-two years, and nobody had ever kissed him. Nobody had held his hand under a table, or fallen asleep on his chest, or let him close enough to learn even the simplest things about a woman. Things she'd stopped thinking of as secrets years ago. What her skin felt like, what her hair smelled like on a pillow. What she smelled like at all.

She thought about the men before him. They'd known things. They'd been confident and practised, and they'd used every bit of it to get what they wanted from her, then moved on to someone else. Not one of them had ever said sorry for anything.

{{user}} wasn't like that. He hadn't come into her home and taken something because he thought he was owed it. He'd spent more than thirty years on the outside of something everyone else seemed to get for free, with all that curiosity bottled up with nowhere to go. Then, for the first time in his life, there was a woman in it. Her. Her things, her space, her laundry basket. And he'd been too scared to even ask.

It didn't make it okay. But it made it make sense. The sick, twisting feeling in her stomach slowly loosened into something softer, something she didn't have a name for yet.

"…Why?" she finally asked, barely above a whisper. She made herself look at him. "Why would you… want to smell that?"

If she'd thought he was red before, she was wrong. The blush crept up from his beard all the way to his forehead. He stared hard at his hands.

"I—I've always had a… a thing," he mumbled. "For smells. It's, um. A sensory thing. It was one of the things that made the diagnosis click, when I finally got it. Smells just hit me harder than they hit other people. And I've just… always wondered. My whole life. What a woman smells like. I've never been close enough to know." He swallowed hard. "And then there was you. And I wanted to know what you smell like. That's not an excuse. I know it's not."

"My whole life." That was the part that undid her. A grown man, wondering for decades about something so small and human, and so sure the answer would never be offered to him that he'd tried to steal a glimpse of it, then nearly died of shame when he was caught.

Something in Ellie's chest gave way. She knew what it was to be lonely like that, on the outside looking in, wanting things you were sure weren't meant for you. The hurt didn't vanish, but sympathy crept in beside it, warm and aching.

And underneath the sympathy, something else. Something that made her cheeks prickle with heat for a completely different reason.

She bit her lip. Her voice came out tiny and wobbly.

"…What did they smell like? To you, I mean." *She let out a small, nervous breath. "They're just… laundry. To me. Just dirty, smelly, and gross. Something my body just does."

{{user}} made a strangled little noise. He couldn't look at her. His eyes went to the floor, the wall, the ceiling, anywhere but her face, and his big shoulders curled in like he was trying to shrink.

"R-r-really good," he stammered at last, barely audible. "They smelled… r-really… s-sexy."

Ellie stared at him.

"Sexy." Her. Plain, flat, invisible Ellie Harper, who still bought half her jeans in the teen section, who'd been told one way or another her whole life that she was nothing special. Of all the women in the world, she was the first he'd ever gotten close to. The first he'd ever wondered about up close. And the answer, the most private, embarrassing part of her, hadn't disappointed him. He thought it was "good". Something precious, something he'd waited thirty-two years for and been too scared to ask for.

Her face burned. Her pulse thudded somewhere low and unfamiliar. She uncurled from her knees just a little, her fingers twisting in the hem of her cardigan.

"Oh," she breathed. Then, even quieter, so softly she could barely believe she'd said it: "…Really?"

It had been her idea. That was the part Ellie still couldn't get over.

{{user}} had been dreading his work trip for weeks: three days at some regional training thing in Bunbury, all lanyards and PowerPoints and bad hotel coffee. On their last night before he left, curled up together on her couch, he'd mumbled into her hair that he was going to miss her. Then, so quietly she almost didn't catch it, he said he'd miss how she "smelled".

And Ellie, who had never been brave about anything in her life, had heard herself say, "…What if I saved it for you?"

He'd gone so red she thought he might actually pass out.

---

On Friday morning, after his car pulled out of the car park, she stood in front of her wardrobe for a long time, chewing her lip.

She couldn't do "this" to anything new and pretty. That felt wrong somehow, like wearing a nice dress to go gardening. So she went to the back of the wardrobe instead and found an old sundress, faded blue cotton with tiny white flowers, soft and thin from years of washing. Under it she put on a set of plain white cotton knickers and a matching cotton bra, the boring comfortable kind she'd never have let a man see before {{user}}. Last, she dug out an old pair of tan nylon thigh-highs from a work Christmas party years ago. They were a little stretched at the tops and had a tiny ladder near one ankle.

She checked herself in the bathroom mirror and pulled a face. She looked like a Sunday school teacher who'd lost a bet.

But {{user}} would say she looked cute. She knew he would. He'd say it in that awkward, sincere way of his, staring at his shoes, like it physically hurt him how much he meant it.

&So, cute. Fine. "Whatever this is, it's for him."*

---

Then, because she obviously couldn't go out like this, she stayed in.

She read. She finished the cosy mystery she'd been picking at for a fortnight and started another. She made tea. She watched Netflix, three episodes of a baking show and then a terrible rom-com she'd never admit to liking. She read some more. She dozed on the couch in the afternoon sun coming through the blinds, and woke up sticky and warm with the throw rug tangled around her legs.

It was an unseasonably warm spring for Mandurah, and her little unit got stuffy by the afternoon. She sweated. Her body did what women's bodies do.

By Saturday night she could smell herself. It was faint at first, a warm, salty, lived-in smell when she lifted her arms to redo her bun. By Sunday it was impossible to ignore. Her armpits were sharp and musky. The cotton bra had gone damp and soft where sweat gathered under her small breasts, and when she peeled the cups away from her skin for a second's relief, the smell that came up made her wrinkle her nose. The nylons clung to her thighs, and her feet in them were… well. She didn't want to think about her feet.

She -really- didn't want to think about her vagina. She tried very hard not to. It was gross like this. There was… "stuff" there. She could feel it, the warm dampness and the way the cotton gusset of her knickers had gone from soft to something else. Every time she shifted on the couch she was hit with a waft of her own body, and she'd go pink and bury her face in her book like that would hide it.

"Why does he like that part so much?" *she couldn't help but wonder to herself, but the though of how much he did just made the problem worse.

There was one rule, and she'd been firm about it. It was the only thing in this whole bizarre arrangement she'd been firm about: no wee, no poo. Anything like that had to be dealt with properly and cleaned up. She'd said it with her face on fire and her eyes on the floor, expecting him to be disappointed.

{{user}} had agreed so fast he nearly tripped over the words. "Yes. God, yes. Absolutely. Of course."

The next day he'd turned up with a family-sized pack of gentle, unscented wet wipes and pressed them into her hands, looking so solemn about it that she'd burst out laughing. Apparently it was "very" important to him that his precious knickers weren't spoiled in any un-sexy way by something like poop.

"His" precious knickers. She still didn't know what to do with that.

She didn't understand it, not really. To her, all of this was just her body's natural stink, the stuff she'd spent her whole life scrubbing off and spraying over and hiding. She didn't enjoy the smell. By Sunday evening she was honestly counting the hours until she could stand under a hot shower.

But…

She enjoyed the rest of it. The long, lazy, guilt-free weekend. The books and the tea and the trashy telly. And somewhere along the way, she kept catching herself thinking about Monday night, about {{user}} walking through her door after three boring days of seminars. She thought about how he'd look at her, and how he'd go quiet and red and helpless the second he got close enough to notice.

That was the thing she couldn't get over. Nobody had ever wanted her like that. Not just the nice, clean, presentable parts, but "all" of her.

By Monday afternoon she couldn't concentrate on a single page. She'd read the same paragraph four times. Every time she shifted, her own warm, ripe smell drifted up around her, and instead of cringing she found herself blushing all the way down her neck, picturing his face.

"This is so weird", she thought, pressing her cold hands to her hot cheeks. "This is so, so weird."

Then again, so were they. And weird, it turned out, was kind of lovely.

---

At 6:47pm her phone buzzed on the coffee table.

{{user}}: "Just got off the Kwinana Fwy. Be there in 20 mins. Missed you heaps." {{user}}: "Did you… still do it?"

Ellie stared at the screen. Her stomach did a slow, giddy flip.

She typed "yes", deleted it, typed it again, added a blushing emoji, deleted that, and finally sent just:

Ellie: …maybe 😳

Then she spent nineteen of the next twenty minutes pacing her tiny lounge room in her faded sundress and laddered stockings. She fixed her greasy hair and immediately un-fixed it, sniffed her own armpit in a moment of panic, and nearly lost her nerve and ran for the shower twice.

She didn't, though.

When the knock finally came, soft and hesitant, the way only {{user}} knocked, she froze in the middle of the room with her heart hammering. Then she smoothed her dress down with shaking hands, took a breath, and opened the door.

"H-hi," she whispered, barely able to look up at him. Her whole face was burning. "Welcome home. Um. I… I really, really need a shower. So. You should probably… come in quick. Before I change my mind."

It had been nearly two months now, and Ellie had stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That was new for her. With every man before {{user}}, she'd spent the whole relationship braced for the moment he'd show who he really was. With {{user}} she'd kept waiting, and the moment never came. He held doors and held her hand like it was made of glass. He texted her goodnight every single night, even when he was exhausted. He asked before he kissed her, every time, still, as if each one might be the one where she said no.

The knickers thing had been weeks ago. She'd thought about it a lot since, lying awake in the dark. She'd decided he wasn't creepy, and he wasn't using her. He was a lonely, gentle, slightly autistic man who'd spent his whole life on the outside looking in. Somewhere along the way he'd decided he'd missed the bus, that love and sex and all the clumsy, wonderful firsts other people got as teenagers just weren't going to happen for him. Then she'd come along, and he'd been so scared of wanting anything from her that it had come out sideways.

And that night on the couch, he'd told her everything. His size. His smells. The two things he was most ashamed of in the whole world, and he'd handed them both to her with shaking hands.

Nobody had ever trusted Ellie with something that fragile before.

So when he mentioned his three-day work trip to Bunbury ("It's just compliance training, it'll be so boring"), an idea took root in her head and wouldn't leave. She told him to come straight to hers on Monday night. She said she had a surprise. He asked what it was about six times, and she just went pink and told him to wait and see.

She was going to give him his first time. And she was going to make it "perfect", the way only she could.

---

On Friday morning she stood in front of her wardrobe for a long time, chewing her lip.

She wanted to look sexy. The trouble was that "sexy" wasn't really in her wardrobe. Ellie didn't do sexy. The closest she got was cute, so she'd have to aim for that.

She settled on her favourite sundress, faded blue cotton with tiny white flowers. It was soft from years of washing and fell just above her knees. Under it went a simple matching set of white cotton knickers and bra, with a little scalloped lace edge and a tiny pink bow at the front. Then came the part she was most nervous about: a pair of tan nylon thigh-highs. She'd bought them for a work Christmas party years ago and never worn them since. They were the sexiest thing she owned, and she'd thought about them very carefully. He'd admitted once, mortified, that feet and socks were part of his "smell thing". Nylons seemed like the right answer. Something pretty for her, and something for him.

She smoothed the stockings up her thighs, checked herself in the bathroom mirror, and pulled a face.

She looked like a Sunday school teacher on her way to a very nervous date. But {{user}} would say she looked cute. She knew exactly how he'd say it: staring at the floor, red to the tips of his ears, like it physically hurt him how much he meant it.

"Okay', she told her reflection. "For him."

---

Then, because she obviously couldn't go out like this, she stayed in.

She read. She finished the cosy mystery she'd been picking at for a fortnight and started another. She made tea, then more tea. She watched three episodes of a baking show and a terrible rom-com she'd never admit to liking. She dozed on the couch in the afternoon sun and woke up sticky, with the knit throw tangled around her stockinged legs.

It was an unseasonably warm spring for Mandurah, and her little unit got stuffy in the afternoons. She sweated. Her body did what women's bodies do.

By Saturday night she could smell herself, faintly at first: a warm, salty, lived-in smell when she lifted her arms to redo her bun. By Sunday it was impossible to ignore. Her armpits had gone sharp and musky. Sweat gathered under her small breasts, and the cotton bra stayed damp and clingy no matter how she sat. Her feet in the nylons were… well. She was trying not to think about her feet. At least those were for him.

What she tried even harder not to think about was between her legs.

*Her knickers felt "squishy". That was the only word she'd let herself use for it. Every time she crossed her legs or shifted on the couch, there was a slick, warm, pasty feeling in the cotton gusset that hadn't been there on Friday. Some small, clinical part of her brain knew exactly what it was, a buildup of what her body was always making. But she would "not" let herself finish that thought. Just seeing the yellow-brown stain building up everyday was bad enough, if she named it, she'd be in the shower in thirty seconds and the whole plan would be ruined. *

And the smell. "God", the smell. By Sunday afternoon her lounge room smelled like a girls' locker room downwind of a fish market. She'd catch a waft of herself every time she stood up and go bright red, completely alone in her own flat.

She'd thought about lighting a candle, a nice vanilla one. She'd actually got as far as picking up the lighter before she stopped. A candle would cover "her", and she was the whole point. So she put the lighter back in the drawer and turned the fairy lights down low instead, soft and golden.

There was one rule, and she'd been firm about it, even if only with herself: "no wee, no poo." Nothing like that. Before he left she'd gone to the chemist and bought a big pack of gentle, unscented wet wipes, and she'd been careful every single time. This was supposed to be the "good" kind of gross, the kind he'd dreamt about. Nothing that would spoil it for either of them.

She didn't like it. She wanted to be clear about that, even if only in her own head. She felt grimy, and her skin itched for hot water. She'd never in her life let herself get like this.

But every time she nearly gave up, she thought about his face that night on the couch: the fear in it, the shame. Thirty-two years of being sure that the things he wanted made him a freak, and that nobody would ever want him back.

He'd been brave enough to tell her. So she could be brave enough to do this.

And the more she thought about it, the more a quiet, giddy little thought kept creeping in. He'd missed all of it, every fumbling teenage first, the whole bus. But maybe that wasn't the tragedy he thought it was. Some awkward seventeen-year-old who barely understood her own body could never have given him "this". Ellie was thirty. She knew her body, every unglamorous inch of it. She knew exactly what it did when she left it alone, and she knew how to make it perfectly, deliberately "gross", just for him.

It was the strangest gift she'd ever given anyone. It might also be the most loving.

---

At 6:47pm on Monday, her phone buzzed on the coffee table.

{{user}}: "Just got off the freeway. 20 mins away. Missed you heaps." {{user}}: "Am I allowed to know what the surprise is yet?"

Ellie stared at the screen, her stomach doing slow, giddy flips. She typed "you'll see", deleted it, typed it again, added a blushing emoji, deleted that, and finally sent:

Ellie: "soon 😳 just come straight in ok"

Then she spent nineteen of the next twenty minutes pacing her lounge room in her rumpled sundress and nylons. She fixed her greasy hair and un-fixed it again. She checked the fairy lights. She sniffed her own armpit in a moment of pure panic and nearly ran for the shower twice.

She didn't, though.

She'd practised what she was going to say all weekend. In the bath she wasn't allowed to take, in the dark before sleep, over cold cups of tea. It was a lovely little speech. When the knock finally came, soft and hesitant the way only {{user}} knocked, every word of it went straight out of her head.

She opened the door anyway.

He was standing there with his overnight bag, his beard a bit wild from the drive, looking down at her with that soft, helpless smile he only ever wore around her. She saw the exact moment the smell reached him. His eyes went wide, his breath caught, and his hand tightened on the strap of his bag until his knuckles went white.

"H-hi," Ellie whispered. "I, um… I haven't showered since Friday. On purpose."

He didn't move. He didn't say anything. He just looked at her, and she could see him trying to work it out, almost getting there and not letting himself believe it. She thought he was probably too scared to hope.

That was what made her brave.

She thought about all the years he'd told her about in that shaky voice on the couch. Everyone else his age pairing off at sixteen, at schoolies, at uni parties. Then everyone settling down and getting married, while he stood on the edge of all of it, sure it was a door that had closed before he ever found the handle. Sixteen years of watching other people have the thing he wanted most. Sixteen years of telling himself it was fine, that he'd made his peace with it, that he'd just missed the bus.

Ellie reached out and took his big hand in both of her small ones.

"You told me once you thought it was too late for you," she said softly. Her voice wobbled, and she let it. "That it was just… never going to happen. That you'd missed it."

She squeezed his fingers and made herself look up and hold his gaze, which she almost never managed.

"You didn't miss it. I-I don't want you to have to wonder anymore. About any of it. About what a woman smells like, or what it feels like to… to be with someone who wants you back. Really wants you." Her face was burning, but she kept going. "You've waited so long. I didn't want it to just happen to you, like it happens to everyone else. I wanted it to be worth the wait. I wanted it to be… everything you were scared you'd never get."

Her eyes stung behind her glasses, but for once it wasn't because she was sad.

"So, um." 8She gave a tiny, nervous laugh and stepped backwards over the threshold, still holding his hand and drawing him gently after her into the warm, golden, ripe-smelling dark of her flat.* "Welcome home. Please come in… before I lose my nerve."

For three days, Ellie didn't answer his texts.

*He'd only sent two. The first came the morning after: "I'm so sorry. You don't have to reply. I just needed you to know that." The second came the night after that: "I won't message again unless you want me to. I hope you're okay." After that, true to his word, he went silent.

She'd read both of them more times than she wanted to admit.

The first night had been the worst. She couldn't stop seeing it: his back turned in her tiny bathroom, her knickers in his hands. Every time the image came back her stomach twisted, hot and sick. She'd stripped the laundry basket and run a load at eleven o'clock at night just so nothing of hers was sitting in there anymore. Then she'd sat on the edge of her bed with the lamp on and cried. She wasn't even sure why. Maybe because she'd -trusted- him. She'd left him alone in her home, which she'd never done with anyone, and it had felt like proof that she'd finally found someone safe.

She felt violated. There wasn't a softer word for it, and she didn't go looking for one.

But Ellie had never been good at staying angry. Anger burned out of her quickly and left her lying awake, picking things apart, which was exactly what she did.

By the second day she wasn't just replaying what she'd seen. She was replaying what he'd said: the shaky, tumbling flood of it on her couch, the way he couldn't look at her, the way his huge shoulders had curled in like he was trying to disappear. "It's not an excuse. I know it's not." None of the men before him had ever said anything like that. They'd always had an excuse, and somehow it had always ended up being her fault.

On the third day she was shelving returns at work, sliding a battered Nora Roberts paperback back into its place, and found herself thinking about every conversation they'd ever had about books. The silly, gooey, sappy romances she was embarrassed to love, and how he'd never once made fun of her for them. He'd talked about them with her. When she gushed over a slow-burn love story he lit up too, quietly, with those awkward little half-smiles, saying things like "I like it when they take their time. When it actually means something." Back then she'd thought it was sweet that they were so alike. Now she wondered if he'd been reading those books for the same reason she had: to learn what it felt like from the outside, because nobody had ever shown him from the inside.

Thirty-two, autistic, and never had a girlfriend. Never been kissed. Nobody had ever let him close enough to learn the normal, clumsy ways people work these things out. He'd never been taught how to want someone out loud, or what to do with feelings that big. He probably thought his own sexuality was something shameful, a secret that made him a creep or a pervert. He'd carried that alone his whole life, and then he'd met her and it had all come spilling out the wrong way.

None of that made it okay. But she was starting to think it made him okay.

That night she sat cross-legged on her bed with her phone in both hands for a full ten minutes before she pressed call.

He answered on the first ring, as if he'd been sitting there with the phone in his hand, and she suspected he had. "Ellie?"

His voice cracked on her name. He sounded wrecked: hoarse, quiet, like he hadn't been sleeping, like he'd spent three days bracing for the moment she called to tell him never to come near her again. When she asked, very softly, if he'd meet her on Saturday, there was a long pause. Then a shaky breath, and a "Yes" that sounded like it had been pulled up from the bottom of him.

That was when she knew she'd made the right choice. It had been a stupid mistake, made by a good man trying to find his way in a world that had never once made room for him.

So, dammit... She was going to give him a second chance.

---

The smell thing was… a lot. She still didn't really know what to do with it, and she didn't need to, not yet. But that wasn't the only thing he'd confessed on her couch. Buried in all that panic had been something much smaller and gentler, something that had stuck with her more than she expected: he'd never been kissed. Not once, not ever.

So she didn't plan anything big. Just a walk along the beach.

---

They met in the car park at Silver Sands late on Saturday afternoon. Summer was slowly giving way to autumn. The worst of the heat had broken, the wind off the water had a cool bite to it, and the holiday crowds had gone home weeks ago. The beach was nearly empty. There was one man throwing a ball for his kelpie down near the waterline and a couple of gulls arguing over chips, and that was it.

{{user}} was already there when she pulled in. He was standing beside his car with his hands jammed in the pockets of an old flannel jacket and his long hair whipping around in the breeze. He looked like he'd been there a while. When he saw her he straightened up so fast he nearly knocked into his own side mirror.

Ellie got out, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and walked over before she could lose her nerve. Up close he looked tired, with dark smudges under his eyes, and terrified. He wouldn't quite meet her gaze.

"Hi," she said quietly.

"Hi," he managed. He swallowed. "Thank you. For, um. For calling. I didn't think you—" He stopped himself and shook his head. "Thank you."

She just nodded. Then, after a moment, she held out her hand. It was a small thing and it scared her half to death, but she did it anyway.

He stared at it like he didn't quite believe it was for him. Then, very carefully, as though her fingers were made of glass, he took it.

---

They walked south along the hard, wet sand near the water's edge, where the walking was easiest. For a while neither of them said much. The waves came in long, lazy and grey-green, foaming white around their feet before sliding back out. Ellie had slipped off her sandals and was carrying them in her free hand, and the water was cold enough to make her gasp the first time it washed over her toes. She heard {{user}} make a soft, surprised sound that might almost have been a laugh.

Slowly, it got easier. They talked about nothing much: the dog down the beach, the book she'd just finished, a terrible pun on a sign at the fish and chip shop. He still wasn't quite himself. She could feel how carefully he was holding everything, how scared he was of putting a single foot wrong. But every so often his thumb moved over the back of her hand, so lightly she wasn't sure he knew he was doing it.

By the time they turned back, the sun was sliding down towards the Indian Ocean. The whole sky had gone to fire: deep orange bleeding into pink, then soft lavender higher up, with long streaks of gold across the water. The wind had dropped. The man and his kelpie had gone, and it was just the two of them, the sound of the waves, and the light.

Ellie slowed to a stop, and he stopped with her.

She looked up at him, and it was a long way up. He was silhouetted against that burning sky, with wind-tangled hair, an untidy beard, and soft, sad, hopeful eyes. She thought about all those romance novels and every first kiss she'd ever read about, swooning on the page between the shelves of a quiet library. She thought about how he'd read those same kinds of stories, wondering if anything like that would ever happen to him.

Her heart was hammering. Her cheeks were burning, and it had nothing to do with the cold.

"If he plays his cards right", she'd told herself that morning, staring at her reflection, "a first kiss on the beach at sunset is a pretty memorable first."

She didn't let go of his hand.

"It's, um…" Her voice came out small and wobbly. She bit her lip, glanced at the sunset, then back up at him. "It's really pretty. Isn't it?"

She didn't step away. She stayed right where she was, close enough that her shoulder almost brushed his arm, looking up at him with her heart in her throat. She was waiting, and hoping he'd understand what she was too shy to say out loud.