Emily inhales, smelling dead seaweed and the ghost of fabric softener. “I’d like to kiss you,” he says and she nods, lifting her chin.

She closes her eyes, imagines the ribbons of foamy water pulling tight around her ankles and his hands feel strange on her face, like they don’t curve in the right places and won’t fit the shapes in her cheekbones, won’t mold to the curve in her jaw. Aaron’s palms warm her skin, keeping her in place as he glides in for a landing. Emily’s breath quickens. There it is; the hairs on her body stand up, all of them, quivering in a sensation like the top layers of her skin are peeling off, launching into space, shooting up through all those layers of blue air into something beyond, something strange, something outside the boundaries of her existence. She holds her breath and floats on a vacuum, thinking oh my God I don’t feel anything at all before a shudder starts deep in the muscles of her thighs. It turns them inward, violence rising up through her belly, shaking apart her thoughts. A blast of hot breath pushes her deeper into the kiss. He catches the back of her neck, holds her face close.

“It’s time to go,” she whispers, running the heels of her hands across his stubbly jaws. He pushes hair out of her face. The wind whistles down out of the sky, slapping away the day’s remaining heat. His fingertips are cold. The moment is like a blade inside her, cold and slipping through the ties between her body and her breath. She starts to shiver. He holds her as close as possible and they cling to each other in the failing light. Goosebumps silt up inside her skin. The waves crash and crash, folding over into one another, grating constant hollow noise. He breathes, ragged, into her ear. Her toes curl into the sand and go numb.

“You’re cold,” he murmurs. “Let’s get you inside.”

At the hotel room they get into bed, leaving their clothes on, layering limbs and breath until everything slows down. Darkness settles over the room’s landscape. Heat builds up between them, held down by layers of blankets. She snuggles down into it and feels the way his desire for sleep creeps through him, unlocking his joints and stretching out inside his muscles. He moves her hair to one side, hand performing an old ingrained dance dressed in half-forgotten tenderness. He kisses high up on her neck, near the place where her hair takes over. The soft, tentative feeling of his mouth strikes a spark deep in her loins. It climbs up her vertebrae, shivering into her throat.

“What about Haley?”

“She’s gone, Emily. She left me. Remember?”

“Yes, but…don’t you still love her?”

“I can’t love you too?”

She turns over. “I‘m not a substitute. I won’t be one.”

“Of course not.”

They kiss and it’s different in the dark, hands reaching for outcroppings of face, pulling up into an undressed meeting of mouths, gradual, building in layers of slippery skin and moist breath. She climbs into the tongue-crossed heat of it, sinking, waiting for the strange rush, that feeling like being in orbit and longing for gravity. They come apart.

“I don’t want to push you,” he pants in a fading whisper, “don’t let me push you.”

She pulls up his shirt, brushes his ribs with the tips of her fingers and feels the tension in him, a surrender to desire that hums below his skin like a stretched piano string. It shudders through his lungs. She pulls the shirt off him, runs her fingers down the ridges of his spine. He shivers, body softening into the sensation, and his mouth comes down on her face, her earlobe, her neck. Her skin awakens to the wet silk of his tongue. Her mouth opens, pulls in air. His kisses fall like tingling feathers into the bowl of her pelvis. She lifts up against their hot weight and he shifts between her thighs.

“I didn’t want it to be like this,” he whispers into her throat. “There are too many hotel rooms in our lives.” His fingers slide between hers and grasp tight, pressing her hands into the pillow. “This means so much more when it happens at home.”

Emily rocks her hips against him, heat flooding her skin. He massages her breast, thumb brushing the raw ache in her nipple. Her breath speeds up, her body pulling away from the echo of teeth, her mind adrift on a fresh cloud of oxygen. Her cunt clutches at the memory. She whimpers into it. Her hand moves over the back of his, molds it tight to her breast.

“The best sex always happens in hotel rooms,” she sighs.

She unzips his jeans and he wriggles out of them. He is pulling her shirt over her head when his phone rings. He can’t remember where it is, and he feels all over the nightstand and picks hers up before the shape of it tells him it’s the wrong one. Emily reaches down over the edge of the bed and snatches up his jeans, shaking them. The phone falls out, all lit up and strident in the breath-torn silence. She passes it to him, watching him open up the phone and stretch out on his back, holding it to his ear with the rumpled covers tossed up past his navel and the sharp bones in his face glazed with digital light. She leans on one elbow and watches his expression change: first the softness rolling back, swirling down behind his eyes, and then fines lines of tension surfacing around his mouth. His faces closes up, gaze reaching past the ceiling.

This is what drove Haley away. This right here, how one phone call can erase all emotion from his face. This invisible mask of armor. She doesn’t understand.

Emily puts a hand on his chest, the vibration of his voice warm inside her fingertips. He closes up the phone and lets it fall onto the bed and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“There’s a case,” she murmurs.

“Yeah.” He sits up, feels around for his shirt. “If we hurry we can catch the last ferry. The others will be flying in later tonight.”

She feels cold all over, engulfed in a fever. Icy sweat beads up on her skin. “Ferry?”

“Yes.” Aaron pulls the shirt down over his torso. He looks at her and she can’t read his face in the dark. “There’s been a murder on Nantucket.”