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“Right.”

“How?”

That takes a little more thought. “Because they know each other. They’ve been together a long time, and Shannon was smiling at him and kissing him and didn’t move away when he touched her. But if he wasn’t sure, he could ask.”

Locke stays where he is, looking at me, and I become abruptly aware that we’re alone in the kitchen. The awareness has nothing to do with fear. It’s another kind of awareness, the one that makes the room feel smaller and every inch between us easier to measure.

“When we watched the movie, you asked,” he says.

“Yes.”

“When you moved closer.”

“Yes.”

“You wanted to touch me.”

Heat starts under my shirt and crawls up my throat. “Yes.” His attention stays on me long enough that I wish he’d chosen almost any example other than the night we watched the movie. Then he asks, “Do you want to now?”

My heartbeat gives one hard thump. “Touch you?” I’m stalling.

“Yes.”

There are a lot of reasonable answers available to me, and I choose the honest one. “Yes.”

Locke steps closer, but not all the way. “What do you want?”

A shiver runs down my back. Discussing consent with an extremely literal wicker man is much less academic when the wicker man is standing three feet away asking what I want from him.

“Give me your hand,” I say. He does, and his fingers close carefully around mine. Warmth settles against my palm. I stroke my thumb over the finer living fibers along the side of his hand. They give softly beneath my touch, then spring back when my thumb passes.

Locke watches our hands. “This?”

“Yes.”

His thumb moves once over the back of my hand. The touch is tentative enough to call innocent, but my body has no interest in technical definitions.

“That feels different,” he says.

“It is.”

He looks up. “I like this.”

My throat goes dry. “Me too.”

Saying it changes something. Until now, I could pretend every surge of awareness around Locke belonged to the situation: his hands in my hair, his body under the shower, sitting against him during the movie. Strange circumstances with a strange man.

This isn’t that. I’m standing in my kitchen holding his hand because I want to, and he’s holding mine because he wants to. There’s nothing accidental left to hide behind.

For a few seconds, neither of us moves. His hand stays around mine, warm and careful, his thumb resting near my knuckles. Then Locke says, “Tom kissed Shannon.”

A laugh escapes me because now there is absolutely nowhere safe for this conversation to go. “Yes.”

“She wanted that too.”

“Yes.”

He thinks about it before asking the question I already feel coming. “Do you?”