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She got up off the bunk and didn't wait on him. She crossed the floor and put both hands flat on his chest, then up into the collar of his shirt, and pulled his head down and kissed him, and he made a sound into her mouth he'd have been ashamed of anywhere else, and his hands came up and had her.

He got her cap off and dropped it on the table and her hair came down, wet at the ends, and he got both hands in it and kissed her, the way he'd wanted to on that porch when she was seventeen and hadn't had the right to. She got his shirt open and pushed it off his shoulders and put her mouth on his chest.

"Bunk," she said, against his skin.

"Liv."

"Don't. Not one word. Bunk."

He walked her back to it. She got her own shirt off over her head, and her bra, and stood in front of him in her jeans and let him look, and then he went down on his knees on the plank floor and got her jeans open with his hands shaking and pulled them down, and the cotton under them, and she stepped out of it all and sat on the edge of the bunk and lay back and put one foot up on the frame.

He put his mouth on her. She was wet and open and she tasted like nothing he'd ever had, and she said his name to the tin roof and got a hand in his hair. He went slow. He learned her, what made her hips come up and what made her say "There, there, Owen, don't you move," and he didn't move, his tongue flat on her clit and two fingers in her, her heel dug into his back and her whole body climbing. He talked to her. Low, against her, in the voice nobody in this town had ever heard out of him.

"Put your other foot up. There. Now hold still and let me."

She couldn't hold still. Her hips came up and he put his arm across them and held her down, and she said, "Owen, I'm going to," and he said, "I know you are. Go on," and she did, hard, against his mouth, her thighs shaking either side of his head and her hand pulling his hair and his name coming out of her broken, and he stayed on her through all of it until she pushed his head away with both hands and lay there with her arm over her eyes.

He wiped his mouth on his shoulder and stayed on his knees. She took her arm down and looked at him there with his belt still done, and she sat up, put her feet either side of him, and got the belt open.

He didn't stop her hands. She got him out. Her hand closed around him and he put his forehead on her knee and said her name into it, and she stroked him slow, and then she bent and put her mouth on him.

He was gone the second she did it. He got a hand in her hair, not pulling, just holding, and she took him as far as she could and came off and went back down, her hand working what her mouth didn't have, and he talked to her because he couldn't not.

"Liv. Slower. I won't last, slower, let me, that's it, God, your mouth."

She didn't go slower. He felt it come up from the soles of his feet and said, "I'm going to finish, Liv," and she didn't move, and he came in her mouth on his knees on the floor of the line camp with his hand in her hair and everything he'd kept for thirteen years going out of him, and she held him till he was done and wiped her mouth with her wrist and looked at him.

He got his boots and jeans off with his hands not working right and lay down next to her, and she turned into him, and he was hard again before she'd got her leg over his. He rolled her under him. She came up against him, open, her heel behind his thigh, and he was right at her, one push and no other side of it.

She put her hand flat on his chest.

It wasn't a push. Just her hand, flat, over the middle of him. "No."

He stopped.

"Not this." Her voice was steady and her hand wasn't. "Not in here, with the rain on it and nobody to see it. You don't get all of me in a room nobody can see, Owen. You can have the rest. You've had it. But not that. Not till you've said one true thing with the sun up."

He was shaking. He didn't move off her and he didn't move in, and she lay under him with her hand on his chest and her eyes on his face, dry, waiting, and he pushed himself up on his arms and off her and lay on his back beside her with the rain on the roof. He'd never wanted anything the way he wanted to roll back over.

She put her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her. The fire went down, and the rain quit.

It quit the way it had come, all at once, and the sun came in under the door in a line across the floor.

They dressed. He found his shirt on the stove and shook the ash off it. She put her hair up with her back to him and took her cap off the table. Neither of them said a word about any of it. She didn't cry and she didn't look at him like she was waiting on anything, and he wouldn't have known what to do if she had. He banked the fire. She went out on the porch and he came out beside her, and they watched the road go from black to brown in the sun.

"Mama knows where I am," she said. "I told her the line camp. She said take a coat."

"You didn't."

"I didn't figure on rain."

"It's April."

"I didn't figure on a lot of things." She watched the draw. "Your daddy know you're out here?"

"He doesn't know where I am most days."

"Brody?"