If she hadn't wanted this, she should never have told him that her family never locked their basement door. But, he suspected, and rightly so, that her grinning protests were more to commend than reprimand him for his naughtiness in sneaking in. He knew she liked it when he did so, despite the way she'd point out, every time, how "wrong" it was, how easily he could be caught if either of her parents got up to search for the reason the motion light on the back porch had blinked to life.

Every time he arrived, unexpected but expected, he let her argue against his actions for awhile. He so loved to spontaneously silence her mid-sentence with his lips: sometimes a hard kiss, sometimes soft, depending on the nature of the hunger he saw in her eyes. He always knew what she wanted—he knew she didn't really want him not to swing by anymore—and he always fed her desires.

There, in the private darkness of her locked bedroom, he would set her body aflame, night after night, having crept in to do so and always creeping out just as silently afterward, after she had allowed sleep to take her from his arms. And every night, at the same point in his travels back home, he would stop. This point was a scatter of dirt by a brook that tossed off the black and white of the night sky and the stars. And here he would bite his lip, turn his eyes to the moon, and imagine them sneaking up there to be together in ways that were, by people who would not follow, not permitted on the soil on which he stood.