An owl hooted throughout the night. It sounded far off, on some unshrouded mountain peak in what seemed like another world. Frog croaks were intermittent, long periods of silence in between.

So few dawn birdcalls to mark the beginning of another day. Tansy stood dull-eyed and lethargic in the mist of her outside enclosure. The woodpile was getting low.

Heath drew pictures on Sarah’s back with his finger. They lay in bed on top of the covers. He traced images from his childhood. She guessed the scene: him bouncing on a trampoline, him in a pool and at a carnival, him playing cricket and Aussie Rules. He reached underneath her top and illustrated the scenes directly onto her skin.

‘Draw something on my back,’ he said when her responses grew half-hearted.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Tell me something.’

Sarah kept her body turned away from him. ‘I can’t think of anything.’

‘Yes you can.’

He sat up and began unwinding the plastic bandage from his knee.

‘My first serious relationship was with a friend of my father’s,’ Sarah said.

‘How old were you?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘He was?’

‘Forty-eight.’

‘Do all your stories require a strong drink afterwards?’

‘You keep asking,’ she said defensively. She turned further away. ‘Not everyone’s had a charmed life.’

‘Don’t get cranky.’

‘Go away.’

‘I can’t.’ He prompted, ‘He was forty-eight, you were seventeen, and . . .’ He sighed when she stayed silent. ‘Having a sick brother is not a charmed life. It’s constantly being the good son, never making a mistake, never making it harder on my mum and dad. It’s never showing you get sad, or angry, and never acting the slightest bit nutty. It’s everyone waiting for you to lose the plot no matter how well behaved you are. Unless you’re absolutely, one hundred per cent acting super sane and perfect then you’re causing too much extra strain on your family.’ She heard him swallow. ‘I love my family, I don’t want to cause them any extra stress, I don’t want to let them down, but sometimes . . . being the healthy one can feel like a straightjacket of its own.’

‘He was my father’s best friend,’ Sarah conceded. ‘Still is. He was separated from his wife and spent a lot of time at our place when I was younger. My father still doesn’t know. My mother found out just before it ended; probably the reason it did end. She walked in when we were together in the bathroom, she apologised and closed the door and walked away. I don’t know,’ Sarah said and shrugged, ‘all I got from her was the feeling she was angry with me about it, and she would be even angrier if I let it get out. It was only much later I realised how wrong the whole thing was, and how wrong her reaction was. I don’t blame her though; she didn’t know what to do.’

‘It’s come between you and your parents?’

‘Oh God, yeah. Well, Mum anyway. We don’t talk about it, we’ve never talked about it, but it’s there whenever I’m with her.’

‘Is he still around?’

‘He has Christmas lunch with them every year.’

Heath hadn’t lain back down. By the sound of it he’d rolled the cling film into a ball and was passing it back and forth between his hands. She imagined he was probably looking at her over his shoulder, looking at the way she wouldn’t look at him.

‘It would tear my parents’ relationship apart if Dad found out,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s really controlling. I’m close to him but . . . he throws his weight around a lot. Not physically, emotionally. He can be intimidating. If he found out we’d kept this secret from him all these years, I really don’t know what he’d do. That’s why Mum’s bitter – she blames me for what she has to hide.’

Without asking for permission this time, Heath put his hand on Sarah’s calf and rubbed her through the thin wool of her thermals. His fingers squeezed and massaged. Sarah closed her eyes.

How could she really know the root cause of her increased heartbeat at that moment? In the fog, in the dim light of the caravan, on the mountain, it was hard to tell. After the conversation they’d had, it was impossible to tell. Heat from his touch, the need for his touch to continue, the want for something more, coupled with the stupid urge to cry, it came from a confusing place. She drew in a pained breath. Heath was dangerous, because he made her feel this way, because he made her talk. His hand moved higher. The mattress sunk with his weight. For almost an hour he’d been touching her, desensitising her at the very same time as increasing her sensitivity. She opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling as he eased her onto her back.

‘Tell me what you want.’

He made it sound so simple. Sarah looked inside herself for an equally straightforward response. He stretched out beside her, was wise enough to avoid kneeling over her, coming down to her level, putting his face near hers and his hand on her stomach.

‘Do I come across as someone who can be used?’

‘You come across as strong and sexy.’

‘No I don’t.’

He moved his hand back and forth between her hipbones and pushed it up her torso to feel her ribcage, he ran his thumb between her breasts while pressing his lips to her shoulder, kissing her, eyes fixed on the side of her face. ‘You do.’ He grazed his knuckles beneath her breasts. The grey wool was a second skin. Her blood was zinging and her head was empty. He trailed his fingers over the swell of her breasts. Sarah bit her bottom lip. She arched beneath his hand. He hummed approvingly against her shoulder.

His fingers spread wide and covered bigger areas of her body, down the outside of her leg and the side of her body. His fingertips swept across her lower belly. Sarah turned her face away. She squeezed her eyes shut. The want was swift, intense and uncomfortable. Need was certainly there, whether it was need for him or need in general . . . so difficult to pin down.

‘That’s good,’ he told her. His voice had grown thick and low. She was rubbing against his hand. He had held it a fraction above her, between her legs, and she lifted her hips to meet it. By rubbing against him this way it gave the impression that there was no uncertainty. For Sarah though there was no easy answer as to whether any indecisiveness remained.

‘Sarah,’ he said and took hold of her chin and made her face him.

A different Heath, a truer one, a less controlled one. This eye contact was his final check to see if she was okay. Sarah didn’t know his name, he had her gun, he’d lied about it, their food was running low and his identity might never be clear . . . but . . . she felt better with him than she had with anyone else. He slid his hand inside her leggings. His touch was light, over the top of her underwear.

During the five or so minutes leading up to Sarah’s orgasm there was a king tide of unmistakable feeling. Her hand wrapped around his wrist as she guided his fingers. She turned her body to him. She clawed closer. He lifted her top, lowered his dark head and kissed her breasts. Sarah said his name because ‘Heath’ felt like a shout of rebellion against all the ‘hims’ in her life, ‘Heath’ was mutiny against the weather and the mountain, against Lauriston, against the world. She climaxed hard.

Out by the fire with the mist softening the light Sarah looked at the tattoo on his torso. He was sitting in a chair, facing the potbelly. Sarah crouched between his knees and made him lean back. She traced his tattoo with her fingers and then with her thumb. The artwork wasn’t original; it had the look of most young men’s tattoos, symbols borrowed from other cultures and designs lifted straight from a webpage or magazine. Her fingers wandered from the drawings and touched his chest. ‘You have an amazing body,’ she told him. There were a couple of different elements that invoked admiration – the fine-pore texture of his skin, the feel and look of the muscle and bone beneath it, the dark hair running in a line up to his navel, the pleasing shape of his shoulders, the way he wasn’t formulaic like his tattoos, but unique, graceful and masculine. Each part of him was in proportion and nothing was over-emphasised. But also he wasn’t perfect. His nipples were small and pale, there was dark regrowth and a slight rash on his chest from what was no doubt a vanity-inspired bout of waxing. His facial hair extended down his neck, leaving some patches of skin red and irritated.

After a period of regular breathing, Heath’s chest expanded with a much deeper breath and he made a small sound in his throat. She looked up at him. The dilated black of his eyes reminded her of where she was and what she was doing. He leaned forward and kissed her. Before that, in the van, he’d only kissed her breasts, shoulders and neck. There was the jolt and the tingle of electricity that came with the newness of a first kiss, and there was a tenderness that took her breath away. His hand curved around her nape and the tilt of his head became suggestive. It had to be a form of flattery, the urgency and the sense of passion he then put into the kiss. Going by his intensity you’d think they were somewhere else, two people in a nightclub, or kissing after a romantic dinner. She pulled away. She undid the button of his cargos and encouraged him to stand. He pushed his pants down to his ankles, slid his foot out of one pant leg and left the other to bunch around his foot. Sarah sat him back down and widened his knees so she could get between his legs again. His leg tattoo was a twist of dagger-like shapes forming the words Bravo Hotel. She paid as much attention to his un-inked thigh.

Sarah liked the reactions his body made as she raked her fingers down his legs. And she liked, too, the things he said, the way he seemed determined to make the moment special. The romance was sweet and reassuring. The sounds he made down in his chest were sexy. They got her breathing keenly too. They made her bolder. Sarah touched his erection through the cotton of his underwear. She felt dizzy with the fact she was rubbing him while crouched and dressed, the cold day over her shoulder and the mountain behind that. In her mind she compared him to her husband. Heath’s erection was not as large but better for it, harder, his penis seemed more in keeping with him and not an organ of its own. Also, Heath’s erection was twice as sensitive to touch. When it was skin on skin (her hand beneath the waistband of his jocks), he took over for a moment and showed her a less direct way of touching him, the method he preferred. Heath liked it slow and teasing. Time was one thing they did have. She inched down his underwear, ran a single finger down his length, she pressed her lips but didn’t lick, then licked but didn’t suck, and so on. With him weakened and at the same time visibly throbbing, it was no wonder she got a buzz.

She stayed dressed, boots on, thermals on, a shirt over the top. If he reached for her, she twisted away. ‘This is what we have to do, one of us always has to be dressed, or else we’ll slip up and have sex.’

‘I would give away all our food for one condom right now.’

‘No you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let you.’

She straightened and kissed his neck, stood over him and eased his head back, tasted his skin and bit him gently. When she kissed his lips it was with a closed mouth, brushing her mouth against his, and then back down his body, feeling no pressure, no regulation moves to make, it wasn’t standard sex. Heath whimpered as though in pain. The most innocent of touches had him writhing in the chair.

‘Keep still.’

Tansy kept snickering her uncertainty of what they were doing, or her impatience that they get it over with already.

In terms of an hour melting by without a problem during that day and the next, those moments outdid all others, even sleep.