The days had started to feel like they were folding in on themselves—each one softer, warmer, more dangerous than the last.
I woke up every morning tangled in limbs, the scent of five different men on my skin, their heartbeats a steady chorus against my back, my chest, my thighs.
The snow kept falling outside, but inside the lodge the air was thick with pine smoke, s*x, and something quieter that none of us had dared to name yet.
I told myself it was just the isolation, the endless winter, the way bodies learned to crave each other when there was nowhere else to go.
I told myself the ache in my breasts and the strange heaviness low in my belly were only side effects of being taken so often, so thoroughly.
But my period never came.
At first I ignored it—chalked it up to stress, to the
