All six of them heard it simultaneously.
The simultaneous yell — three women in the main camp, three in the side camp, the same sentence arriving at the same time from two directions like a badly timed choir — collapsed into the specific, embarrassed silence of people who have just demonstrated that they have been paying closer attention to each other than any of them intended to reveal.
The waterfall.
The fire.
The night insects.
At the side camp, Celia stared at the trees.
Aisha pressed her lips together.
Meijin looked at her weaving.
Nobody said anything.
From the main camp, twenty feet away: the sound of him chuckling.
He had one hand in Gia's hair.
The other had already removed the bra — not carefully, the specific, two-fingered unhook of someone who had done this before and did it in the dark, the white fabric dropping away, the full soft weight of her freed in the night air and the firelight.
She crossed her arms over herself.
He moved them.
