1969, Mabon

She'd met him at a party. Well, that wasn't exactly true. Technically, they had known each other for all of their lives. Their mothers had probably known each other at some time or another, though Carmen's mother was an artiste and Grant's mother was long dead. Maybe dead: no one knew, and Grant had never invited the questions.

But the party was where she would always remember meeting him. It had been the pulsing rock music that had raped the blood vessels of everyone in the room, it had been the smell of sweat and wine coolers and the sheer luxury of cool night air in panting lungs. It was everything at the end of the spectrum, a merge of lust and divinity, but nothing approaching any sort of equilibrium. It was that hot, excited mindset she had been in when she had first looked at Grant with eyes that weren't innocent. It was the moment she had first imagined Grant's legs twining around her own when she had first come into contact with an entirely new and primal part of herself. She had seen him in his tight blue jeans, seen his bare chest and black devil's trail of hair, seen the faint trace of sweat on his brow and the sub-zero temperatures in his golden eyes, and wanted from him what she had never wanted from any boy in her life before.

She caught his eyes from across the room and gravitated toward him, never remembering how she had moved so quickly or who she must have pushed out of the way. But she stood in front of him, her ice-blue eyes directly meeting his own flame-gold, and watched as he reviewed her. She bit the inside of her cheek, and the corner of Grant's lips twitched.

"Wanna dance?" She asked. Her eyes implied that there was more than one kind of dancing that would be done tonight.

Grant shrugged with one shoulder, and Carmen, moved by some force she couldn't identify, found the sheer guts to smooth back his damp hair with her cool fingers, moving to the shell of his ear and down his cheek and neck. He stayed still, unimpassioned as she did this, but when she had finished, those golden eyes were definitely shining in a different way than they had been before. "Sure." He breathed, and they moved off into a private corner. The outsider kids, not sure whether they were going to dance or fuck or explode, kept a safe distance away from them.

Later that night, her halter-top and miniskirt would have been easy enough to remove, though they didn't bother with such formalities. She had gone back to Crowhaven Road in his car, and there on the beach, Carmen's favorite place in the world, with only the moon and stars to witness, Carmen moaned wildly into Grant's mouth as he became a living flame inside her. Afterwards, they talked earnestly in the moonlight.

"Nothing seems real," Grant had said, his golden eyes dark brown in the stark shadows. "You know what I mean? Like everyone's pretending there's something there. Like false hope. I see it in their eyes, all over the place. We're the same, you and me, Carmen." And at this, he had turned to run his thumb over her cheek, almost emulating the gesture she had done before, at the party. "Refugees from a torn-up world."

Carmen's eyes shined with tears. She sniffed, in a futile gesture to hold them in, but her eyes spilled over. "Yes." She whispered. She bit her lip. "It's people that matter, not places or things. No one else I know ever understood that."

His large hand closed on her shoulder, and this time he untied her halter-top and put it gently on the sand.