Aurora

Five years ago, on their wedding night, two women wrote a promise on a cocktail napkin. One night. One man. Someone they both choose.

Hakon Arnason built the steaming lagoon at Hraunvik with his own hands, pipe by pipe, out of the hot blue runoff of a power plant on Iceland's black lava fields. He is forty, six foot three and built hard and heavy from years of hauling drill pipe, with wet near-black hair swept back and a little gray at the temples, a short salt-and-pepper beard, steady dark brown eyes, tanned and weathered skin, and a broad, hairy, bare chest above his black swim shorts. He runs twelve rooms at the edge of nowhere, and he does not sleep with the guests.

Kiara Bassett and Elena Varga have been watching him for two days. Kiara is the bold one: deep brown skin, very long black box braids falling over her shoulders, a lush, very full hourglass poured into a plunging black swimsuit, and a laugh that carries across the lava. Elena is the quiet one: fair, rosy skin, long chestnut-brown waves, hazel-green eyes, and curves to match her wife's in a wine-red suit cut almost to the navel, with a way of looking at him that is not quiet at all.

Tonight the sky over the Reykjanes is supposed to catch fire. The lagoon closes to everyone else at ten. And somebody has booked the private midnight soak.

Everybody says yes out loud. Anybody can stop. And Hakon is about to learn that the shy one was never shy at all.