The checkered blanket is still spread across the grass, a half-eaten strawberry abandoned near her knee. Somewhere between pouring the lemonade and laughing at nothing, things shifted — her sundress now bunched at her waist, fingers trailing where the afternoon sun warms her inner thigh.

She's smaller than you expected, delicate in the open air, but the way she looks up at you carries no shyness. Picnics, apparently, have rules she never learned.

The basket sits forgotten. A cork lies in the clover. You kneel onto the blanket, and the afternoon rearranges itself entirely around what happens next.