Page 43 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

I take a tentative sip of air. It still tastes of sulfur, but dampened. Dare I say this is working? I draw in another breath, deeper now. My first real inhale since I was in the barn.

Definitely working.

Logan’s shoulders relax beneath me. With his head tipped back to the rock, the line of his jaw is even more prominent. His breaths are steady and deeper. His rib cage expands to meet my own, our skin touching in a new place.

“Logan.”

His chin lifts. His gaze meets mine. It sends an electric zip between my shoulder blades.

Two minutes down and fifty-eight to go. “What the actual hell just happened to us?”

There’s a long pause, filled only by the gentle rushing sound of water running over rocks. Finally, Logan says, “I’ve only ever seen something like that once before.”

I hesitate before whispering, “The butterflies.”

One of my damp curls has sprung loose from my ponytail and now rests on my forehead. Logan lifts his hand to sweep it out of my sight line, a gesture that was once so rote he still seems to carry its muscle memory fourteen years later.

And now there’s no stopping it—my mind slips back in time, skimming directly from turquoise and amber butterflies fluttering around that first kiss…to the dozens that followed it. Against the barn door at dusk, Logan’s skin smelling faintly of sweat and sawdust. Behind his mom’s pickup truck, the metal radiating heat through my sundress, our knees bumping. Next to an old oak tree, my finger winding through his belt loop, his breath stirring the fine hairs at my temples.

I blink and teenage Logan is replaced with this very adult one. With a beard instead of that youthful roundness in his cheeks. With an expanse of muscles across his shoulders and chest. With so much more hair dusting his arms and legs.

More guarded. Fewer easy smiles.

But still the same steady eye contact that leaves me both grounded and unmoored.

My throat is sunbaked dry. I clear it. “And that’s not to mention that skunk. No skunk spray should last like that, not through that much soap and water. And now”—I take another long draught of air—“this pool should not be helping, but it is.”

But as I say this, I feel the shift. We’re suddenly talking about something else, something more significant, and it tolls between us with the low, purposeful ring of a bell that cannot be unrung. It’s a shift into something entirely new and, frankly, terrifying.

“Something here is…”

I can’t say it.

Logan apparently can because he says, “Supernatural.”

The word sits between us. Despite the heat and the silt and the way Logan’s body is rubbing against mine, I’m only thinking about one thing.

My farm is remarkable.

The butterflies and the glowing beetle and the bunnies and maybe even the problems Martin dealt with over the years. It wasn’t all natural. It means something more than I’d realized.

I should be more unsettled by this idea than I am, though. But I suppose it could be because I’ve always known, deep down, that something about this land is different. I’ve always had questions that my uncle wouldn’t answer directly. Sometimes about mundane things. But also about deeper things. Like why the trees felt like they were breathing with me. Why they seem to be more than unconscious life.

“Could that be what’s going on with the fruit?” Logan asks.

I turn to him, startled anew by how close he is. Droplets cling to his beard and eyebrows. A bead of water traces a tendon in his neck, tucking into the depression at the base of his throat.

“I think it has to be,” I say, trying not to look like I’ve been staring. “Whatever is wrong with the fruit isn’t natural.” Could this be what Val has been hiding? The reason she got upset yesterday? In some ways it would make sense. She’s most defensive when it comes to two things: the land and my uncle. “Why wouldn’t she have told us, though?”

“Martin never said anything, either?”

I rub at my temple, trying to think. “Not exactly. He always had this flair for the theatrical, and he was prone to, I don’t know, exaggeration? He used to say stuff like ‘Never forget that this land’s special, Ali.’ Or ‘You’ll never step foot on an orchard like this one.’ Or he’d talk about how you have to respect the trees so they respect you back. But when I asked him to explain, he’d just tweak my nose. And…I don’t know. I always figured that was how he talked, you know? He was just like that.”

“I remember.”

“Right. I keep forgetting about that steel-trap mind of yours.”

“Only for some things,” Logan says.