Page 63 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

“Okay, but,” I say, “hear me out.”

Logan waits.

I duck my chin. “I was hoping to come up with an idea by the time I stopped talking.”

He grunts out a laugh and then with the barest of smiles, drops to his knees. With one arm around my backside, he hitches me onto tiptoes, my back braced against the trunk. His lips travel higher, kissing the inside of my knee, then the soft, sensitive skin along my thighs, up and up, until—

I gasp with pleasure, my hips arching. This. This is finally close enough. Enough pressure. Enough heat. Enough Logan.

My fingers dig into the soft bark, and I’m sure I’ve just ruined my nails with dirt, but I can’t care. My spine arches and my hair tangles in bark. My breaths come faster, heaving in and out of my lungs as Logan’s tongue moves, driving me with the force of a cresting wave.

His name rips out of my lips. My fingers twist into his hair, and maybe I’m pulling too hard, but I barely know what I’m doing because I’m close to bursting, exploding, radiating. Like I’m lost in the movement of his mouth as he unshackles each nerve ending from its muscle.

Then Logan adds his finger, too, and everything clenches. Explodes. A bright pulse of white.

I’m opening, relaxing like a bloom. I tip my head back, and Logan is still nudging his nose against me, murmuring encouragements as the wave ebbs.

My eyes open toward the branches. They should be filled with nothing but leaves, dark silhouettes against the starry sky, but my vision spackles with white.

I blink as my back relaxes against the trunk, limp and boneless. Logan eases me to the ground, gathering me into his arms. Vibrations still race through me, but they’re subsiding now. Still, the white filling my vision doesn’t fade.

“Logan,” I say and shake his elbow.

“Hmm?” he says distractedly.

“Logan. Look.”

I tip my chin higher. Our faces travel upward.

Impossibly, so impossibly, the tree has bloomed. Where, minutes ago, these branches were only green, they’ve erupted in a riot of glowing buds, silvered under the moonlight. A breeze catches a branch and blossoms scatter in a million disintegrating pieces. They drift and rise in the shallow breeze, shimmering down on us like a rainstorm of flowers, decorating my curls in specks of white.

A laugh catches in my throat as I lift my hand. Delicate petals collect in my open palm. “Logan. Tell me this is real.”

His eyes are wide with awe—an expression of wonder I haven’t seen since we were children, didn’t even realize his adult face could still make. Our gazes connect as a blossom settles on his cheek.

I pinch it off his beard, and his hand rises to catch my wrist.

“As real as the butterflies,” he says, thumb tucked into my palm.

My mind sheers in half, splintering a jagged edge between then and now.

His barrel chest. Probing eyes.

A worn pencil in his fingers, his back against a tree trunk.

The line of his jaw. The rough pads of his fingertips.

His pinky finger anchored to mine as we follow the drift of clouds through a cornflower blue sky.

I’m straddling a line, living a refraction. I see him as he was: open and young and standing in the light of his biggest dreams. And here. The man who can steady, or unravel, me with a single glance.

“Remind me why you’re the one leaving this time,” I say quietly.

Logan rests his chin on top of my head. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember.”

I swivel so I can look up at him. “What times?”

His thumb runs against my cheekbone, and even though the eye contact is so intense my veins hum, I let it ride. “Anytime you’re looking at me.”