Page 4

The orchard is silent. I wasn't ready for that. The rows climb the hill in long black lines, the branches heavy. The air is sweet and cold and a little rotten in the way of apples left too long on the ground. Moonlight lies in pieces between the trunks. The grass is soaked through to the soles of my boots.

I slow down without meaning to because the smell has gone straight past my head and into my chest. The whole summer of my eleventh year folded up inside it.

"You all right?" Ethan asks. His voice is low.

"I thought it'd be the trees. I didn't know it would be the smell."

"It does that to people. Lived in this town my whole life, and I still walk up here some nights just to stand in it."

"Some nights."

"I keep odd hours."

"I'll bet you do."

He turns his head. In the dark his eyes are nearly black. The distance between us has been closing for a quarter of a mile. Neither of us has mentioned it.

I set my cup on a stump. After a moment he sets his down next to it. When we straighten up we're closer than we were.

"I should say something," he says. "Before either of us does anything we can't take back."

"That sounds like paperwork."

"I'm not a guy who stays." He doesn't flinch from it. "I'm not saying it to be a jerk. I'd rather you hear it from me tonight than work it out at breakfast. I don't call afterward, and I'm out of the house early, because I have to be somewhere by seven. I don't want that to turn into a mystery."

I wait for it to hurt. It does, a little, in a place I thought was healed over. A long time ago a man let me believe in a later that he never meant to give me. But this one is looking me in the eye with his hands at his sides, saying it all out loud in an orchard at night.

"You're the first man who's ever told me the ending before the beginning."

"Is that bad?"

"It's efficient." I lift my chin. "I'm in town until Monday. I'd have been the one leaving anyway."

Something crosses his face and is gone before I can read it. "Good," he says.

"Good."

"So one night."

"One night." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "No strings."

"No strings," he agrees, and takes one step.

The trunk of the old Northern Spy meets my back before I notice I've been moving. The bark presses through my sweater, rough and cold. Ethan is in front of me with one hand braced on the tree beside my head and the other settling at my waist. He stays like that, not pulling, not pushing. His thumb rests on the curve above my hip.

"Tell me if I've got this wrong," he says.

"You haven't."

"Good, because I've been thinking about your mouth since the cider line."

"While you were carrying Dolores's crate?"

"I'm very talented."

I laugh, breathless. The hand at my waist tightens and slides around the fullness of my hip like he's learning the shape of it. A sound comes out of him, deep in his throat. "There's a lot of you to hold on to, Carolina, and I plan on being thorough."

My palms are flat against his chest. I don't remember putting them there. Beneath the flannel his heart is going as hard as mine. That undoes something in me, because he's the easy one, the one the whole town teases, and he's standing here with a pulse like a boy's.