I reach over and link Abby’s fingers with mine. “You want to be an agent for actors?”

She bitterly laughs. “No, but it sounded good. I get what you’re saying though. I’ve spent my whole life being Mozart’s daughter, the girl he saved from the junkie, Grams’s second chance, the street hustler for Ricky, the pet project for Linus. I don’t have a clue who I am. Do you think normal people ever feel like us? Like we’re so busy being what everyone in our lives say we are that we never have a chance to be anything else?”

“Who are normal people?” I ask.

“Not us.”

Not us.

“Truth?” she asks.

I squeeze her fingers. “Truth.”

“I like who I am more around all of you then I ever liked myself before. Sort of like I had been trying out other people’s skin like a girl trying on clothes. The person I was before I met any of you, the person I am when I’m not around any of you feels too tight, too scratchy, too irritating. But when I hang with any of you, it’s like I can breathe.”

That’s a big statement for Abby and I’m dumbfounded as to what to say. Instead, I gently pull on her hand until she tilts her body so that we’re facing each other.

“Bigger truth?” she whispers.

“Bigger truth.”

“I really, really like who I am when I’m around you.”

I tuck her hair behind her ear and enjoy the silky strands as they fall from my fingers. For months I ignored the truth, gave what was brewing between me and Abby other labels—attraction, friendship, playing around, lust.

While Abby definitely takes my breath away every time she walks into a room, there’s always been more between us and it’s time to man up. “Abby, I’m in love with you.”

Abby

I can’t breathe.

Logan’s in love with me. With me. And he knows all my dirty secrets. Not just the slightly-coated-with-dust secrets. The real deep muddy ones. The secrets that are so crusted over that they’re cemented into my soul. He knows all of these things, but he loves me anyhow.

“People don’t love me,” I whisper. Fear me. Leave me. Hate me. Use me. But love? Grams loved me but she left me mentally a long time ago and my father...I was the closest he had to experiencing emotion.

“I do.”

My heart thunders. “Normal people don’t love me.”

Logan’s mouth twitches into a somewhat smile. “Guess it’s good I’m crazy.”

I sock him in the shoulder. “I’m serious.”

“I am, too.”

“On being crazy?”

“Yeah and on the loving you.”

I sit up. “Will you stop saying that?”

“What, that I love you?”

“Yes!” I shriek. “That.”

“Why?”

“Because what if you don’t mean it? What if you think you love me and you don’t?”

“I can’t say I have much experience in all this, but I’ve seen a lot of what love isn’t in my life and maybe that’s enough to figure out what it is.”

There’s a trembling inside me that keeps building in intensity and it’s like being on a countdown until I explode. With shaking hands, I touch Logan’s face, confirming he’s real. That this is real. His skin is warm, rough from the slight evening stubble.

“You love me?” I say, trying out the words.

“I love you.”

He loves me.

I stare at him and he only stares back. I’ve had boys touch me before, but it wasn’t because they cared. I had people tell me they’re my friends before, but it’s only because they wanted something I had. I had a mother before, and she sold me for drugs. I had a father, but I was more of a highly valued possession that he liked to admire from the other side of a glass case. I had Grams and I lost her before her body drifted away.

I don’t understand love very well and I don’t understand why someone would give it so freely.

“Stop searching for an angle, Abby. You won’t find one.”

I lace my fingers in my hair and slightly pull until there’s pain at the roots. None of this makes sense. I know how I feel for him, but for him to feel this way for me?

My forehead wrinkles as I try to solve this problem. When I open my mouth to argue with him again, Logan leans in and kisses me.

His mouth is warm, soft, just a tiny bit rough on the edges and electricity shoots through my veins. Starting my heart, waking my soul, making me warm in all the right places. Logan twists my hair around his fingers and right as I’m about to touch him, Logan pulls away and meets my gaze. “I love you.”

I incline my head to argue again and Logan once again leans in. This time he takes my lower lip into his and when he releases it, he permits his tongue to slip along the seam of my mouth. My blood tingles and my mind becomes fuzzy.

I melt. Like hot butter against toast. Like wax dripping off a candle. I’m liquid in his hands.

Logan edges back again and he uses a hand to steady me when I sway. Disorientation fogs my brain and there was something I was going to say, but it’s hard to remember when Logan’s thumb keeps caressing the sensitive skin of my neck.

“What if it’s just lust?” I understand lust. I understand boys using my body and me letting my body be used. There were times I caved into lust. There were times I did what I did because it was a way to survive or to help someone else survive. But lust associated with emotion? That confuses me.

Hunger darkens Logan’s eyes. “No question on there being lust. I’ve been attracted to you since the moment you strode into Isaiah’s garage, but there’s more to us than that. You asked me to take care of your grandmother. I’ve told you more about my parents than I’ve ever told anyone else. We have trust, we have friendship, and we both feel like being someone better when we’re around the other. I already said I don’t know much about love, but I know that when I’m with you I feel something that’s a lot like flying and that is something I don’t want to go away.”

“You love me,” I say and wish I had the courage to turn those words around to use for him, but just trying to accept he has emotions for me is about all I can handle for one day.

Logan circles his arms around my waist and flips us. The breath catches in my throat and when he settles his chest on mine, I slowly release the air.

He’s on top, I’m on the bottom, and this time, unlike my bedroom, he’s not holding back. Logan’s sweetly pressing into me, our legs tangled, and just the right brilliant and blush-worthy parts are touching.

I expect Logan to take possession of my mouth, to return to that frantic pace that we had discovered so quickly at the bar, but instead he skims his nose down my cheek and places one delicious kiss on my neck. My cells zing to life as my fingers press into his back.

Logan explores me using this gradual assault. Kisses, touches, and caresses. All of it in this slow sweeping motion down. Along my bare skin at the top of my tank, then over the material, barely nipping places that make Logan a tad naughty and me devilishly happy.

He fists the ends of my tank and slides it up, leaving my belly button naked. I giggle as he kisses me there and squirm as he purposely tickles me on my side. When I declare mutiny and threaten to roll away, Logan returns to kissing my lips and I get lost in the sensations.

I wiggle as he covers me with his body again and places his strong hands on my hips. We play, letting our hands roam and satisfy curiosity of the skin.

It’s tickles and tingles and shivers and pleasurable sighs. It’s his fingers tracing the inside of my thigh, my hands messaging the broad shoulders I’ve admired from afar. It’s all slow, all methodical, and it’s causing this warming in my belly to wind tighter and tighter and tighter.

And there’s this moment when Logan moves that I let out a small gasp. Oh, that felt good. So very good. And then he does it again. And again. And it’s like we’re a wildfire. The good kind of fire. The kind that destroys the old and creates new. It’s fire licking through my veins, rhythmic movements that cause me to want more. It’s this need, this desire and as we hold each other so close that I’m no longer sure where I begin and Logan ends we race for the horizon and discover heaven.

It’s the only way to describe it...heaven. My body is weightless and I would think I had died if I didn’t breathe in. Logan edges to the side and pulls me into him. It’s exhaustion and slow kisses and our bodies that are now correctly fitting puzzle pieces. Never before have I felt so high and all of it with our clothes on. It’s odd how close I feel to Logan, odd how so many emotions are flooding through me.

“Hey, Logan,” I whisper.

He kisses one cheek, then the other, the tip of my nose, and then my lips. “Yes?”

“I don’t know what love is very well either, but I hope it feels like this.” It’s not poetic. It’s not really a declaration. But it’s a lot like being an addict or not being addict, it’s one of those things that I’m not sure of and I’m wary of jumping in and admitting to too much, too fast. Love is one of those things that I’m not sure I’d know unless I truly know who I am myself.