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.