Cassie could feel the square of her folded childhood drawing in her pocket as she sat to put on her socks and shoes, urging her on. Nobody else was awake. Watery morning light illuminated patches on the carpet and obscured the family photos cascading down the stairwell wall with mirror-bright reflection as she crept silently by. Through the kitchen, out the back door with only a faint click. She paused to look up at the house, but the blinds were drawn on all windows but her own. Nobody saw her as she crossed the yard and slipped into the bramble.

Wouldn’t it be funny, she thought—screamingly hilarious—if he weren’t there? It was a weekend, and the sun had only just risen. No sane person would be up at this hour, let alone picking his way through the bushes. The gate was already open wide enough for her to get through—how had he been getting through? It wasn’t open wide enough for him, rangy though he may be. The question should have occurred to her earlier.

A lot of things should have.

She stepped through the gate.

She didn’t see him at first. The bramble was shadowed at this hour, and Cassie’s eyes were still adjusting. Motion caught her eye; he was sitting further back, behind a spray of canes that had arced back down to the ground and rooted in the soil. Thin black sweater, dirty black jeans, bare feet that disappeared into the duff. He didn’t speak.

Cassie licked her lips and slid the picture out of her pocket, then unfolded it with a faintly trembling hand.

“I drew you,” she said, and held it out to him. “A long time ago.”

He examined the picture for a moment, hair falling in his face, then smiled. “I remember this.”

“I labeled everyone’s names.”

“Yes.”

“Except yours.”

He looked up. He was slightly more clean-shaven today, but his hair was still an unruly thicket. “Yes you did.” He turned the drawing around to face her again and pointed. “Right here.” Cassie looked.

Rubus armeniacus, her meticulously crafted childhood handwriting said. Blackberry.

Cassie sat down. After a moment, he sat down before her. But then, he was already all around her, wasn’t he?

“Rubus,” she whispered.

He reached out and touched her—not on her neck, or her lips, as she had done so long ago to him, but on her cheek. Soft as a flower petal. When he drew his hand back, it was wet.

“Why are you crying?” Rubus asked.

Cassie wilted to the ground and rolled onto her back, felt her tears start pooling in her ears before overflowing into the duff. A gentle breeze stirred the roof of the bower over their heads.

“I forgot you,” Cassie choked. “For years. I thought I needed to forget you, because you couldn’t be real. So I did.”

Rubus reached down and scooped Cassie into his lap. For a second time, she cried in his arms. He said nothing at all, and held absolutely still, as though rooted to the ground. It was a real possibility.

When she finally stopped crying enough to see, he was looking down at her solemnly. He pulled a strand of hair from her tear-sticky cheek and tucked it behind her ear. “I’m glad you remembered me,” he said, voice resonating in his chest. “It’s an honor to be remembered by a botanist.”

Cassie took a ragged breath and smiled. “It’s an honor to be remembered by a dryad.”

The kiss was sudden, and not gentle. Cassie gasped into his mouth, eyes flaring wide for a moment before closing again, squeezing out the last of the tears. Rubus brushed them away with his thumb as he wandered her face, kissing her jaw and nose, tracing the curve of her ear, resting his forehead against hers for a heartbeat before claiming her mouth again.

When he moved to her neck, Cassie opened her eyes. The glossy leaves above her were trembling. More movement out of the corner of her eye; the canes were shifting, writhing. To what end, she couldn’t see, for just at that moment Rubus worked his hand under her shirt, running his fingers over her stomach and ribs, and her eyes closed again of their own accord. He pulled her shirt off and lay her down in the duff.

Cassie moved to unhook her bra, but his hand was already there, under her, and it was more than just his fingers; nascent seedlings, tender and thornless, were growing around her, caressing her skin with tender cotyledons. Her bra came undone. Rubus slid it off and his expression changed. The cotyledons stilled; the leaves stopped their shimmer. The dryad simply gazed at her, longingly, reverently, as he had years ago when he first prepared to draw her portrait.

The breeze sighed in the leaves and Rubus leaned forward to touch her; the sweep of her collarbone, the curve of her flank. His eyes shone with fascination as much as arousal.

This was all new to him, Cassie realized. Her flesh was not being caressed by some ancient entity who’d walked the earth for eons, seducing mortals that happened across his path. He must be the spirit of this particular blackberry bramble, not the spirit of all blackberries as an aggregate concept. A hamadryad.

God knows how he knew how to unhook a bra.

His fingers drifted to her hips. She toed off her shoes and wriggled from her pants, eyes never leaving his face. How strange, to feel the cool outside air fresh against skin that spent most of its life under clothing—and his hands followed, warm, gentle, smoothing from belly to thighs. Cassie arched, eyes fluttering shut, and he wrapped his arm around to her back to explore the run of her spine with his fingers, kissing her once more.

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Cassie tried to surreptitiously peel her socks off, but he captured an ankle and completed the action for her, examining her toes.

So she lay there, completely naked, trying not to laugh while Rubus traced the arch of her foot.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, without rancor.

“That tickles,” Cassie snorted, unable to hold still any longer.

He looked at her foot with renewed interest. “Is that why you always wear socks and shoes?”

“No, shoes are usually for keeping our feet protected from things that can hurt them while we’re walking, like hot asphalt or sharp rocks. The socks are to keep the shoes from chafing our skin.” How had this not come up before, during some childhood conversation? What other bizarre knowledge gaps did he have? “You’ve worn shoes before, I’ve seen it.”

“It seemed important,” he said mildly, and ran a finger down her foot again. Cassie squeaked and tried to roll over, but his hold on her ankle was absolute. She may as well have had her foot stuck in a tree.

“Do you like this?” he asked, pausing.

Cassie wasn’t sure she could explain the concept of tickling to a plant under ordinary circumstances, let alone what she found herself in the middle of now. “I—yes. I like being touched by you. Yes.”

The canes began to shift in her peripheral vision again as Rubus ceased his tickling and resumed his caress. Over her heel, up her calf, around her knee to her thigh. His eyes grew bright and the air became still as he neared where she so desperately wanted him to be. “Yes,” Cassie whispered. She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

Those long fingers, slow and warm. She could see them, in her mind’s eye, as she had drawn them countless times. She wouldn’t last long. Kissie Cassie. Her hands dug into the duff, through it into the soil below. Roots reached up and twined around her knuckles, holding her fast. Yes. She was gasping, voice catching with each breath, and Rubus responded by gathering a fistful of hair from the nape of her neck, never stopping with his other hand, and pulling her into a kiss through which she could not breathe. She whimpered into his mouth. Yes. Yes.

He pinned her with the kiss while she shuddered, and the rootlets kept her in their grasp.

Not until she relaxed completely did Rubus relinquish his hold on Cassie, mouth retreating from hers and fingers untwining from her hair, and she sighed—to get air as much as anything. She opened her eyes. He was looking at his glistening fingers, enthralled. A strand of clear, viscous moisture dropped to the ground. When it touched the soil where they had collaboratively mussed the duff away, his lips parted, as though he could taste it. Then he did taste it, bringing his fingers to his tongue almost instinctively, the way Cassie had licked the pie filling from her desk. She wondered if she tasted as good to him as he had to her.

She wondered a lot of things.

Cassie sat up and kissed him, tasting herself, and the dryad leaned into the kiss. She reached to take his shirt off, but her hand met only bare flesh. She pulled back in confusion; his sweater was simply gone. Demanifested. So were his pants, and whatever he may have been wearing beneath. He was as naked as she. Now it was her turn to look, and to touch.

Mom would have said he had a “Mediterranean complexion”—and Cassie would have crawled into a hole to die of embarrassment if she had—but it was more than that. Much more; he was changing now, slowly, subtly. The green tint to his flesh was more than just light filtered through leaves, more than just olive-toned skin. Cassie brushed her fingers through the dark hairs dusting his chest—pilose indumentum, plant fur, soft as velvet. The sinews strung beneath his chlorophyllic skin arched like primocane, almost rigid to the touch, veins like rhizomes twining about them. Just like the picture that now lay abandoned with her clothes, the hair on Rubus’ head was thick with thorns. Cassie touched one softly, admiring its point, before turning her attentions lower.

More indumentum, a trail of it leading to a dark thatch. No thorns, just iridescent blackness. She glanced at him for permission, hands drifting downward. His eyes were eager and bright.

Cassie knelt down to explore him with a botanist’s curiosity.

Rubus shifted abruptly, startling her. She looked up again, hands stilled upon him. He was watching her. “That feels…” He stopped, unable to find the words.

Cassie smiled. “Wait,” she said softly, and tasted him. Floral and faintly sweet, mixed with a bitter green tang. Sap and pollen. She swallowed, and Rubus shuddered.

Driven by some instinct, he put his hands on the back of her head and pulled her closer, deeper, but just as quickly his hands drew away, as if he were afraid to hurt her. She smiled, and moved lightly, hands wrapped around his thighs, feeling the tension in them, tracing features with her tongue, until she felt him relax.

He leaned back into the throne of thorns that had grown to meet his frame and tilted his face towards the canopy of leaves, eyes closed, ribs sliding beneath his skin with each breath.

She took him deeper and hummed softly, sliding her hands around his hips. He buried his hands in her hair and groaned, and the noise was echoed by the creaking of the bramble as it shifted and knotted itself around her. She felt the serrated brush of blackberry leaves at her back, urging her closer, and rootlets binding her bare legs to the ground. The bower began to grow dark. The smell of fertile earth filled her nose.

Cassie could no longer tell whether she clasped flesh or bark. She did not stop; tongue and lips and mouth around him, arms upon his thighs, knees held fast beneath a web of roots, gliding up and down again and again as the air grew still and murky. Thorns combed her hair away from her face. The only light was a dim, subterranean green, with no discernible source. The creature she held was rigid and silent, brimming with pressure barely contained.

With one last, deliberate set of actions—a hand moved, a pace quickened—Cassie pulled him over the edge. Vines tangled her hair into a braided snarl as sap flooded her throat, pulse after pulse. Cassie watched him as she swallowed, his face twisted with euphoria. If he made any sound as he climaxed, it was drowned by the creaking of the wood and thrash of leaves in the sudden wind, or else the rush of blood in her ears.

The bower grew lighter again as the roof of leaves thinned, trembling as they shifted, illuminating a face that looked shocked and blissful in equal measure. Root and vine withdrew from Cassie’s kneeling form, tugging gently at her hair and tickling her skin with their retreat. Freed from her pinions, Cassie released Rubus from her mouth and arched back, stretching her spine and rolling her neck. He watched her motions with gleaming eyes, breathing hard.

Her throat ached pleasantly, and there was a warm sensation in her stomach. Cassie leaned back down to lap up the last of the sap still flowing, and was gratified by a hiss of air through his teeth. She smiled in satisfaction and kissed the inside of his thigh.

Rubus lifted her into his lap and pulled her into a tight embrace, resting his forehead on her chest. The thorns were gone from his hair now; she stroked it gingerly as the birds began to flutter through the bramble once more.

“Is it always like this?” he asked. His breath was warm on her skin.

“Like what?”

“So good. So much.”

Cassie smiled. “It can be.”

“Mmm,” he mumbled happily, and placed a kiss between her breasts. His fingers trailed along the muscles in her back.

Cassie stretched like a climbing vine.