“I kept the picture you drew of me,” Cassie said, resting her cheek on the top of his head. But for her voice, and the noises of birds, the bower was still quiet. “From before I went to camp. You told me you wanted to learn to draw, but you already knew.”

Rubus lifted his head to look her in the eyes very seriously. “I didn’t.” He traced her eyebrow lightly with his finger. “I drew you over and over until it was right. That’s why it took me so long. I used up all the paper. I still have the pencils, though.”

Cane undulated behind him, and a moment later he reached back and plucked a dirt-caked Ziploc bag from the bramble. Cassie peeled it open; the colored pencils, unfaded but notably shortened as a result of crude, rough-hewn sharpening, tinkled together at the bottom of the bag. She stared at them, momentarily lost for words. “I can get you more paper, if you’d like,” she finally managed, handing it back.

“Yes please,” he replied earnestly. “And do you have any new books?”

“Would botany magazines interest you?”

“I don’t know. May I read one to find out?”

“Absolutely.” Cassie ran her fingers over his hair again, thornless but still too snarled to comb. “Can—do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

“No. I like your questions.”

There were too many, so she just asked the one immediately at hand, in the most literal sense. “Where did your thorns go? The ones in your hair?”

“They’re still there,” he said comfortably, “you just can’t see them right now.”

Cassie felt the gears of scientific inquiry grinding uselessly in her mind and switched her tack. “Do all blackberry bushes have dryads?”

“No,” he replied immediately.

“Are you the only blackberry dryad?”

Rubus stroked her collarbone as he thought. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I’ve never met another one.”

“Have you ever met another dryad? Of any type?”

“Yes!” Rubus’ eyes lit up. “One time, a tumbleweed blew through the parkland.”

“A tumbleweed!” (Kali tragus.) “Way out here?”

“Yes. He was very determined to adventure. He didn’t stay long, but he had a lot of interesting stories. He fought a snowplow once, and punched a bull in the throat. And he almost died after a truck hit him on the highway and dragged him along underneath for three miles.”

“Tumbleweeds are already dead by the time they’re tumbling,” Cassie blurted before she could stop herself. Rubus remained unperturbed. “Well, he had scars all along his face and a missing tooth, but it didn’t seem to bother him; he was always grinning. Laughed a lot, too. He sounded like a creaky screen door spring.” Rubus smiled. “He told me he liked my thorns.”

“Was he the only other dryad you’ve met?”

“No. A very kind old ficus lived in an enameled pot on a deck two houses down, before her family moved away. They brought her inside every winter, but when she was out we would sometimes talk.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. The weather, of course. Water quality. She was very curious about the ground—her roots were all inside the pot—and I had birds bring her an earthworm for her potting soil every so often. We shared ladybugs sometimes. She would ask me about the books I’d read and I would ask her about the television shows she’d seen while she was inside.”

“She watched TV?”

“Yes. She said most of it was boring, or sad. I think she watched a lot of news. She liked Jeopardy though.”

Cassie was too taken aback to even laugh.

“Sometimes,” Rubus continued, “the husband fell asleep while watching television after the wife had already gone to bed, and old black-and-white movies would play all night. That was her favorite. She would actually step out to watch those.”

“Step out?” Cassie realized what he must mean a split second after she spoke. “From her tree?”

“Yes. She hid behind a grandfather clock, she said.”

“She never…” Cassie searched for the words. “... interacted with the humans in the house? They didn’t know she was there?”

“No.” Rubus’ eyes grew vague. “She thought I was very foolish to do so myself.”

Cassie watched a caterpillar inch its way along a cane behind Rubus’ head. “It does seem potentially very risky,” she allowed. “Am I the only human you’ve spoken to?”

“No,” Rubus said, very quietly. “When we were very little, I used to play with Matt, too.”

“Why did you stop?”

“I don’t know.” Rubus’ voice became even quieter. “It seemed like he didn’t want to play with me anymore, and I didn’t know why.” Cassie could hear the betrayal. Perhaps a dryad’s memory was more powerful, more perfectly recalled, than that of a human. Or perhaps he just had little else to occupy his mind over the years.

“Did the tumbleweed interact with people?”

Rubus perked up again. “Yes. Dozens. He never told them what he was, and never stuck around long enough for them to find out, but he said he fucked fifty-seven lady ranchers, three diner busboys, and a lonely drifter in a desert laundromat.” Rubus said this so matter-of-factly, it took several moments for Cassie to fully process what he’d just said. Really, that was more or less the behavior she’d expect from a sentient tumbleweed. Before she could reply, he added, a little uncertainly, “He said he always kept his hat and boots on while fucking. But you took all your clothes off, so I did too.”

“No—” Cassie scrambled to catch up with the conversation, “no, that was definitely the right thing to do. Thank you.” She touched his bare shoulder. “Do you get cold without clothing on?”

“Not in the summer. In the winter, sometimes, when there’s frost.”

Cassie ran her fingers through his chest hair again. It felt more mammalian now. “You wore a suit to my father’s funeral,” she said idly.

“All the men were wearing suits at your father’s funeral.” His eyes were half closed, enjoying her touch. “It must be hard to always keep so much clothing around for when you need it.”

Cassie considered this, still stroking his chest. “We do have to dedicate a fair amount of storage to it,” she agreed. “Bureaus and closets and shoe-racks.” She thought of her prom dress. “Sometimes, we even buy clothing we only wear once, for a very special occasion. Usually women.”

“Why?”

Cassie did not speak for a whole minute while she mentally composed her response. Rubus didn’t press her; he merely waited in contented silence, eyes heavy-lidded with pleasure as she trickled her nails across his skin.

“Because for a long time,” she said slowly, “women were told they have to be beautiful, and men have to be utilitarian. This is less true now than it used to be, but women are still expected to be more beautiful than men. This can be very frustrating for women who are not interested in being beautiful and men who are.”

Rubus opened his eyes fully and stilled her hand. “You’re not interested in being beautiful?”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“It’s… not particularly relevant to my life…” She’d used up all her eloquence. “I mean, of course nobody wants to be ugly, with a few exceptions, I suppose. It can be really hard to be taken seriously in academia if you’re too pretty or too ugly, for women at least, so we normally aim for something middle of the road… I mean… Yeah, I’ll gussy myself up for a special occasion. I like looking nice now and then, but I’m not sure that really constitutes an ‘interest’ per se…”

Rubus let her stammer to a halt before taking her other hand. “You are beautiful,” he said simply. The statement was delivered with the same matter-of-fact sincerity with which he recalled the sexual escapades of the tumbleweed. Cassie went crimson, but fortunately was spared from having to muster a response when he smiled and patted both her cheeks. “I like your colors,” he said, and kissed her delicately.

There was a faint noise from the house: the coffee grinder. Cassie looked up in amazement. Surely they hadn’t been in here that long! But the angle of the sun through the leaves clearly indicated midmorning. She dismounted from Rubus’ lap and started hurriedly throwing on her clothes. He watched the process with as much interest as he’d earlier observed it in reverse.

“Mom wants to finish trimming today,” Cassie said, struggling to comb her fingers through her hair. “We only got halfway done the other day.”

“That’s fine,” Rubus said magnanimously.

“It doesn’t hurt when we do that?” Cassie gave up combing her hair and scraped it into a pile.

“Not in a bad way, as long as you don’t cut too much.”

“We’ll be careful,” she promised. “And the berries—” Cassie cut herself off.

For once, Rubus didn’t look wholly innocent when he smiled. “You liked them?”

“You could say that.” Cassie sat down to put on her socks. “How did you… target that effect?”

“What do you mean?”

“Mom and Matt and Tyler didn’t have nearly the experience I did.”

“I grew the berries for you.”

“I have so many questions about this.” Cassie slipped on her shoes and stood. “The pharmaceutical implications are staggering.”

Rubus stood with her, miraculously clothed once again. His hair brushed the bower canopy. “If you come back, I will answer your questions. If I can.”

“I’ll come back tonight, if I can get away without being seen. I’ll bring you more paper. And a magazine.”

“Thank you.”

Cassie stood on tiptoes to place a quick kiss on his jaw and, with one last futile pat to her hair, slipped out of the bramble.

Nobody was looking out of the kitchen as she emerged, but both Matt and Mom looked up in surprise when she slid open the door and stepped inside.

“Couldn’t find my gloves,” Cassie announced overloudly.

Mom looked back down at the coffee pot as she poured. “They’re on the counter right next to the toaster, Cassie.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Matt watched Cassie over his own coffee mug and then took a long, contemplative sip.

Cassie felt a blush beginning and fled to her room before it could betray her further. She spent a long time combing her hair, and afterwards she just sat on her bed, comb in her hand, looking out the window and smiling.

When she finally came back downstairs, Matt was hunched over the kitchen table tapping a pencil on his head absently, documents arrayed around him in a neat semicircle. Mom sat across from him, sipping coffee and looking baffled. “What’s all this?” Cassie asked, taking her regular seat. There was already a muffin and a cup of coffee waiting there for her; Mom must have poured it when she heard Cassie coming down the stairs.

“A few things,” Matt said, straightening up. He started spinning the pencil across his fingers. “I’m making a couple tweaks to the trust. Trusts, plural, technically.”

Cassie felt her brain prepare to take a vacation, but forced it back to attention. “Does this have anything to do with Tyler’s 529s?”

Matt fumbled his pencil in surprise. “Partially. Since when do you know about 529s?”

“Since Tyler made off with a sheaf of 529 paperwork from the office yesterday morning.”

Matt frowned. “Odd,” he muttered, then turned to lift one of the paper stacks at his elbow. “I thought—”

His thought was interrupted by the doorbell. Matt and Cassie looked at Mom, who looked just as surprised as they. Cassie went to answer.

She opened the door to two orange-vested men in straw hats and sunglasses. The man in front was holding a clipboard; the man in back was resting a theodolite against the wall while he applied sunscreen to his nose. “You must be the surveyors,” she said hollowly, before either of them could speak. Apparently they were available even on weekends.

“Ah, yes ma’am,” said the clipboard-man, folding away his sunglasses. “Are you the owner of this property?”

“No, that would be my mother. Hold on one moment, I’ll go get her.” Leaving the door open, she walked to within earshot of the kitchen and yelled, “Mom, the surveyors are here!”

“Coming!”

As soon as Mom came to the door, Cassie shot straight back through the kitchen, grabbed her gardening gloves, and ran into the backyard. “I’ll open the side gate for the surveyors, Mom!” she bellowed, and proceeded to do so with as much banging and corroded-bell-tinkling as she could manage. She waited breathlessly for them to come around—it seemed to take them an eternity—and dogged their steps as closely as she could without getting clipped by a theodolite. Mom watched from the porch, shading her eyes.

“You ladies don’t need to stand out in the sun while we work,” the clipboard-man hinted, “this’ll take a while.” Cassie wordlessly turned away, put on her gloves, and started weeding around the base of the peach tree, never letting the surveyors out of her sight. She answered a string of three work emails right there, kneeling on the tree roots, one eye on the message she was tapping and the other on the surveyors as they worked. Mom went to get them some water.

“Is there a way through the back fence?” the other asked after a time of mysterious measurements and pacing.

“No,” replied Cassie firmly. “You’ll have to go around, through the park. The entrance is just down the street.”

“Oh well, that’s how it goes,” he replied cheerfully. He hoisted his theodolite to his shoulder and ambled back out the side gate, whistling. Cassie could hear him rustling and calling to his partner from the other side of the fence a short while later. She held her breath and felt her heart leap with every rustle.

When they finally finished, they came back around and rang the doorbell again. Cassie and Matt both joined their mother at the door.

“Good news, ma’am! You’ve got another—” the surveyor checked his clipboard— “six hundred and fifty square feet of property on the other side of your fence back there!”

“Oh!” exclaimed Mom.

“Nice,” said Matt.

Cassie said nothing. A pit of vague unease opened in her stomach. She drifted back to the kitchen and sat down, careful not to disturb any of the documents, then picked up her mug and took a sip of tepid coffee. Matt joined her a moment later while Mom was still talking to the surveyors. He sat down and didn’t speak for a moment, then pulled something out of his pocket.

“You dropped this,” he said simply, and handed Cassie the childhood drawing she had stuffed in her pocket.

She had thrown her clothes on in such haste, she wasn’t surprised it had fallen out. Stupid not to have checked. She took it from him and turned her face away. “Thank you,” she said belatedly after a moment of silence. She waited for him to say something else, but he seemed to be waiting for her to offer an explanation. She didn’t. He resumed shuffling the papers. Cassie looked out the kitchen door and thought of Rubus. She hoped the surveyors hadn’t alarmed him too much.

“Are you going to need to print out a bunch more stuff?” she asked after a while.

“God, I hope not. If anything, I’d like to scan all this and e-sign rather than dead-tree it.”

Cassie turned around and watched Matt underline something. “Thank you.”

He looked up. “For what?”

“For doing all this for Mom. For being the executor.”

“I’d be a pretty crummy lawyer-son if I didn’t.”

Cassie smiled. “Thank you anyway.”

“De nada.”

“Glad we didn’t fight over it.”

Matt hesitated. “We didn’t,” he agreed, “but Tyler and I had a tug-of-war over the executorship for a bit. Before Dad died. It was actually Dad snapping and yelling at Tyler that put an end to it.”

Cassie sat rigid with confusion and rage. “But—why?” Tyler made Dad yell at him? While he was dying? My god, how much of a shitheel did you have to be to get to that level? “He wouldn’t know any more about this kind of thing than I would, and he’s got a million kids to boot!”

Matt sighed. “It didn’t make any sense to me, either. Maybe some sort of firstborn-son thing?”

Cassie made a rude noise.

“Yeah, well.” Matt turned back to the paper he held. “Nobody’s at their best with a dying parent, are they?”

Cassie shook her head and plodded up to the office. Mom kept the printer in the closet, so infrequently was it used. She opened the door and peered into the printer tray. She’d make a run to the store for a pad of drawing paper tomorrow, but for now this was the only paper available in the house. There wasn’t much. She took all but the last two sheets of paper and closed the tray again, then looked out the window. The surveyors must have gone again; Mom was standing on the deck pulling on her gloves. The paper would have to wait. She put it away in her room and joined her mother outside to complete trimming the blackberry.

The endeavor took on a completely different tone now that she knew what she was doing—to whom it was being done. What did this feel like—a haircut? A deep, exfoliating scrub? She didn’t dare eat a blackberry, alluring as they were; they all went into the bucket. Snip snip, plop plop.

She was a little surprised to discover how calmly she was assimilating proof of the supernatural. Perhaps all those years in Sunday school had left more of a mark than she’d realized, in a pantheon-insensitive way. Perhaps she was just in shock. Perhaps there was some question among the ever-increasing pile accruing at the back of her mind whose answer would set her off and she’d run screaming from the thicket.

Perhaps it was just that she had always known, and merely forgotten.