Your Last Love | Seed

WILLOW

The stones were older than anyone I’d ever asked about them.

That was what the archaeologists always said when the documentary cameras found their way into places like this—older than we expected, older than we can explain—as if age itself were the mystery, and not whatever had moved someone to drag granite slabs to this forest and arrange them in a circle so precise it made the hair on your arms stand up.

I’d been coming here since I was sixteen.

Since the year my grandmother stopped being able to run after me.

She’d told me the forest was full of devils. With her whole body she’d told me—hands around my wrists, eyes wide and wet. Don’t go there, Willow. Promise me. There’s something in those trees that wants you.

I’d promised.

Every time.

And then went anyway.

The ground there was damp even in spring. The cold seeped into my feet as I walked between the stones, and it steadied me.

I came here when I was angry.

When I was sad.

When I couldn’t sleep.

It always helped. At some point I’d stopped asking myself why.

Grandmother called it the devil’s ground. I called it the only place I could breathe.

The evening was warm for early spring—the kind that tricks you into thinking winter is over when it isn’t—and the light through the trees had turned gold, the way it only did for twenty minutes every evening.

It fell over the clearing, over the stones, over the white cotton of my dress. The moss gave slightly under my weight. The air smelled like wet bark and something green and sweet. Somewhere in the tree line a bird called once and went silent.

I almost didn’t see him.

He was standing at the center of the circle, and for a moment my mind simply didn’t process him. It slid off him, refusing the shape of something that didn’t belong.

Then it caught, and I stopped.

He was very still.

Not the stillness of someone trying not to be noticed—just still, like movement was a decision he hadn’t yet made. The dying light caught his hair and gave it back brighter than it had any right to be. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with green eyes that didn’t quite land on anything—or so I thought at first.

Then they landed on me.

My first thought was that he was lost.

My second thought was quieter: he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen.

And it came with a quality of wrongness.

The kind of beautiful that doesn’t sit right in this world.

I took a step toward him without fully deciding to.

“Hello?” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. The stones seemed to absorb it.

He looked at me with something hard to name. Not hungry. Not surprised. Patient—as if he’d been expecting me, or something like me, and was waiting to understand the difference.

“Vesna,” he said.

Not a greeting. Not a question. Just the word, placed in the air between us.

It landed in my chest and sat there. My name wasn’t Vesna. But it moved through me with a strange familiarity, and for a full second I forgot to correct him.

“My name is Willow,” I said.

His expression shifted—not confusion, more like someone being corrected about something they were certain of. A small, careful recalibration.

“Willow,” he said, trying it. Then, quieter: “I’m sorry.”

I took another step toward him. The moss was cold between my toes. The wind moved through the tree line with a low sound and the tall grasses at the edge of the clearing bent and straightened.

“Are you lost?”

A pause.

Longer than the question needed.

“I don’t think so.”

He spoke carefully. Rationing words. His accent was faint and I couldn’t place it—not local, not anything.

A devil, I thought, and almost wanted to laugh at myself.

But he didn’t look like anything dangerous. He seemed somewhere far away. Present in the body, absent somewhere else—except when he looked at me, then he was entirely there.

“This is private land,” I said, which was almost true.

“I know.”

“Then—”

“I know where I am.” No edge to it. Simply true.

I believed him.

We stood there while the light continued to die around us, and I should have left—my grandmother’s voice was very distant but it was there—and I didn’t move. Neither did he.

“You come here often,” he said.

“Yes.” I looked at him. “I’ve never seen you.”

His eyes moved down, briefly, to the ground between us.

“The moss grows differently where you walk.”

I looked and he was right. A faint path worn between the stones, so gradual I’d never noticed—the moss a shade greener along it, more alive, quicker to recover. Years of my feet had made it somehow. I looked back up at him and found him already watching me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

A beat. A small hesitation I couldn’t interpret.

“Yarrow,” he said.

“Like the plant.”

The faintest movement at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile.

“Yes.”

I closed the remaining distance between us, one step and then another, until I was close enough to feel the warmth of him against the evening chill. Close enough to catch his scent. Green stems crushed between fingertips. Wild herbs warmed by the afternoon sun. Something bitter beneath it, and fresh, and alive.

My chest tightened before I could stop it.

“You smell nice.”

The words came out before I’d decided to say them.

I didn’t try to take them back.

Then I lifted my hand.

I wasn’t thinking.

Or I was thinking too much, and none of it was making sense, and my body had decided not to wait.

My fingertips brushed his cheek.

Warm.

He closed his eyes—just for a heartbeat—and the tiny reaction stole the breath straight out of me.

When he looked at me again, he felt closer, and that had nothing to do with distance.

His hand rose slowly.

Giving me every chance to step away.

I didn’t.

His fingers moved my hair back from my face. Then his palm settled against my jaw, so gently it almost wasn’t there—except it was and heat moved through me before I could name it.

A slow ache unfurled beneath my ribs and moved down.

His thumb traced the curve of my cheek.

“Why am I doing this?” I whispered. It wasn’t really a question for him.

He watched me for a long moment.

“I don’t know.”

It was the first time he’d sounded uncertain.

His thumb moved to the corner of my mouth.

Every nerve I had woke up at once. I leaned forward without deciding to. His hand tightened the smallest amount against my face—not pulling me closer. Just meeting me where I was.

His thumb brushed my lower lip.

My lips parted on a breath I didn’t mean to let out.

“You smell so nice,” I whispered again.

I kissed him.

He went very still.

A million thoughts crashed through me at once—kiss him harder, sink into the ground, turn and run and never look back.

The stones stood around us, gray and silent.

And his hand still hadn’t moved from my jaw.

I stopped breathing.

Sooooo... are we staying or running away?

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